It has been my practice to take the opportunity of sending Christmas cards to write individual letters which cover political and social issues as well as personal developments over the past year. Last year I decided against doing so and this year I have been selective according to known interests.
The recent rioting of students in central London over the issue of the funding of University Education and student fees and loans reminded of my own experience as a revolutionary fifty years ago, albeit as someone dedicated to the use of direct action according to the principles of Sattyagragha, the Gandhian teachings of non violent protest and action. I became concerned when a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police mentioned that the majority of the 200 individuals who had been arrested and interviewed were students without a previous record and now faced going through life with the impact of having one. This is something I know from personal experience, although in my instance because of the approach taken and the relationships established the experience worked to my advantage and to the benefit of society in general.
I still believe that if you protest, whether lawful or not, and show respect for the authorities and their work, if you are open and honest about what you are doing, and also understand and accept the potential consequences, then the UK remains a remarkable country in which active involvement can lead to a life of great interest and experience.
But it can also result in significant obstacles and major problems and the inability to become fulfilled as an individual in terms of occupational activity and place within the society. It can make some and crush others.
In general if you study history and particularly the history of Europe the individual can only achieve change through holding democratic power, since democracies became the norm, or mobilising force which you exercise at a distance. While the state should always use non violent means of control if possible, I have consistently taken the view that those undertaking political and managerial roles for the state, at national and local levels, must accept that one of their functions is to use force in defined circumstances.
While I have participated, and continue to support non violent direct action in defined circumstances as long as the individuals involved understand and accept the potential consequence, I remain opposed to the use of force by individuals in general and fear for the consequence of violent revolution when the street mob takes over and then all kinds of undesirable individuals tend to take power without the usual checks and balances.
I was reminded of this earlier to day watching the Film The Cardinal, based on the life of a man who became the first appointed American as Cardinal in the USA, a man who had experienced mob rule in a southern state where he had gone to the aid of black priest and was whipped by members of Ku Klux Klan, then experienced the fury of an organised Nazi mob following Hitler’s annexation of Austria.
I also suspect much of what has happened in London recently has been orchestrated by the usual interests, including the authorities, rather than a spontaneous uprising of students and therefore it can be contained, as has been the swing to the far right in local and national elections and Muslim based terrorism. It can never be eliminated and there will continue to be casualties, mostly innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time, but also some genuinely concerned about the issues who become caught up in the web of intrigue and secret agendas of others.
The extreme left will continue to attempt to gain ground, primarily through some trade unions. The student protests were and remain another opportunity for them to pursue their separate, and sometimes secret agendas, but whether things get out of control will depend on how far the Labour Party Leadership will continue to oppose everything undertaken by the Coalition primarily for Party Political purposes. It is fortunate that they are taking seriously their role as a Law and Order Party but I would like to see strong open as well as private condemnation of mob violence on the streets. In Austria it is alleged that the Catholic Church misguidedly appeared to be in the vanguard of giving support to the unification of Austria with Germany and even when told by the Vatican to adopt a neutral stance, found ways to influence the people to vote in favour of the taking over of the institutions, thus giving official authority to the subsequent Nazification. Only then did the Church leadership realise that Hitler had no intention to leave them in charge of the church and found that he was abolishing church schools and organisations, that Catholic marriage was not to be recognised, did they appreciate their mistake in pandering to his demands of them.
It is easy to get caught up in situations when an ideology, political or spiritual, or an issue of principle is involved and before you know you have records, including a criminal one which affects you for the rest of your life. This is my memory of my story. I will leave why I had the propensity to become a revolutionary albeit a non violent one, to another day.
I begin with an event which took place after I had become a non violent activist against weapons of mass destruction. This followed publicity about adults and children being killed by the police for protesting at Sharpville South Africa. I had put on a suit and gone to South Africa House to one side of Trafalgar Square. A Liberal Democrat candidate had announced in a London Evening Paper she was going to the Embassy to register her protest. When she arrived with media and assistants she said we ought to do something and suggested we sat down. We were arrested and bundled into police vans to Bow Street Police station. I was kept in a large waiting cell with about a dozen individuals and kept until there was just me and a South African studying at the LSE which proved a moving experience given what he was giving up and risking. I have never regretted that action because I met someone to it mattered directly and immediately. Whether I would have found the courage to act so in South Africa is a good question
A relative provided bail, I was fined and my name and address appeared in the London papers. I knew what I was doing and the potential consequence but I would not be surprised if others acted on the spur of the moment. The police in this instance behaved appropriately although technically the officer who gave evidence was not the actual arresting officer and what he reported in relation to me was inaccurate. With a solicitor I might have been able to get off the fine and criminal record, but it would have defeated he point being made.
This situation arose after failing to sell British Olivetti Typewriters in the City of London (1959) to offices with less than 5 business machines, because the new typewriter had a great design but a soft touch which the typists hated. When I resigned (I was spending bad weather days buying a 3 pence ticket on the circle line and noting the truanting children, elderly and other salesmen who were still on the train half way around the 56-57 mins it took to go round) my supervisor and area sales manager were criticised as I had headed the one month Barclay Square sales training course of forty. In the summer of 1963 while working for Norfolk Children’s Department as part of my Child Care Training, I met the man who had been second on the Training course, coming out of a restaurant in Norwich and he said he had become Southern England Training Manager. He also said that a Newspaper photo of me being lifted by four police officers during the Operation Foulness project had been placed on notice boards in the company with the banner. This is what happens if you do not sell.
Because of the failure to become a salesman I decided I wanted to do something more worthwhile and wrote to several people including the Editor of Peace News which I knew nothing about, and was offered a job over Christmas helping out in the book shop. I was also invited to help out preparing the postal copies of the paper on Wednesday evenings and became friends with someone who said they were the illegitimate son of a former Labour Minister. He had trained to be a Jesuit and was then and still is, an Anarcho Syndicalist, Anglo Catholic Vegan! There was a report that he and his wife were arrested when in their seventies for protesting at a visit of a political figures who had been in support of British intervention in Iraq
Over Christmas/New Year 1959/1960 I participated in a Youth CND march from Liverpool to Hull and among the small group of 30 who walked the distance was the Young Communist league brother and sister of a subsequent Labour Attorney General, the 14 year old daughter of a Cannon who came on the march to look after her, (it was alleged that she subsequently became a showgirl at the Folies Bergére or some similar Parisian entertainment), and a young trainee teacher from Manchester who married and went to the USA. Before then she had spent a week in prison following a demonstration in Yorkshire. I subsequently met her again after she had become Professor of Education at Newcastle and then at Durham Universities. After retirement she returned to the United States. Another young woman became great friends and we met again when I was at Ruskin College and she an undergraduate. She went on to work in University Administration.
At that first non violent civil disobedience protest I was kept on remand, having refused bail, locked up on my own for 23 of the 24 hours of the rest of the weekend because I was under 21 while the rest had a great time in the prison Library. A top notch lawyer decided to represent the group, (one of the young women was the daughter of a judge) and he addressed the court with a powerful but blatant political speech and we were all given an absolute discharge. The government took steps to avoid such a situation again.
Before the sit down protest at the gates of the missile base we stood for a photo shoot overlooking the silos through the boundary fence and the official Peace News Photographer gave me a grappling hook to hold. This photo appeared in Peace News stating that I was a Peace News staff man when in fact I was a temporary bookshop assistant but it did my creditability in the movement no end of good and I had the good sense to drop the grappling hook before lying down in the roadway.
Later in 1960 by which time I had become active in the CND, the idea being to convert the CND into non violent direct action and got to know George Clark the London based Chief Marshall for the Aldermston Marches as the London CND executive also met at Peace News Houseman’s offices and he got me a temporary job cleaning tables at a cellar coffee bar in Soho above which were the premises of what had been the Left Wing Book Club… Ralph Miliband (father of Ed and David, Parliamentary Socialism and all that. One significance of my work there will be mentioned later.
It was only by one vote that those who had participated in the Operation Foulness project decided to repeat the protest. This was a separate group direct action project not sponsored by the Michael Randle chair Pat Arrowsmith field organiser Direct Action Committee although Pat also organised the Foulness action. The DAC was influenced by Gandhi’s Sattyagraha and a young Pacifist Oxbridge graduate thinker and writer and who was a close friend of Pat. Therefore before the civil disobedience action, contact was made with the authorities including telling them what the action consisted of and various meetings were held with the public including soap box speeches on Southend Sea front, under the watchful eye of the uniformed branch and the photographers and shorthand writers of special branch et al. In my little speech I suggested that the police were not neutral and in being prepared to arrest us for demonstrating they were condoning the potential use of weapons of mass destruction on women, children and non combatants in general. About a year later at Committee 100 rally in Trafalgar Square when I was on the platform as a Committee member, a young man told me that a sixteen year old girl had been so impressed by what I had said that she went back and told her father, who was a police Inspector and he had asked her to leave home or give up involvement. She had left home. I have often wondered what happened to her, concerned that my words had such an influence.
At the first Operation Foulness action we were blocked off in the middle of the countryside miles from the Weapons Development establishment and the only witnesses were the police and the media. The police were polite and respectful calling us sir, madam, miss and after due warning we were lifted slowly and placed gently into police vans and taken immediately to a court which was waiting for us. The sentence was a small fine or a week in prison. On someone’s orders the money in our possession was confiscated so that we were all discharged at difference times depending on what proportion of the fine we had available less the fare to our homes.
Pat Arrowsmith argued that we needed to repeat the protest to communicate our seriousness, although we had mixed feelings. We did so by a margin of one maybe two votes. This time a Treasury solicitor prosecuted and demanded that we should be asked to enter into an agreement not to participate in further activities for 2 years or go to civil prison for 6 months and pay a fine of £50 or be a convicted prisoner for 1 month. 13 of the 15 chose prison and completed the full six months and one off shoot was the formation of the Committee 100 by Lord Russell with various well known writers artists and personalities of the day.
I hated every minute of prison and any notion that it is easy beforehand will add to the initial shock of the reception process. Prison officers are a mixture with some bullies and few idealists and later when I studied Criminology on the post grad Diploma in Public and Social Administration I was made privy to a profile study of prison officers by the then Reader in criminology at Oxford as part of some the research work he was undertaking for the Home Office. Although a civil prisoner I worked a prison wing library for 4½ months in Stafford closed prison with access to other first time prisoners and also occasionally to recidivists. I also took meals with the other prisoners whereas the other five Operation Foulness men eat separately as vegetarians and got super food because the kitchen staff enjoyed preparing something special. I also worked in the kitchen at Brixton where I noted the porridge oats came from bags marked Pig Meal. The best job only lasted 4 days. A governor (Drake Hall Staffs) asked if I minded manual work and put me on a small demolition team at an armaments factory site in Cheshire, yes I thought this was imaginative too. Fellow prisoners insisted that what I did was limited especially because we were not allocated masks and there was much asbestos. Some prisoners were in awe and kind while others hated us.
We were then moved to the closed prison without explanation. I believe this was because of what someone said at a discussion group to the effect that we were there by choice and would walk out if something important happened. Christopher Driver in his book, The Disarmers, quotes my observation that the officers viewed us with hostility and mistrust, with most feeling their position threatened because we had chosen to be in prison and could leave at any time, until we went on hunger strike 24 hours following the announcement that someone convicted of murder was to be hanged. The black prisoners also joined in when we returned the weekly orange because it came from South Africa. Several prison officers then went out of their way to have conversations about what we had done and why, and for the first and only time I felt going to prison was of value to those I came into contact. It has to be remembered that many officers serve in effect a life sentence in prison before taking their pension,
I found the majority of prisoners pathetic sad and immature individuals, many illiterate but also prone to violent outbursts, one stuck a blunt eating knife into the chest of a colleague and the same man attempted to throttle me because be thought I was laughing at him. Although I was uneducated and inarticulate at the time what struck me was the futility of the prison experience for most of them where the damage appeared to have been done in their childhood. It was when I undertook two months with the Family Service Unit working in Salford two years later that I decided to work with children rather than probation.
Some two and half decades later I was able to question Prison Governors and Prison officer representatives as a member of a Home Office Advisory Sub Committee on Drugs and HIV they confirmed that Drugs had become the working currency with prisons replacing tobacco. Understandably it was easy for drugs to get into prison with so many drug chain people in the jails as it had been had been for tobacco in my time decades before. The favourite method back in the early 1960’s had been to fill thin sachets placed within papers and periodicals sent into prisoners on remand who had been discharged or moved on, or pound notes. The papers and periodicals were taken out of their wrappers by prisoners rather than officers. A few officers were known to bring stuff in although this was hearsay only, sometimes for exchanges of meat cuts from the kitchens it was said but I had no direct experience of this. A leading psychiatrist manager once explained to me that his institution was an amazing place where if you told someone you wanted something on arrival at the gate it was usually provided once you reached the office at the centre. He added that at least the inmates recognised they needed help something he could not say for the majority of the staff! When afterwards I wrote that most prisoners needed psychiatric intervention and only a minority containment, someone drew attention that I had been a prisoner too as if this invalidated by point. It reinforced it.
I was invited by one of the female Foulness Prisoners, whose brother was a member of the House of Lords to chair a working party of ex prisoners to advise the Home Office on Prison Reform resurrecting what I believe had been a suffragette spin off and which had a shadow Labour Minister in the Lords as its President. There was mixed publicity following publication of our 100 suggestions for prison reform but a Lords debate was arranged by Lord Stonham (Victor Collins MP) and who took me, the secretary and the young aristocrat to meet Lord Jellico, the Home Office Secretary of State. Our presentation was orchestrated but I had five minutes to make points I wished and pressed an issue about the difference between stated and actual visiting rights. The civil servant present stated that I was wrong so I presented to the Minister, the Government publication with the official position, and as they say this caught the Minister’s eye who rounded on the civil servant to sort the matter out.
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During the Lord debate we were taken to tea and the party included the head of a civil service union re a member who had been imprisoned for giving information to her lover. We were introduced to a Bishop from the South West who shook the hand of the Civil Service Union chief and was impressed to lean that one us was the sister of a member of the House of the Lords, but the Bishop kept his distance when Stonham mentioned what I had done. I told this story to a Criminology seminar at Oxford University and afterwards a female student explained that daddy tended to live his own world. And the moral if this little story is.
This also reminds that in my first year at Ruskin I lent some correspondence course material to a student from Malawi, including on the British Constitution which I successfully studied at GCE advanced level and waxed on the importance of the civil service in running the UK as well as the Empire previously. He listened and expressed much gratitude. It was only after leaving that I read a notice to say a reception had been held for him at the London Embassy, as the secretary of the Civil service Union and who went onto becomes an Ambassador to Germany and to the UK.
In 1961 I sat next to an older man on an arranged bus from London to Aldermaston for the Easter March. I was with two male former Foulness prisoners who took great delight in talking out loud about their prison experience and shouting over to me for my opinion. The man next to me started to ask questions about my experience and the conversation led to politics and I told him how I had come to be elected to the Executive of the Wallington and Beddington Labour Party as part of a coup of young socialists. I had joined the local party but had not attended any meetings and one night a Councillor who I had not met called at the door and invited me to a meeting saying it was an AGM and the meeting would be asked to accept me as ward delegate because I was the only member in the ward. When it came to electing the EC unbeknown to me the Young Socialists staged a coup and rattled off names during which I was asked if my name would could be put forward and then a nominations closed motion was put and carried and I and the others formed the committee without a further vote, thus eliminating a long standing member, an accountant who subsequently became Chairman of the GLCC finance Committee.
I continued that I had been impressed by the Secretary of the Committee who had explained her view of tuppence socialism, getting the streets cleaned and lighted and rubbish collected and it was she who had arranged for the local constituency to sponsor my application to Ruskin College and to provide a book grant. At the end of journey the man mentioned he was a Member of Parliament, Frank Allaun, Salford who became Chairman of the National Labour Party and we kept up communication and direct contact for over a decade.
After undertaking a placement with the Family Service Unit for two months one summer I had written to him about the experience, especially the housing conditions where he had a special interest. Following finding some terrible housing conditions while undertaking placement with Birmingham City Children’s Department I had again written to him and unbeknown to me he had quoted from a letter in a Housing debate in the Commons which resulted in national media attention. At my lodging late one night I was told the Home Office was on the phone (The Home Office paid for my child care training and provided maintenance) However it was a local journalist who had been given my number in confidence by Frank and faced with protecting self interest or admitting ownership of the communication I agreed. There was only a small piece in the local paper on a Saturday but it was seen by the wife of the Deputy Children’s Officer for Birmingham and on the Monday I was summoned to the Birmingham University course head who had only taken me under pressure from the Home Office and told that I had to apologise to everyone and plead to continue with the placement or I would be sacked from the course. The Children’s officer acting on behalf of his chairman offered me a job but I was already promised the first vacancy at Oxfordshire. For a decade after I became a Director of Social Services the story was told as part of a seminar at the course on the role of the social worker and political action. I accepted that I had been wrong and unprofessionally even though I was not writing for direct transmission, but I had not obtained family permission in advance.
At Ruskin I had switched from Politics and Economics Diploma to the postgraduate social work Public and Social Administration Course, with both funded by the County Council as an adult education grant. I had applied for professional child care officer training at 3 courses but had received no invitation to interview. The Home Office contacted by phone to ask why I had not returned the form for the grant and I explained I had not been given an interview. Within a week I was given interviews at the then three best regarded courses, London School of Economics, Bristol and Birmingham. I was not accepted by the first two and while it was evident that it was against her better judgement I was offered Birmingham. I can only speculate why the Home office went out of their way to fund and maintain the training which led to my subsequent career.
There are several likely strands which also provide insight as to how the authorities operate and which I believe is still like to be the situation albeit 50 years later.
The Committee of 100 was created while I and the others were in prison, in part to avoid small groups going to prison for increasingly longer periods without having any effect on policy. I was only invited to become a member after several prominent individuals resigned after realising their potential liability. I became a member of the demonstration organising group which was an unwieldy group with vastly different views because of the different background perspectives. Early on it was evident that although likeable Michael Randle was the chair the real power was Ralph Schoenman a mysterious American. It was agreed that the action in Parliament Square would not take place unless there were 3000 committed participants. While cleaning tables at the Soho Coffee bar I caught Ralph, who did not know me, asking people to sign up to ensure the minimum requirement telling them they did not need to actually participate. When I told Russell by letter about this and other issues of concern, his wife wrote saying her husband had full confidence in Ralph and my remarks had upset her husband. In the event more than 3000 participated and we were kettled for the three hours of the demonstration but no action was taken against anyone and at the end of the period we all went home. There was no vandalism or violence.
I had managed a bookstall for Peace News at the annual meeting/ conference of the Socialist Labour League in the days of Gerry Healey and entered the hall to hear Pat Arrowsmith, staying behind to hear Gerry denounce everything she had said, and explain why the organisation supported CND in the UK but it was important to maintain the worker’s bomb in communist countries against capitalism. He went onto explain why they had to enter the machine tools industry and the approach was to cause as much unrest as possible so that capitalist interests would show their hand and this in turn would bring about revolutionary pressures among the workers when they were kept out on strike, sacked and placed on black lists and persecuted. I referred to this in the few speeches I was asked to make and this would have been noted by the state monitors.
The Direct Action Committee and the Committee 100 subsequently supported an idea which we had originated while in prison intended to follow along the lines of the Gandhi salt marches in which canoes would be pulled all the way from Aldermaston at the Easter March to Trafalgar Square and on through England and Scotland over six weeks campaigning prior to a sea and land demonstration at Holy Loch the Polaris Submarine base. I was appointed Chief Marshal for the first week as far as Bedford after which I was to undertake preparatory work for a month in Scotland arranging with the police and local authorities the routes of marches on both sides of the Clyde and food and accommodation as well as hiring trains and ferries. George Clark and I attended a meeting at Scotland Yard with the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to agree arrangements for London for the Aldermaston March and in relation to the DAC Polaris march where it was agreed we would leave Trafalgar Square at a certain time, make in orbit of the Square before heading for the first over night stop. There would be no civil disobedience action. It had been agreed within the DAC that there would only be a small sponsored core of marchers some 30 which included an embedded reporter from the Daily Mail and these were selected on the basis of each individual having to give something important up, a job and their family, and we wanted to avoid those who were becoming persistent demonstrators as well as those without some training understanding and acceptance of non violent campaigning. Before Bedford it was arranged for the police to remove one young mother who had four children in care and who suddenly attached herself to the march. Several applicants for the march were rejected by those taking the decision.
However we wanted as many people as possible to join in the march or attend rallies along the way. This was my first experience of how both sides tend to say one thing and do another. The police insisted we leave Trafalgar Square early, refused to allow the agreed orbit and rushed us along the agreed route preventing many from joining as they subsequently told us. The reason for this is that unbeknown to me a group within the Committee 100, including Schoenman had broken from the agreed route and gone to demonstrate at the USA Embassy without prior official agreement although I afterwards assumed the authorities would have had some intelligence from their placements within the Committee 100 organisation.
In Scotland the response of the police and local authorities varied. In Clydebank for example I went to see the local fixer a communist shoe maker. When I contacted the police they asked how many men I thought we would need and they offered to stop the traffic for the duration of the march and this was where I survived a bus ride full of factory girls coming off shift. For Greenock and Gourock the politicians arranged for me to meet the Chief Executive and Treasurer who had been told to offer schools for overnight accommodation and to provide an evening meal and breakfast. The Dumbarton authorities on the other bank refused to meet. On visiting Dunoon to report on what was planned on the final day of demonstration I agreed to a shorthand transcript and duly received a warning letter from the Commanding officer of the Flagship Scotland. Two years ago I came across an article on the demonstration written by a Naval Historian at Greenwich who claimed the authorities had taken steps to find out what was to happen beforehand. I took great delight in explaining to him that I had carefully told the authorities in advance precisely what was planned, or at least as I had believed to be the situation at the time
Pat Arrowmsmith was a powerful, dedicated and single minded individual and had insisted on marching down the main street in Edinburgh (Princess Street) without permission and was duly arrested with all the other marchers. I was sent from Glasgow to Edinburgh with a banker’s cheque raised from influential supporters at short notice, to avoid them all going to prison and ending the project prematurely before reaching its objective, only to find that the fines had been paid by the Scottish Mine Workers Union then run by two Communist brothers. I took a taxi to the headquarters to find the marchers in the Board room drinking whisky to celebrate their achievement. I had been instructed by the Executive Committee of the organisation to read the riot act about following the plan from then on but this difficult to do in the circumstances of the party atmosphere and the Brothers were making every one Honorary Members of the Union. I retreated leaving hem to their party.
This was but a prelude for back in Glasgow a few days later at a meeting to discuss the day of action on sea and on land Pat introduced several new developments including the use of two large boats with demonstrators recruited via the Committee 100 without any prior training or checking they could swim, the blocking of additional piers and other variations to the plan I had reported to the authorities.
I had no alternative but to resign my position and went off to join the small separate group camped on banks of the loch who were undertaking an operation using canoes. On the day I joined one of the large boats which was flooded with the use of water cannon and then when we were transferring passengers to the other boat this was damaged as the authorities cleverly sandwiched the boats between a large Buoy. I then joined a sit in blockade of a pier only to find that Pat and all the remaining organisers and marshals have been arrested in a similar operation to that at Witney Green. When the servicemen were ordered to get through the sit down the crowd became ugly especially when the police attempted to clear a pathway by flinging protestors on top of each other. I stood up and told everyone to be calm and passive and let the authorities do what they felt they had to do. We were not against the individual the servicemen and the police who were acting under orders. I was not arrested or subsequently charged with anything. I received a message from Pat and those arrested and held at the Dunoon Police station to end the sit down and march in good order to the police station to protest there. I told everyone to do this which was met with calls of who are you and why should we, but with help I managed to get this organised and on their way. I returned to the campsite in the grounds of the youth hostel and from there back to the Iona Community House in Glasgow and then made a visit to a commune in Wales with a former Foulness prisoner who wrote the novel Smallcreeps Day.
I had been advised by someone I had contacted at the Labour Party that if I wanted to go into politics or become a political agent I should go to Ruskin College and made application. I had also applied to become the first full time organiser of the London region CND, a post which George Clark did not want the job because of his other interests. What then happened is that on a visit to the Committee 100 offices I was introduced to a beautiful girl who was in the midst of taking her degree finals and finding out that she was not attached I got her address and wrote saying that if she would like a meal to ring within ten seconds of getting the letter. This she did and I was still in bed asleep at the time when she phoned and we met at Hampstead Station and spent the rest of the day together return to her palatial home in the village where she mentioned that her father was regarded as one of the best accountants in the City of London. We went out together over several weeks although she had lots of other suitors. It was she who pressed that I should go to Ruskin rather than take the CND Job (it will condense what you have to say) sadly that failed and sadly she became engaged and married someone who became a Member of Parliament. Twenty years later without contacting me she published an article in the then British Hospital Journal about the difference of view I had with Shelter about providing information which required a lot of staff time, and for free, only for the organisation then to use the information to criticise the local authority. The Committee/ Council agreed we should charge a minimum basic fee if the information required additional work.
I knew the editor of the journal and he provided her contact address, meeting subsequently for a meal in London. She was divorced but had a new partner. She said she had drawn attention to her mother who had advised against the relationship with me given, as what she saw was my successful subsequent career. With hindsight her mother had been right!
George Clark had married a journalist who had written a Penguin book about Housing and she and I acted as observers at a Committee 100 rally and sit down in Trafalgar Square. Everything appeared to go well until late in the evening when the police used kettling as they do in relation to football supporters at away grounds. You could leave the Square to go home in ones or two but not in a group and then there was an incident which the police said was caused by demonstrators and which happened on the far side to where Mary and I were walking at the time. However the police were reported to have waded in and were very rough. Some of the media who were still around and a few spectators were reported saying they were sickened by the violence. We suspected that there had been plants, i.e. outsiders who waited until given some signal to provoke the police who then cleared the Square.
I intentionally mentioned football because of my experiences witnessing a group of 100 or so men in a side street to the Chelsea ground as I made my way home early, in groups of two or three suddenly form into a silent column when one of their number raised an umbrella and then go off at orderly trot in the direction of where Sunderland supporters could be heard making their way to their coaches. Later I encountered police on horses and in cars following a running pack of young men, and later still, about an hour or so I was on a train to first witness police escort about thirty or forty young men onto the train and who were not wearing football clothing. At another station into central London the platform was full of young men who spotted what I was later told were members of the London Sunderland supporters club and those on the platform smashed their way into the train using knuckle dusters, boots and swinging from the hand grips in a vicious fight. Some of these looked as young as twelve. The train had to be taken out of service at the next station after the police arrived to take away a number of those involved. On another occasion I was on a train when West Ham supporters on their way back from a game at Wimbledon broke out of the train onto a platform where the police were preventing Chelsea supporters getting onto the station and they had to be reinforced being attacked from two sides
At Barnsley however the kettling system was such that the crowd panicked and I thought there was going to be a dangerous crush at he end of one match. At Tottenham having bought an away ticket from Sunderland there were only about a dozen of us in the stand for the evening Cup game but found that about fifty Spurs fans had been sold tickets for the same stand and when the game started they moved from their allotted seats to seats behind us and commenced a torrent of foul abuse. Stewards initially ignored my protest and eventually about a dozen police entered but when we went and sat with them so did a number of the gang. Fortunately Spurs got a penalty and when the attention of the gang was on this we made our escape running for our lives. At Arsenal sitting among a full stand of Sunderland supporters, a man suddenly stood up and started to shout abuse close to where I sat. Several police came down the rows towards the man and one produced a truncheon and was threatening towards everyone. Upset by this I left the match early but as I made my way out of the ground I was asked by a Police Inspector why I was leaving, having evidently observed the incident on CCTV. I said what had happened and he suggested a complain which I made. The matter was investigated and eventually someone came up from London and together with an officer from Northumbria visited my home. From this I understood that in effect Arsenal had put on an exercise for visiting officials from Scandinavia and that the offending policeman was brought in from an outside force. It was agreed that he should be spoken to and given further training rather than take things further. The whole thing seemed to be police led from start to finish which I was content to go along with, However these experiences demonstrate the problems which the police face with large crowds, especially demonstrators and football matches in London which occur every weekend and week days throughout the year. They have to use outside forces to ensure continuation of everyday policing and while there is effective riot control training I would not be surprised if there are staged trials in live events as well as experimentation with the tactics.
However I do not understand why a way was not cleared for the Prince and his wife to get through to the Theatre although there are problems with a one way system operating for a part of Oxford Street to do with the West East new trans London underground link and the major station development at the Tottenham Court Road, late Christmas shopping opening hours, visits to see the lights and the usual evening traffic. It is puzzling at best because the authorities are usually so thorough.
When at Ruskin a series of Committee 100 demonstrations were held including at Brize Norton and I decide to be a Marshal for the march from Witney Green to the base but not participate in the civil disobedience. On the Green we responded to the request of the Chief Marshal to meet with the police for a briefing only for us all to be arrested and asked to enter into a recognisance to keep the peace under some ancient statute. As I was to find out later the Police Station and the Court House are on one side of the Green. Although I did not intend to participate I was prepared by this time for all eventualities and had a little statement ready. So when I was individually arrested by a young constable I made my political statement about freedom to as well as freedom from and that we are all responsible for the actions of our governments, he carefully wrote down and then read out in court. The Magistrates intervened after first couple of sentences but the Constable said sir this is his statement and it must be recorded, which you can imagine did not endear me or him to the court. I agreed to the recognisance however. Two years later I was allocated to the Witney Child Care Team by Oxfordshire County Council and appointed the Court officer for the Department to the Courts at Witney and Burford (The Marques of Blandford chaired the adult court at Burford and his wife the Juvenile as it was said they could never agree) and one of my functions in addition to liaising with the police was to report to the Magistrates on any children who had been placed on care orders rather than sent to approved schools.
As a consequence of my other duties I was required on behalf of a court to interview an RAF officer at the base. When he refused to be interviewed my superiors instructed me to write to his Commanding officer who duly arranged for the interview to take place. On arrival at Brize Norton the staff car of the commanding officer was awaiting and after greeting me in his office the RAF officer was marched in and ordered to answer the questions. resisted the temptation to mention my previous difficulty in getting to the base!
My theme is what we say and do lives with us throughout our lives and with those we say or do it with. I was the first Chairman of the Family and Children’s Committee of the newly formed British Association of Social Workers and we held an annual meeting and three day conference at which I was able to choose the programme and speakers, except that the after annual dinner speaker was already booked: Sir Keith Joseph. As Chairman I was allocated a two bedroom apartment flat at the top of a residential block and on the night of the dinner Sir Keith was staying over. I was impressed that one of the first things he did on arrival was to phone his wife and had a long conversation with her. Over dinner I made no secret of my background as I then knew it and my political leanings and to say his response was frosty is an understatement. I think at one point he suggested that I might find Russia more conducive. He spent the rest of the evening in the adoring care of the young female Conservative supporting social workers, spurning my offer to look after him.
A year later having applied to become the first Director of Social Services at South Shields and Dewsbury I was invited out to lunch by the Home Office Regional Children’s Service Inspector who advised that the department would grade me as a suitable applicant. You were graded A B C or not, but suggested that I had to stop writing and creating problems. I had led a march and lobby of social workers against the M.O H’s taking over the Child Care service prior to government decisions about a Social Services Department and also chaired an Association’s Committee which had blacklisted the London Borough Of Sutton and Torbay (Later I was invited by the Sutton constituency Labour Party to address one of their meetings about the implementation of the legislation.
What happened is that I also applied to be Deputy at Cheshire and they put me up in the best hotel in town, interviewed and offered me a contract to sign all in one day as an Assistant having decided not to make the Deputy appointment. By implication if I did well I would be made up. Having signed the contract I politely declined the interviews for Shields and Dewsbury which then arose although I was told that I was the choice of the Chairman of Dewsbury Social Services had I attended. I had met and talked some months beforehand although I did not know she had become the Chair of the Social Services or had contact with her since that meeting.
In 1971 the South Shield’s job went to the Medical officer of Health, one of only two individuals with a Medical background appointed. The other was in Liverpool. I was subsequently told the Shields Council Leadership had promised the position to their man when the authority was enlarged into South Tyneside which included senior politicians from Jarrow, Hebburn and Bolden and County Durham. They had become so incensed when all the senior appointments were made to former South Shield’s staff they insisted that the retaining posts be opened to individuals from outside the local authority staff being integrated. Thus I came to appointed at the age of 32 and the Director of Housing at the age of 26. Someone with the leadership of the Council leaked that I been to prison to a free lance Journalist who later became the Council’s media officer. He passed the story to the national media one of whom had the headline. Ex Con gets top job. It was Sir Keith Joseph the Social Services Minister who I assume in the circumstances would have been consulted as well as the Minister of State who did not block my appointment. The legislation referred to the approval of the Secretary of State. At one point at the dinner a couple of years before I had suggested that come the revolution because of my anti totalitarian and liberal freedom to views I expected to be put against a wall and shot as he would no doubt be. I would like to believe he remembered that when he came to make the decision, if he did.
However those opposed to my appointment within the local authority brought the subject up at various opportunities and some looked to quickly end the position regardless of my managerial performance. It continued to be raised from time to time but although it was never forgotten it became less and less an issue as one decade passed into another.
It is a lesson that you can overcome the actions of youth if you show respect for the views of others and the position of the democratic state and that you accept the consequences of your actions in the short and long term. However it could have been very different and I fear for the future of those recently arrested and charged.
