Many will have experienced a euphoric
period of weeks with glorious Mediterranean weather and from watching the human
miraculous rescue of a football team and their coach from 2 miles of
underground caves and tunnels in Thailand, together with the unexpected triumphs
of the England Football team in reaching a semi-final of the World today with
the prospect of a final against France on Sunday. There was also a royal christening involving
the “fab four” and a brilliant hundred plane fly past over Buckingham palace
yesterday to mark the creation of the Royal Air Force a century ago and where
several generations of royals have gained their wings.
In contrast, Prime Minister
May devised a way to present a possible negotiated trade deal with the European
Economic Community by confronting the fundamentalist Brexiteers and forcing the
nominal chief negotiator and Brexit Secretary of State, David Davis, to resign,
quickly followed by Boris Johnson, the ludicrous and egotistical Foreign Secretary who immediately in declared his contempt for that proposed, inciting
his supporters into paroxysms of rage
and plotting, threatening to depose the Prime Minister if she did not change in
her position or if she gives more concessions in the negotiations. Then we have
the President of the United States declaring on his way to a NATO summit at
which he will demand significantly more money for the continuing US support,
that Britian is in turmoil and hopes he will meet up with Boris Johnson, and
one also suspects, Nigel Farage. He added that the easiest event before him had
become a meeting with the President of Russia. His visit has been downgraded
from a formal state visit in which he could have been expected to address
Parliament and attend a state dinner and overnight residence at Buckingham
Palace. He will be flown to the opening of United State Embassy, to talk with
May at Chequers and the Queen at Windsor, and then play golf at his course in
Scotland avoiding mass protest marches about his policies and personal life.
Here in the North East Jeremy Corbin, Emily Thornbury and other Labour
personalities unafraid to talk of socialism will speak at the Durham Gala while
the Tall sailing ships will spend the weekend in Sunderland.
I contemplate and prepare for
the first of two operations on my eyes to remove cataracts, something which my
birth mother experienced also on reaching a similar age and express continued
disappointment that a female actor and film maker from Darlington, encountered
on the 10.25 from Newcastle to Kings Cross, a week ago Friday, has not made contact
as she appeared determined to do. Most likely she Googled and accepted my
explanation why aspects of the printed but unpublished 101 in Black and White
should not become public during my lifetime, and she would have to wait and see
if I was able to complete and publish the two volume autobiography now in the
making, or perhaps her husband who sat focussed on his lap top throughout the
three hour journey and who admitted that her impulsive enthusiasms sometimes
got the better of her, counselled against
further contact.
One of the advantages of
looking old, although inside one retains the hopes of a teenager, is the
openness and kindness of strangers, and one of the exciting features of
contemporary Britain is the number of independent, self-confident and single
minded young women that have emerged in the House of Commons, in the news and
entertainment media, and experienced through direct contact and communication.
A young woman from Mansfield
who engaged me in conversation when enjoying a brunch sandwich in a cool corner
of St Pancras station the Monday morning before returning home, was one such
example. She reminded of the young women
I met when as a 20-year-old together with a former catholic priest in training,
the Anglo Catholic pacifist, anarchist and vegan, Laurens Otter, we hitched
lifts on Boxing Day 1959 to join a youth campaign for nuclear disarmament march
from Liverpool to Hull and which I repeated over Christmas and New Year
1960/1961.
In December 1959 I was offered
temporary work at the Houseman’s bookshop which is still located close to Kings
Cross station and which helped fund the weekly publication Peace News. The
bookshop manager, Harry Mister asked if I would also help with preparing copies
of Peace News for posting on Wednesday evening work group held on one of the
basement rooms in the building. Laurens
was also a regular member of the Wednesday evening group and it was his idea
that we should join the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament march and where
I was already a member of an adult CND group in Wallington where I had lived
for all but the first days of my life.
Separately, I had also made up
my mind to participate in the January 1960 proposed human blockade of the
entrance of the United States intercontinental nuclear missile and air base at
Harrington in Northamptonshire organised by the Direct Action Committee Against
Nuclear War.
On Boxing Day 1959 I commenced
a journey which changed the course of my future life after spending Christmas Day
with my birth and care mothers and their eldest sister at the council flat in
Wallington where we had moved into one of the two blocks of six flats, two on
each floor, built on the site of one of the 140 plus V1 and V2 rockets which
had exploded in Croydon Airport during the War. We had shared a requisitioned
house with the Cheeseman’s, where Paul had served with the RAF regiment in
North Africa and we were allocated adjacent flats in the Maldon Court. Bute Road
block by the local authority when the owners of the requisitioned house at the
Stafford Road end of Onslow Gardens had pressed for its return. We had gained
the accommodation with the help of our Member of Parliament, Robert Carr, who
became Sir Robert and a Home Secretary, and the three sisters voted Conservative
until one of their nieces persuaded them to vote for Tom Brake, the Liberal
Democrat who survived the treachery of the Tory Party coalition and remains the
MP for Wallington and Carshalton, the constituency created with
reorganisation of local government in London which ended the separate
borough of Beddington and Wallington and its local government and political
connection with Mitcham.
I joined Laurens in London to
commence hitching lifts and after he angered one countryman who had been out
shooting we were required to walk for miles to the nearest town where we spent
the night in sleeping bags in a bus shelter arriving to meet up with the score
of core marchers who had already developed into a close group but made us most welcome.
Unfortunately, I was not able to go to Hull, leaving at Doncaster to hitch
lifts back on my own in preparation for the protest at Harrington.
Two of the remarkable young
women first encountered on the trans Pennine campaign were to have important
and positive influences on my life at that time, although it was a third who I
had met at the offices Lord Russell’s Committee 100 who was instrumental in my decision to go to Ruskin College and
not become the first paid organiser of the London Region CND with its office
also in the basement of Peace News. The first
of the two was a sixth form student who went to India on her own for several
months before going up to Oxford where we encountered again as Ruskin College
also had premises in the city. She attended my subsequent wedding and became a
senior university administrator. The second, then a student teacher from Manchester
became a Professor of Education. She travelled to be outside the gates of
Stafford Prison on October 1st, 1960 when with five others we were
released from voluntary captivity after refusing for six months give an
undertaking to discontinue our civil disobedience protesting the possession and
potential use of weapons of mass civilian extermination. She also visited to
help with my readjustment back into everyday society when the prison experience
proved more traumatic than appreciated at the time. It is noteworthy that the father of another
the young marchers went on to hold two of the most senior political positions
in government and she also became a university professor. I met her again with
the man she was to marry on a Scottish hillside the morning after the joint Direct
Action Committee and Committee 100 land and sea action against the location of
USA submarine with Polaris nuclear missiles in Holy Loch in 1961. Another of
the young women who participated with her well known Church of England
Clergyman father was reported to have subsequently become a dancer at the Folies
Bergére in Paris.
The decision, we now know,
following the release of Cabinet papers, to place the submarine base so close
of the main city of Scotland had been forced by the USA government in exchange
for the technology enabling the independent British system to become deterrent
effective. News of the development had reached the six of us in Stafford prison
where two of our number worked in the main library and I in the daily lending
library on the prison C wing. The Potter, and subsequent author of Smallcreeps Day,
Peter Currell Brown and I had talked of a Gandhi Satyagraha style march with
canoes to the Loch before attempting to
plant a peace flag on a submarine and I had written a letter suggesting the
project to the Direct Action Committee who asked if I would be the chief
Marshall for the first week of the project and then help with project planning
in Scotland from a base in Glasgow. Peter had made the canoe which set off from
Trafalgar Square at the end of the 1961 Aldermaston March and George Clark who was the organiser
and chief marshal for an event where
over 100000 perhaps more than 200000 had participated, had invited me to join him at a meeting with police at
Scotland Yard where it became evident I was the focus of interest when members
of the Home Office and Admiralty were introduced and others I suspected the CIA
or USA embassy staff were not.
Peter had left the core group
of some 30 as it wound in its way through England for six weeks, with selection
based on giving something up, a job, a course place, a husband and children. He
formed a base camp in the private loch side grounds of the Youth Hostel at
Strone Point Dunselma Castle and known locally as the Big House. When I commenced
research, I discovered that the young warden had emigrated to Australia and
that her son joined correspondence on Trip Adviser (see Dunoon) about the YHA and
which included reference to her participation in the land demonstration.
Another of the six Operation
Foulness men held in Stafford, Michael Nolan, also joined the group on the loch
side. Mike had also participated in the Harrington demonstration and he and I had
shared adjacent cells in Bedford Jail after refusing Police Bail. We were
locked up for 23 out of 24 hours on the Sunday with two half hour spells of
exercise in silence and walking yards apart so we could not communicate. This was
because we were under 20 and therefore had to be held separately from adult
prisoners. The other men also held until we appeared before the magistrates
said they had a great time kept together in the prison Library. Among those
arrested was the daughter of a judge. We were collectively represented by a
barrister who made an impassioned political speech, one Greville Janner, and we
were given an unconditional discharge.
13 of the 15 arrested, who
participated in the second Operation Foulness project competed the six
months. Terry Chandler also under 21 had
to serve his time alone in Wormwood Scrubs. He joined the Holy Loch camp and a
photo of him planting a flag at Holy Loch reappears from time to time and in
the recent BBC documentary covering the release of the government papers. A
photo of me being water hosed in a launch appeared in some papers at the time of
the Whitsun demonstrations.
A more prominent photo being
carried by policemen appeared in Guardian after Operation Foulness in 1960. In 1959 I trained and worked as a salesmen for
the office machine firm Olivetti, having passed top of the four week training
course and in 1964 while completing a Home Office secured and financed course
to become a qualified child care officer, I met the person who was second on
the course and who had worked the same sales team in the City of London ,when
he walked out of a restaurant in a street in Norwich as I was on my way back to the Children’s Department. He said
that the Guardian photo had been pinned to notice boards throughout the company
with the banner “This is what happens if you do not sell.”
The third photograph of me
proved of potential greater significance when a team at the West End Police
station in central London came under media and official scrutiny in 1963 after
they attempted to frame a member of the National Council of Civil Liberties who
participated in a demonstration and who also contributed as a cartoonist to
Peace News. After Harrington, a posed
photo of me holding a grappling iron taken against the boundary of the nuclear
rocket station and air base was published in Peace News, stating that I was a
staff man, which I was not. I had then put down what would have been regarded
as an offensive weapon and capable of damaging property before helping to form
the human blockade at the entrance of the base. The potential significance of
the photo and my minor roles in the peace movements of that era will form the
subject of part of the autobiography with its themes of the difference between
coincidence and connection, that the appearance of anything is only one aspect
of its reality and that everything we do and say can be viewed and heard by
anyone anywhere, anytime with the technology.
The only female member of
Operation Foulness who joined the Peace Camp was the young and single Ruth
Townsend who stayed in the area after the demonstrations and went to work in a
local hotel. The interaction between the
local community and United States personnel who worked at the base, the base
supply ship or crewed the submarines in brilliantly described by Andrene
Messersmith in The American Years Dunoon and the US Navy, and provides the
perspective of those who served and of the local population. She was 11 when
the first submarine arrived and later married a US Master diver.
The amusing aspect of my
encounter with the young and adventuring young woman from Mansfield whose
mother wanted her to see the world, is that she had initiated the conversation
and whether this had been noted by the station camera unit or it was noticed
that I moved from one end of the five row seats to sit next to her in the
middle of the five, having previously
moved from sitting beside her to then end seat when it became vacant, or
that I had initially left the shoulder bag by the end seat after moving the
case before me, it provoked a visit from a station security lady from Croydon,
originally from Ghana who checked that the shoulder bag was mine and then asked
if the young lady was my daughter.
This was flattering as granddaughter
was more appropriate. I cannot remember why the woman who lives in Croydon made
the generalization that Ghanaians were different from West Indians but this was
something I could in part concur from my experience as the Senior Child Care
and Court Officer for Ealing Council at Acton in the late 1960’s which had a
large West Indian origin community, and where after 6 months I had become the
Area Children’s Officer for Central Ealing where there was a post WW2 Polish
community, now enhanced with the enlargement of the European Economic Community,
and also of Hungarian refugees. I was educated about Ghana by a new member of
the managed team who had come to England to train and gain experience before
returning to her homeland. From her, my
experience working in Acton and a Home Office Children’s Department course on
ethnic diversity, I had become aware of the full and long terms impact of
British slavery which profited from selling and exploiting women and their
children separately from the men in the West Indies, and the British
exploitation of homeland-based Africans but where the Christian approach to
family life strongly influenced.
It was by accident that I
encountered the woman from Mansfield. I had set off later than usual from
Premier Inn close to East Croydon Station for a Thameslink train to St Pancras
because I had a standard ticket and could not enjoy croissant with butter and
jam, a banana, coffee with biscuits, a newspaper and free Wi-Fi in the First-Class
lounge at Kings Cross. Leaving around 10.30 had been a mistake because I
forgotten that with the completion of the transformation of London Bridge into
one of Western Europe’s finest railway stations the Thameslink trains now stop
there again instead of the route via the Elephant Castle and although mid-morning,
it was standing room only again on one of the new spacious 12 coach trains.
Arriving with my large and
heavy suitcase containing breathing machine, large heavy binoculars to
counteract the reduced cataract sight in my left eye which had made seeing a
cricket ball in flight no longer possible, plus laptop and book, I needed a
seat to recover and eat the sandwich previously purchased. I have used the
seats below the domestic high-speed trains and across from the entrance to
Underground stations to eat food several times before, usually buying a
sandwich deal from Boots or chicken wings and a single chocolate desert from
Marks and Spencer’s located at this end of the station. I was surprised that
there was only one vacant seat between, as it transpired the young woman from
Mansfield, and another woman on the end seat. When the two women who had
occupied the other two seats departed I moved myself and luggage to the end
seat and it was at this point that the young woman who had been engrossed in her
mobile phone looked across and asked if I had been on holiday.
I explained that I had spent
the weekend based in Croydon where I was born and was returning to the North
East where I had lived since 1974. She volunteered that she was born and bred
in Mansfield but hoped to make a life for herself in London in marketing, a
great coincidence because several times a year I stay at the Mansfield Travel
Lodge, which as she immediately pointed out is in Sutton in Ashfield over the
border from Mansfield. She was also familiar with the developed village where
members of my family live and the reason for high house prices compared with
those in Mansfield and other villages due to the curtilage involved in parents
being able to apply to attend the Minister school at Southwell, now an academy
and where she volunteered information which concurred with my own understanding.
It was the coincidence of this connection which prompted me to move again and
sit in the seat next to her moving my case in front of the vacant seat and the
shoulder bag by the side, on its own, and it may have been this act and not my
previous movements which attracted the attention of security staff.
Last year I stopped for a
visit to McD’s in the food court above Victoria Station and a lady sitting at
the adjacent table asked me to mind her luggage while she went off to get a
drink. When she was away for what seemed to me a long time I mentioned this to
table clearing staff and when this appeared to have no outcome, I spoke to the
catering unit who directed me to the station management staff office with its
entrance in the far corner of the available seating area. I explained the
situation and location via the doorway communications system and returned to my
seat. The woman who appeared a foreign national with limited English went away again
as a member of the security staff arrived and followed her to intercept. At
that point I left to be on my way.
On Saturday June 23rd,
I had attended the second visit of 77-year-old Eric Burden and his latest group
of The Animals at the City Hall in Newcastle. Usually I would take my aging car
to street parking in Newcastle, a car park in Gateshead for some shopping at
Tesco afterwards, or to the car park at one end of the Metro Station at South
Shields. In all instances this avoided the climb on the way back up a steep hill
to where I live close the Arbeia Roman supply fort which served the Legion
defending Hadrian’s Wall on the north bank of the River Tyne. My car had
refused to restart when I was trying to move in the carpark of the Emirates
Riverside County Cricket ground Chester Le Street for the international one day
contest between England and Australia and I had missed the early part of
England’s Innings being towed from the ground to the garage I use in South Shields,
and then watching the final overs on television at my home. It has taken two
weeks and a gold bar for the problem to be identified and the parts required
located and the vehicle returned in working order.
Because the band due to perform in the first half of the
concert had withdrawn, Eric Burden had performed a 100 minute set without a
break from 8 pm so I was on a Metro train back comparatively early than usual,
but it was already dark and I decided
not to go across the grass bank which softens the gradient but continued along
the road from the station which passes the Wouldhave Wetherspoons, and car park
of the then closed Morrisons supermarket, and crossed the bisecting road, intending
to pass by a Bangladesh Muslim religious building and go to the next road
junction before turning upwards. As I crossed, a man standing in the roadway by
a bicycle called my attention that there was an apparent young person collapsed
on the pavement. The body looked that of a teenager, but I could not see the
face which was bent down towards a closed phone laying on the pavement. I asked
if the individual needed help and there was no response. The individual
appeared alive. I told the man I would call an ambulance and provided the
location. I was asked to confirm the individual was breathing and then place
full length on their side. It was at this point I saw that the person was a
woman and not a teenager. I provided the emergency control centre my name and
the ambulance arrived within minutes and two very young staff asked me to
repeat my involvement and advised that I was free to be on my way. Because I did
not smelt alcohol I speculated this was a substance abuse misadventure.
Over the past five years of
travelling from Kings Cross to Newcastle I will have become well known to the
station camera monitoring unit as someone who is among the first to stand in
the area before the platforms and not on concourse and then attempt to locate
and get on the train even though I have a reserved seat. This is because my large case does not fit upright within the
provided luggage space on the present East Coast line trains. There are two
places within each first-class carriage where is possible to stand a large case
upright without blocking the aisle otherwise it necessary to lay the case flat
and expect that someone else will lay their case on top. In each visit it is
possible to work out the most likely platform for the departure and wait to the
back of the area to avoid the rush of people departing or arriving to catch
earlier trains. Last year I noticed a young woman sitting on the ground in what
appeared a semi-conscious condition very similar to the woman encountered in
Baring Street, South Shileds. I asked if she needed help and gaining no
response alerted station staff who arranged for help which arrived as my train
was announced and I needed to make my way.
On the outward journey of the
weekend visit I had booked a seat on the 12.25 which departs from Newcastle and
as it transpired on the day it is possible to board the train at noon, having
first enjoyed a bottle of water and taken biscuits for later the trip together
with a copy of the Times from the first
class lounge. The seat facing me was booked from Newcastle but remained
vacant. It was rejected by a young man
who disliked rear facing seats. The hot meal offered in the menu that I fancied
was the Lemon and Lime chicken, but I had to settle for a sandwich, a cake and
some crisps, and the first offer of a whisky and ginger with ice. When the young
couple boarded at Darlington they chose to sit together with the young woman
facing me taking the unoccupied seat from Newcstle and immediately appearing to
want to engage in conversation while her partner, later she identified as her
husband, immediately became engrossed in his lap top. I explained about the
absence of the hot meal when they looked at the menu and this was later
explained as kitchen flooding and the non-use of the ovens.
My first visit to the capital this
year had been a day trip a couple of weeks beforehand. I had planned family
visits by car to the Midlands and the Sussex coast and with a stay in Croydon
in between, in March, but the late winter ice and snow put paid to the plan and
the lost cost of the accommodation. Because one aspect of the biographical work
concerns Soho life in the1950’s and 1960’s I decided to visit the National
Theatre for a production of Absolute Hell set in Wartime Soho and the new
production of a work staged as The Pink Room in 1952 and directed by Terence
Rattigan. The critics hated it and it closed after three weeks at a significant
financial loss. The advance briefing was that the play covered the interaction
between the Members a private Soho Club, the ‘Vie en Rose and where there was debate
from national politics and Buddhism to the aftermath of the Holocaust. There
were such mentions in play but these were several notches below the level of the
script of The Happy Prince, the brilliant film of the last days of Oscar Wilde
after his release from prison which I experienced at the Cineworld, East India
Dock on the Sunday having supported Essex who lost against Hampshire in the
final of the one day 50 overs each side held at Lords on the Saturday. The
Happy Prince has a script as substantial
in terms of the quality and wit as the plays Wilde. I accept that given that
the Pink Room was presented before the era of the Angry Young Men it is not
surprising that the subject matter of the play shocked and offended.
My interest centred on the
private members club of which three were the most notorious in the decades of the
1940’s to 1970’s, one in Carnaby Street and two Dean Street which is the focus of
my interest and I wondered if the Vie En Rose was based on one of them.
The Carnaby Street club was
the subject of several reincarnations known for police protected drug taking
and for what remained the unsolved murder of a prostitute outside of its door
during the War. The murder remained unsolved until very recently when the
culprit walked into a police station in Canada and confessed following the
diagnosis of terminal cancer. As with the Vie en Rose this club had become a
wartime haunt for USA servicemen. One of
the clubs in Dean Street was famous because well-known homosexual and lesbians
frequented to get drunk, and for sex and drugs. Wikipedia provides the list of
the well-known members and there is reference in the memoirs of George Melly
and of his wife. The other Dean Street establishment known for riotous living
attracted heterosexual known public figures from both sides of the Atlantic. In
the 1950’s and 1960’s my direct experience was restricted to traditional jazz
clubs and the left-wing Partisan Coffee bar.
After my visit to the new
production at the National Theatre where at short notice I secured an aisle
seat a few rows back from the stage for a matinee performance, I had an enjoyable
return journey in the company of St John’s
Ambulance ladies from Durham who were all dressed up for a Royal Garden Party that afternoon. I had then met on
the Metro station platform the present
leader of South Tyneside Council. Iain Malcom, where I had worked as Director
of Social Services from 1974 to1991 at a time when he was a young councillor
and so engaged did we become in conversation about the old days that we got on the
train to Sunderland and not South Shields and this meant returning to Pelaw
where being midweek there was just time to catch the last train to South
Shileds.
I was delighted when just before making the weekend trip and
meeting the ladies from Darlington and Mansfield, I received a copy of Iain’s
book on the political and social impact of the 1972 Rent Act called Reluctant Rebels.
It is the most authentic account of local politics and the everyday interaction
between local politicians, particularly those of the same Party, I have come
across since the 1950’s publication “No Love Johnnie” by the Labour Member of
the House of Commons Wilfred Fienburgh. Peter Finch played Johnnie in the 1960
film version with a host of future stars-Billie Whitelaw, Rosalie Crutchley,
Mary Peach, Fenella Fielding, Donald Pleasence, Geoffrey Keen, Paul Rogers,
Denis Price, Peter Barkworth, Conrad Phillips, Mervyn Johns, Peter Sallies and
Derek Francis.
I had boarded the train at
Newcastle on June 30th with the intention of drafting by hand a
thank you letter to Iain and provide information which I believed he would find
of interest and then wanted to finish a significant book about modern Spain by
Giles Tremblett in which he travels through a country’s Hidden Past (Ghosts of
Spain). I am reading this alongside the 5th form (2nd
stream) year prize in 1955 from the John
Fisher School, H V Morton’s, A Stranger in Spain. Both my birth parents were
born in Gibraltar but with strong maternal Spanish ancestry in addition to
Maltese and British and their daily language had been Llanito, basic Spanish
laced with English phrases and words from southern Mediterranean countries and
North Africa. My DNA is that of the Iberian Peninsula and Malta with only a
fifth western and central European with a small element of the Ashkenazi
Jewishness although this aspect was not discovered until 2017.
I had settled down to draft
the letter and it was after this was completed I relaxed before commencing to
read the book on Spain’s rejected fascist past, when the examination by the
young woman from Darlington recommenced and she enquired what I did. Having disclose that I was born in 1939 I was
a little surprised by the question, but she persisted so after explaining about
the letter and that I was writing about experience and had written and printed a
book not intended for publication the interest intensified. I felt challenged because
it was at the core of the dilemma I have tried to resolve for some 25 years: how
to write a book of truth with public interest which sets out not to harm and
which achieves no harm.
