Pie 'n' Mash and Prefabs (23 page)

M
y first vague awareness of politics came with listening to news stories about the Mau Mau uprisings in Kenya in the early 1950s. Of course, I didn't really understand what it was all about and some of the descriptions of ‘terrorist' outrages were so graphic I sometimes worried that our prefab might be attacked by gangs of Mau Mau. This was followed by news of unrest in Cyprus and similar uprisings.

The first time I ever expressed a political opinion, I was shot down in flames by my family, but then I was only nine. This was when the Soviet Union ruthlessly put down the Hungarian uprising. The news as broadcast on radio and television had always treated those in revolt against British rule in Kenya and Cyprus as terrorists and painted a very black picture of them, so when the Hungarians rose against the Soviet Union
I assumed they were in the wrong as well, and one day, at Nan and Grandpa's, the grown-ups were tutting at the news from Hungary. When I voiced the opinion that it was all the Hungarians' fault as they had started the trouble, I was quickly told that I was too young to understand and I should keep such opinions to myself.

I can just about remember the 1959 General Election because John had obtained a free map from
The Times,
showing all the constituencies, and spent some time after the results were declared colouring it in with red for Labour, blue for Conservative and green for Liberal. But it wasn't until my early teens that I began to take a real interest in politics and what was going on in the news. Until the late 1950s, there had been few black people living in Hackney but in the early 1960s more and more West Indian families began to settle in the area as the British Government continued to encourage immigration to help staff our hospitals, public transport and so on. The numbers were still very small but more noticeable, though they meant nothing to me. It was while on the coach back from football one afternoon that I realised that the presence of black people on our streets was the subject of comment. A group of boys sitting at the back of the coach were counting the numbers of black people they saw and making what I thought were completely uncalled-for remarks about their appearance. This was the first time that I had ever encountered any form of racism and it made me feel very uncomfortable.

There was a clear polarisation of views on immigration in the school and in my class. Several boys took a strong view on immigration and were utterly opposed to it. It wasn't until the
Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 that there was any control over the numbers of immigrants from Commonwealth countries. Even so, there were relatively few in and around the East End and I couldn't understand why some people were making such a big fuss about it and even more feeling the need to use such disparaging language when talking about black people. Discrimination on grounds of race was not outlawed until 1965 with the passing of the Race Relations Act, so in the early sixties it was still not uncommon for landlords to put up the sign ‘No blacks, no Irish, no dogs' on the door of their boarding house. I suppose the fact I came from a Jewish background with its own history of discrimination allowed me to see this in a completely different way to those from a purely white British background, though, of course, a lot of my friends and classmates shared my views, whatever their background. There would be many informal discussions especially at break between the groups expressing opposing views.

In the third year, we had a new English teacher, Mr Dowler. Every now and then, he would suspend the normal syllabus to hold a more formal debate in class, immigration being the most frequently debated topic. At the end of the lesson, he would sum up the arguments and would invariably come down on our side.

Mr Dowler was a Canadian and not a great one for formality. Whereas most of the teachers wore their university gowns when teaching, he used to come into class wearing a beat-up old duffle coat, looking very scruffy. He didn't last more than a year and the rumour was the Headmaster had got rid of him firstly because of his unconventional dress and secondly because he was a bit of a ‘lefty'.

It was during these debates that I found out which of my friends and other classmates thought like me. Fortunately, Murray and John were very much on my wavelength, as was Herbert and his friend, Colin Mitchell. Gradually, as time went on, we would talk more and more about politics in general, not just immigration and racism. By the third year, we had also got to know many of the boys in the year above us quite well and they seemed to be a real hotbed of left-wing thought. One boy in particular, Larry Burr, was a member of Hackney Young Socialists, the Labour Party's youth organisation, and he encouraged us to go along to a meeting.

So, one Friday evening, Murray, John, Herbert, Colin and I went along to Hackney Labour Party headquarters in Graham Road, just off Mare Street, to attend our first political meeting. When we got there, we found about thirty people, all crammed into a fairly small, very smoky room. Later, I was told by the Chairman that Hackney Y.S. was the largest Young Socialist group in the country if you didn't include Wigan, which was really only a social club. So we didn't count Wigan.

I have to admit that I couldn't make head nor tail of what went on for most of the meeting. We had fairly straightforward discussions at school about things within our own experience, but here there seemed to be the most complicated and esoteric discussions going on about obscure points of socialism. I was to learn a bit later on that Hackney Y.S. was the melting pot of Trotskyism. There were three main Trotskyist groupings in Great Britain at the time, which later became the Socialist Workers Party, Militant and the Workers Revolutionary Party. Some of the leading members of all three were in Hackney Y.S.
They spent more time tearing each other to shreds than they ever did berating the Tories!

Going to Hackney Y.S. became a regular Friday night activity for my friends and me. I never really did get to grips with all the intricacies of Trotskyism, but it did give me the chance to make new friends and, in spite of us not being like Wigan, there were some social activities as well – nights out at the pub and parties.

My political development coincided with the British satire boom that launched itself on a largely unsuspecting public in the early 1960s. The growing youth culture brought with it a more generalised cynicism of authority. And, although political satire had a long and honourable history in Great Britain, it was, by the time of the Second World War, largely a forgotten art, and certainly throughout the War itself, with everyone pulling together, the idea of making fun of those in charge was unthinkable.

Once the War was over, there was a general feeling of not wanting to return to the ‘bad old days' of the 1930s when unemployment was rife and wages depressed, hence the landslide election of a majority Labour Government for the first time in British history. However, there was still a general deference to those in power. There were probably two things that changed all that, which, as it happened, coincided. The first was the growing independence of young people through the rock'n'roll revolution and the second was the Suez Crisis in 1956. For the first time, probably ever, the British Government embarked on a war that was not supported by the great majority of the British people. Suez resulted in a growing lack of faith in governments of all types.

The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a big cultural change in the arts as ‘kitchen sink' dramas by the likes of John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe brought a new gritty realism to literature in the form of novels, plays and films, and even television got in on the act with
Coronation Street'
s first airing on 9 December 1960, followed by series such as
Z-Cars
in 1962.

While this new emphasis on portraying everyday life for working-class people was taking over from the cosy middle-class world of playwrights like Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan, another strand of the general dissatisfaction with authority began to stir in the bastion of the middle-class world itself, Oxbridge.

In particular, four young graduates from Oxford and Cambridge – Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore – shook the Establishment with their show,
Beyond the Fringe,
which premiered at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh on 22 August 1960 and transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London. The show broke new ground, with Peter Cook impersonating the then Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, something unheard of at the time, and even made fun of the current craze for heroic war films. It heralded the beginning of the satire boom.

My first exposure to this came with
That Was The Week That Was,
broadcast on 24 November 1962. Quite by chance, I saw the first episode. It was broadcast late on Saturday evening and we had not long got in from the usual grandparents' run when we put the television on, and there it was. Immediately, it struck a chord with me and my newfound political interest. Of course, the programme itself caused a sensation and became the most talked-about programme on television.

Not long after that, I also discovered
Private Eye
at a time when it was mercilessly satirising the Government over the Profumo Affair. The affair concerned the sexual liaison between the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, and a nineteen-year-old call girl, Christine Keeler, who was simultaneously involved with a Soviet naval attache, thus creating a possible security risk. Profumo made a personal statement to the House of Commons denying any impropriety but was forced to admit he had lied to Parliament a few weeks later. The repercussions of all this severely damaged the Conservative Government and to a large extent finished off the work started with the Suez Crisis in completely destroying any last vestiges of the mystique of government and the idea that middle-and upper-class politicians knew best. It encouraged ordinary young working-class people to feel that they could and should get involved more and led to my friends and me getting deeper and deeper into politics. It wasn't just something reserved for Friday nights. We now took part in local activity, canvassing, leafleting and so on, as well as national events, going on demonstrations in London behind our Hackney Young Socialists banner.

The most exciting event I took part in was when the pre-War fascist leader Oswald Mosley tried to organise a meeting in a local market street, Ridley Road, in Dalston on 31 July 1962. With the increasing number of immigrants coming into Hackney, Mosley had decided the time was right for a comeback. We were determined to stop this happening, just as our parents had done at the famous Battle of Cable Street in 1936. And so we turned out in force, along with other local Labour Parties, the Communist Party, trade union branches
and so on. We easily outnumbered Mosley's supporters but they were well protected by the police.

Mosley planned to speak from the back of a lorry but, as soon as he appeared from between two police buses, we all surged forward and knocked him to the ground. The police helped him up and he climbed onto the lorry where he was met by a hail of missiles including rotten fruit, pennies and stones. His speech was drowned out by boos and a chorus of ‘Down with the Fascists!' There was a continuous chant of ‘BUM, BUM, BUM!' – these were the unfortunate (for him) initials of Mosley's party, the British Union Movement. Police were forced to close the meeting within three minutes and shepherd Mosley back to his car, whereupon we continued to punch and kick at the side of the vehicle as he drove off through a gangway cleared by mounted police. We were absolutely delighted with the result and the streets round Ridley Road were full of people, including us, dancing and singing Socialist songs and other chants for at least another hour.

Later that week, the local paper, the
Hackney Gazette,
published a photograph of Oswald Mosley on the ground with a demonstrator kicking him. As it happened, the demonstrator in question was one of our Hackney Y.S. members, Robin Jamieson, so the photo was cut out, framed and hung on the wall of the Labour Party office under the heading ‘Robin puts the boot in'. It remained there for several years.

This sort of politics was very exciting for a fifteen-year-old and much better and more rewarding than arguing interminably about what Trotsky might have said in 1917. Not so exciting was the time the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a head.
As a result of the Second World War, two new superpowers emerged, the USA and the Soviet Union. Between them, they more or less carved up the world into their own spheres of influence and there was a standoff between the two completely differing ideologies. This was the period known as the Cold War. In order to defend themselves from possible attack by the other, both superpowers built up large arsenals of nuclear weapons. In general, the USA's sphere of influence comprised the Americas and Western Europe, while the Soviet Union had Eastern Europe and large swathes of Asia. However, in 1959, a communist revolution took place in Cuba leading to Fidel Castro being proclaimed Prime Minister and the Soviet Union gaining its first foothold in the Americas. Cuba became the source of great tension between the superpowers and an attempt was made to invade the country by Cuban exiles backed by the USA to remove Castro. This was very badly handled and completely failed in its objective.

However, it was when US spy planes secured evidence on 14 October 1962 that the Soviet Union had placed nuclear missiles on Cuba, right on its doorstep, that all hell let loose. The US President, John F. Kennedy, announced that it would not allow this and demanded they be returned to the Soviet Union. In addition, he said the USA would mount a blockade of Cuba to prevent any Soviet ships from landing in Cuba. The Soviet President, Nikita Khrushchev, replied to this by saying that a US blockade of ‘navigation in international waters and air space' constituted ‘an act of aggression propelling human kind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war'.