Reminiscences of a young CND activist

Sorry I’ve been offline for so long. I’m back. For now, anyway.

Among other things I’ve been writing a little bit about what it was like for me being a teenager involved in left wing politics at the beginning of the 80’s. This is the first (and far the longest) of a series of reminiscences that were prompted by a casual conversation with one of my excellent graduate students. Feel free to ignore! I’ll also be posting them on a substack which, if you like, you can subscribe to (free, but god knows how you subscribe!).

Here goes:

We moved to Oxford in the wake of the 1979 general election. Dad had become Chief Education Officer in Oxfordshire a year earlier, but we’d waited to move till I finished my O’Levels and my sister finished primary school, to minimize disruption (because Oxford, itself, then still had a system of middle schools, my sister was more disrupted than I was, having to spend a year in a middle school before going to an ‘upper’ school.

I did the sixth form at Peers School, an inaptly named comprehensive which served two council estates (Blackbird Leys and Rose Hill; like Lord’s Cricket Ground it was named after a person, not a Peer or a Lord) plus some quite distant rural areas outside the city. The demographics were as you’d expect: mainly poor and working class kids, but with a smattering of middle class children like me who whose parents were left-ish, educated, professionals – teachers, vicars, nurses, etc, one or two academics, and the chief education officer (dad was shocked when he started in Oxfordshire just how many of his colleagues in the LEA leadership sent their kids private and I am sure he was not unduly diplomatic about it).

Peers was quite progressive – indeed, the Graunida had an article about how it had once been a school of the future when it was finally closed. It had a School Council, to which I was, I now realise rather surprisingly, elected by other 6th formers (maybe no-one else wanted to do it?). Mr. B, my rather posh Maoist [1] history teacher once told me that the School Council was supposed to be like a parliamentary democracy but that in practice it didn’t work that way, because it mainly endorsed what the head teacher wanted. This, I pointed out, was exactly how he thought a parliamentary democracy worked, so I couldn’t figure out what his complaint was. My role (again, I don’t quite understand how this happened) was to serve on the PTA, the main job of which seemed to be to organize dog shows to raise funds for the school, dog shows being the special enthusiasm of the couple who led the PTA, a policeman and his wife. I remember at the first meeting being kind of awestruck both by the whole scene and, especially, by a rather disheveled woman called Meg who turned up a late, clearly had no time either for the policeman or for dog shows, and yet equally clearly had more organizational sense than any of the other parents. (The dog show experts were manifestly annoyed by her, probably thinking that she was the kind of person who lived on Stratford Street, had probably been a member of the International Socialists who had left when Cliff took them in a Leninist direction, and drove a green 2CV with a “Nuclear Power: No Thanks” sticker on it. If they did think that, I’m pretty certain they were right on all counts; but they also accepted all her suggestions none of which, nearly 50 years later, I can remember).

A few days later I got a phone call at home from Meg.

She told me that Mr. Lewis (more on him in a minute) had given her my phone number because he thought I’d be interested in attending the next meeting of an organization she was in which was going to protest against nuclear weapons that were probably going to be deployed in Oxfordshire. It was next Tuesday at 7.30 at the East Oxford Community Centre, so I’d better figure out where that was and she’d meet me there.

Ok, a word about Mr. Lewis. He was the deputy head (vice-principal) and as such the liaison to the PTA. My dad rarely misjudged people but when, much later, I told him this story, he realized he had gotten Mr. Lewis quite wrong. I believe that Lewis had been head of Maths at the grammar school that merged with the secondary modern to form Peers comprehensive in 1968, and dad believed to be a conservative grammar school man. In fact he’d grown up in the valleys– a left-wing socialist who was naturally a doer and a diplomat and, actually, a fierce supporter of the comprehensive ideal – the fact that he didn’t leave should probably have been a clue. And someone who thought nothing of taking the risk of handing my home number to a left-wing activist whom he thought should try to recruit me. Much later, in the middle of A’ levels, Lewis sat me down in his office and talked to me about what it meant to pursue political ends, the many ways one does that, advising me to take a long view, and not to be unduly depressed by setbacks, of which he thought there would be many. He was right about that.

I arrived early on Tuesday at the East Oxford Community Center, a redbrick building which I would guess was from the 1930s and already, then, grungy and tired. The meeting was in a tiny room and, of course, when I found it, there were only a handful of people there. A very short fierce-looking woman around 40 with cropped hair and a small dog; a very good looking couple in their mid-twenties; two very earnest looking young men who turned out to be Oxford undergraduates (one of whom you can see at a subsequent demonstration reading the demand to a bemused RAF officer at Upper Heyford, here), and a short cheerful man with a slightly reddish beard and a brown corduroy jacket who broke the ice by asking me, after I had already sat on the floor, “Are you the masses? Meg told us that she was bringing the masses to this meeting, are you them?”. This was Mark Levene. It turned out that he, like Meg, was a PhD student in History, and they were connected (in ways that are now a little mysterious to me) to E.P. Thompson who was absolutely central to the rebirth of the anti-weapons movement, and will turn up again later. [Most of the people in this story I only remember, or only ever knew, their first names; others are ungoogleable anyway, and still others (eg, some of the IMGers I didn’t get along well with, the weirdest of whom was sharing a house with someone I gotten to know well since, at the time) I will render ungoogleable, but you can have Mark, Meg and a couple of others for free.]

I still, not infrequently, ask, in my head, whether some newcomer to some meeting I’m at is the masses. They never are.

Shortly after we’d established that I was not, in fact, the promised masses, Meg turned up, and the meeting started. An old comrade who cut his teeth in the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley told me, when Mario Savio died, that Savio was a great leader not because he was a great orator or because he was a great strategist, or even because he was good at managing people, but because everyone knew, intuitively and without doubt, that he was utterly sincere and utterly incorruptible. In it for the cause, never for himself. I’ve met a very few people like that, and I’m not sure whether it has been a blessing or a curse that the first political leader I ever knew, Meg, was one of them.[2] She brimmed with energy and confidence, seeming to lack self-doubt, but also lacking self-importance despite sort of seeming like the head girl. Everyone in the room deferred to her leadership willingly and admiringly.

The decision had already been made to hold a protest, starting at the Plain, and ending up at Oxpens, on March 15th, and the whole meeting was about logistics. Who who was going to get the posters made, and where, who would we ask to speak at the rally, what was Olive Gibbs’s role going to be (Olive Gibbs was a prominent local Labour politician who had been a central leader of CND in Oxford in the early 1960s which, to me, seemed like several lifetimes ago, but was, in fact, barely the other day); what were the leaflets going to say and who was going to hand them out on Saturdays in Cornmarket; who was going to liaise with the police; would we have our own placards (a very important question about which more in a subsequent story); how were we going to deal with the inevitable interest of the Trots?

This last question was from Georgina, the woman with the dog and the short haircut. I never really figured her out (well, the truth is there were a lot of them that I never really figured out – like Steve, the fiercely evangelical Christian undergraduate whose determination to have a placard saying “Ban Satan’s Bombs” I firmly defended in an argument within the informal leadership which, I guess, I was part of pretty quickly). In my head I remember her having recently moved from Surrey but I suspect that is something I made because she was (I think) Oxford’s only member of the New Communist Party. [3]
I’m an unusually law-abiding person (slightly ironic that I’m saying that on Justice for Janitors day, having been arrested and beaten up on the original Justice for Janitors day, video of which you can see here). But the one crime I have committed (not the one I have been convicted of, which I did not commit) was flyposting. In the evenings we’d go out in pairs with a bucket of wallpaper paste, reems of posters advertising the march (or whatever – I once did this with a set of day-glo/neon posters advertising a fundraising benefit for Campaign ATOM by the Thompson Twins [4]), and pasting them to walls of various descriptions in Cowley and East Oxford. We knew it wasn’t allowed, and once in a while some coppers would notice that we were doing it (maybe having been given a ring by a responsible citizen) and would give chase, absurdly, by car. Absurd, because East Oxford already had a quite odd one way system, has a number of alleyways, and I already knew where all the gaps were better than the coppers from the Cowley Road station. If they’d chased us by foot they’d have caught us every time.

Mark Levene was kind of amazing. He was clever, thoughtful, always cheerful, funny, irreverent, and dedicated. I dutifully turned up at Carfax the next Saturday morning at 10 am to find him with a massive pile of leaflets advertising our demonstration, which we had to hand out. I was very reserved with strangers (still am, basically) and my natural attitude toward anyone I am trying to sell something to is apologetic. Mark would approach shoppers with a huge grin on his face as if he was doing them a favour, put the leaflet in their hands and say “Here, have a leaflet!” with a lovely chuckle. I followed suit, mimicking him (not very well, I admit!). When people would stop to argue he was never the slightest bit rude, listening carefully and attentively, seeking the common ground, acknowledging their good points, countering the others – always cooperative, always friendly, as if he really cared about changing their hearts and minds and was willing to let them change his – which, I think, he was. He approached the whole operation not as if he was trying to get out the vote, but was trying to make the world a better place, by getting rid of nuclear weapons if he could, and by creating better political relationships whether he could get rid of nuclear weapons or not. I had no idea how lucky I was to be influenced, so early, by him and Meg. As far as I knew, they were completely normal!

I was so excited on the day of the demonstration. My job, at which I failed spectacularly, was to help some minor unpaid T&G official, who had no great interest in the cause, to find the march so that he could speak at rally. As it turned out he drove to the Plain, and didn’t want to walk as far as Oxpens. So I had to help him, in his car, find parking in Oxford, which for someone who was new to Oxford, 16 years old, who didn’t drive for another 16 years (and never in the UK) was not a good task. He was irritated by dealing with an earnest middle-class child (fair enough), and I was terrified of failing in my job (which I did); in the end, defeated by the town centre’s one-way system and lack of parking he just told me to get out and went home to watch Grandstand. I ran to the Plain in time to catch the tail end of the march leaving, and joined the thousand or so people ambling up the High Street and down St Aldates, replete with magnificent Trades Union banners, newspapers being hawked across the full spectrum of Trotskyist opinion (Socialist Challenge, Socialist Worker, Newsline, even Socialist Press and Militant were on sale that day), and lots of hippy-ish looking characters in their 30s and 40s.

At Oxpens were the speakers. My T&G official was awol, but the speakers included EP Thompson, Olive Gibbs, and the General Secretary of CND, Bruce Kent. More on him later, too. Altogether the whole thing felt magical. I’d never seen, let alone contributed to organizing, anything like it. I was sure that nuclear weapons would be abandoned by the UK within a couple of years.

What was the point of the demonstration? We believed there was the basis for a real large-membership, movement (a belief which was true as it turned out but for which I, at least, had no warrant at all). So we had hired the Friends Meeting House and gave every single marcher a leaflet advertising a meeting there the following week. Instead of`10-ish oddballs meeting in a closet at the EOCC, we wanted to be 70 or maybe 200 oddballs, making the case for nuclear disarmament throughout the city. And, indeed, about 70 new people turned up the following week at the Friends Meeting House meeting, to plan our next demonstration, a march from Oxford to Upper Heyford, the airbase where we (wrongly) expected the cruise missiles to be deployed (the East Anglian airbase where we expected them to be deployed was Lakenheath; in the end they were located at Greenham Common in Berkshire, and the marvelously-named RAF Molesworth in Cambridgeshire).

One thing I didn’t understand at the time was why we weren’t really part of CND in any formal sense. Everyone was aware of CND, and of course everyone used the CND symbol, but many organisations, including our own, did not call themselves CND, and only became branches sometime after they were established. We were the Campaign against the Oxfordshire Missiles, and I think the Lakenheath-oriented group was called East Anglia Against the Missiles.[5] European Nuclear Disarmament, a sort of loosely affiliated group of mainly academics that opposed nuclear weapons throughout Europe and had strong connections with Eastern European dissidents (so was very openly anti-Stalinist: it’s leaders included E.P. Thompson and Mary Kaldor, who may turn up again later if I tell you about my first real job, as her live-in nanny!) provided a lot of momentum for us. CND, as I’ll observe in another post, was not driving the movement, but was desperately trying to keep up with it, at least at this early stage.

What happens when a small tight group suddenly grows? A rapid turnover of personnel. About 10 people with particular experiences had organized the March demonstration and the subsequent meeting; but suddenly there was a flood of people, many of whom had a lot more experience, and with more diverse contacts across the city. Rip Bulkeley, sometimes of the SWP, but with an extreme independent streak (he basically did whatever he wanted, and they either tolerated him or expelled him depending on the prevailing mood of the leadership) came on board, as did a guy called Dave Wainwright who I think had recently graduated from Oxford, and was energetic and dynamic. Chris and Lorraine, a couple who had sort of adopted me as a mascot, increasingly took a back seat, as did Georgina of the NCP. The IMG sent some comrades into the mix, including a bloke who worked at Oxford Poly who, everyone complained, never washed, and who was utterly and, I’m sorry to say, unwarrantedly, full of himself (google shows that he’s still active for the cause) and a chess-playing genius who seems latterly to have taken to running for parliament: in 2019 for Labour under Corbyn, and in 2024 for George Galloway’s latest outfit. But two of the original people remained at the helm – Mark Levene, and our leader Meg.

Obviously, when you’re involved with something like this, and you’re essentially still a child, you’re learning at an incredible pace, but you also miss a lot. I’m sure there were all sorts of rivalries I had no idea about, and probably also sexual tensions I would have been completely oblivious to. But one thing that I did notice, and that has probably affected me quite a lot, was the attitudes that Mark and Rip (and others, but they were the striking ones) took toward Meg. Mark evidently knew Meg as a fellow graduate student: he was the more committed to academia (he recently retired from the University of Southampton), and despite the slightly mocking comment with which he greeted me at the first meeting, he seemed to recognize right from the start that she had extraordinary abilities, and was completely loyal to her. Rip came into the campaign later: he was a physically big man with a deep strong voice, enormous self-confidence, and someone who, if I’d had more experience of the world, I might have misjudged as a potential disrupter. It seemed to me, though, that in that first post-March March meeting he immediately understood what Mark already knew: that if the group was going to work, she had to be its leader, and that his efforts should be devoted to ensuring that her leadership went smoothly. I had a probably unusual-at-the-time experience of learning politics in a movement led by a woman whose authority very able men accepted without hesitation.

[1] Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), the group which Alexei Sayle joined in a failed attempt to escape his mother, who just went ahead and joined too. I attended a branch meeting once – the fact that my teacher felt ok inviting me to a branch meeting of his Maoist organization despite my dad being the Chief Education Officer, and very soon after invited me, my dad and my mum to a Christmas drinks do (which we attended), says something about something, but I am not sure exactly what. The meeting was addressed by Reg Birch who was, probably quite deservedly, revered by the comrades. But it was all a bit odd.

[2] The second, Bruce Kent or, as Meg always called him, “Brucey”, was the same. He once, during a very stressful period, exhibited the very slightest — almost imperceptible — moment of shortness with me; and the next day sought me out to apologize without offering any excuse at all. He did not need to do that.

[3] The NCP (which shared its initials with National Car Parks, something I still find bemusing) was ultra-Stalinist party which had been formed a few years earlier by former members of a (or perhaps the) Surrey branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. (In case you care: at the time the Communist Party of Great Britain was divided between two main factions, one of which was broadly speaking Eurocommunist, and controlled the genuinely interesting and influential-on-the-left weekly magazine, Marxism Today, and the the other of which was utterly pro-Soviet and controlled the, we now know USSR-subsidized, daily newspaper the Morning Star. The New Communist Party found the tankie side of the CPGB divide insufficiently Stalinist, but was not Maoist. The Trots who became involved in Campaign ATOM were, in fact, mainly from the International Marxist Group, with a couple of SWPers, although I doubt either group was what she had in mind. My guess is that the problem group for her, as for most of the Stalinists I knew in Oxford, was the Workers Socialist League (a small, mainly working-class, organization with a peculiarly large presence in Oxford) which in fact never seemed very interested in the peace movement. Militant was buried sufficiently deeply inside the Labour Party that it, too, was uninterested, and actually denigrated CND. Anyway, more on various kinds of Trots another time.

[4] It’s a regrettable, almost tragic, fact about the world that the Thompson Twins were not named after E.P. Thompson and his late brother Frank (they weren’t twins of course), but the fact that they were named after Thompson and Thompson (who also weren’t twins!) is something to salvage.

[5] There was definitely a small amount of rivalry between us and initial distrust which was allayed by Meg determinedly meeting their leaders as soon as possible. We trivially achieved the aim set out in our name when the location of the missiles was announced, and someone who wasn’t me did, wryly, point this out. If only they’d called themselves the Campaign Against the Suffolk Missiles they, too, could have enjoyed an early victory.