Youth CND

Here’s another of my posts about being a peace activist in the UK in the early eighties. This one is mainly about my time in secondary school. When I linked to the substack version from Facebook a couple of people recognized some of the people involved, but they’re pretty well disguised unless you were there. (Something I enjoyed about writing this one is that the characters were in both my life and CB’s life at the time, something we only discovered when we met properly 25 years ago this coming Saturday). Here’s the substack link in case you’d prefer to read it there.

There had to be a Youth CND, both national, and local. I’m not really sure why, to be honest. Every political organization I knew had a youth wing – the Labour Party Young Socialists (boring, controlled by Militant Tendency), the Young Liberals (which contained anarchists, socialists, and the odd liberal), the Young Conservatives (I once debated some Young Conservatives on behalf of the Young Liberals, despite not being one, at the Oxford city conservative club which was opposite my dad’s office – they just seemed so incredibly posh, it was as if they wanted to be caricatures), Revolution Youth (the IMG’s outfit – more about them in a moment). Youth organisations in the Labour Party have mostly ended unhappily, because they were easy to infiltrate and the Party wanted more control than it could reasonably exercise. Youth CND was vulnerable in the same way: much easier for a small coordinated group to dominate than the adult version, not least because there weren’t many young members of the CPGB to resist them, and what young communists there were seemed not, at least then, to be active in CND, but potentially quite damaging to the brand. Some Youth CND activists were well into their twenties. Indeed, this was our problem in Oxford really. I was the organizer of Youth CND in Oxford at the start, which was fair enough because I was the only schoolkid in Campaign ATOM. It attracted several (working class) kids from my school (through me), several (working class) boys from Oxford Boys School (led by a chap called Alex whose parents were both immigrants, and was as good-looking as he was smart, and subsequently became my flatmate for a year in college – somebody I very much regret losing touch with, actually), a few from Cheney school led by a girl called J whose mum, an East Oxford lefty, once took us to a Leon Rosselson concert. And there was a whole group of people in Revolution Youth, or “Revo” as they liked to call themselves, some of whom seemed old enough to be our parents, and several of whom were definitely old enough to be our teachers. It was uneasy to say the least, and my first experience of factionalism. We’d meet at the bedsit of two of the older Revo people, between the Iffley and Cowley Roads, and they, who I have to say struck me as quite dull-witted, would condescend to us with their catch-phrase “Basically, right…[and then whatever the line was that they were telling us, and which was not open for discussion]”, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that, sure, we weren’t the masses, but we were a group of smart kids from state schools quite aware that more of them had gone to or were at private schools than not. They were irritating and off-putting to anyone new who turned up and wasn’t already absolutely committed.

We once held a rather good full-day teach-in event at the Old Fire Station in Oxford, which my schoolmates and the Oxford Boys (as I thought of them [1]) had done a lot of work on, and at the end of it, a group of Revo people from around the country got me in a room and threatened me with some unspecified outcome if I didn’t stop doing some also barely specified thing (which was probably exclusionary of them). I was a little rattled, but also aware that a couple of people in the SWP (who were sort of friends), and the most terrifying boy in my school (who was an actual friend; his parents were old communists who disallowed him from reading The Beano and The Dandy because, according to him, they said that DC Thompson was a non-union shop [2]) would have low tolerance for anyone actually trying to harm me. At the next gathering of the national youth CND leadership, one of the Revo crowd (who eventually did a PhD in astronomy at Imperial I think, and was professionally connected to Piers Corbyn, and whom I rather liked) apologized to me on the grounds that they had discussed whether to intimidate me by threatening violence, decided against, so the incident was a breach of discipline.

A couple of weeks later, on my way to weekend national Youth CND conference in Birmingham, I had the misfortune of sharing the carriage with the strangest and most frightening of the Revo crowd, a man whose name I won’t reveal who seemed to be about 30 but was, I now know, around 21. I now know what his age was because he was the housemate of someone I’ve subsequently become close friends with so I’ve latterly learned quite a bit about him. He was weird enough that you always wondered whether he was about to either attack you or cast a spell that might lead to your untimely death. If I’d know then, as I do now, that he collected milk cartons obsessively, it probably wouldn’t have made me feel any safer. When we got off the train he disappeared to a caucus meeting at the IMG’s bookshop in Digbeth, returning to make push whatever line it was that they wanted national Youth CND to take.

Oh, and what about the most terrifying boy in my school?: I won’t use his real name for obvious reasons, so I’ll just call him Dave. Dave was greatly feared for his undeniably erratic behaviour and his regular possession of a knife on his person, rather than for any particular ill-will he exhibited toward anyone. I’m not even sure that he ever actually used the knife. One day, I think shortly after I’d left school, the National Front decided to hold a march in Oxford, triggering a large Anti-Nazi League demonstration against them. At some point the whole event descended into a kind of free for all, with the NF scattering, being chased around the Westgate (much, much less posh then than it is now) by various of the counter-demonstrators; the police diligently, and without enthusiasm, arrested a handful from each group. Once the NF-ers had disappeared we, the anti-Nazis, convened outside the police station in St. Aldates, calling for the release of our comrades by chanting “Let them out”, and other imaginative slogans. It was pretty cordial for a while, but the tension mounted, and eventually Dave threw a brick through a window. If you’ve been in similar situations you’ll know that the ensuing silence was electric, with the quite young cops all suddenly looking angry and afraid. I’m not sure whether anyone else saw who threw the brick (he was my mate and I was right next to him), but none of cops did, because they didn’t make any move to get him, and they would have if they’d known. To break the tension I decided to shout, into the silence, “Let us in!”, at which three of the cops –and almost all of our people – burst out laughing. After that Peter Moss, a local councilor, was invited into the station to negotiate the release of our comrades.

Another kid from my school, a couple of years below me, let’s also not use his real name but call him Bob, was also enjoying himself that day. I never knew Bob very well, but his dad, Simon, was a hairdresser, another Communist, who was part of the Vidal Sassoon millieu, and had been a member, in his extreme youth, of the 43 Group. Simon was, for many years, my dad’s next door neighbour. Dad and Simon died on the same day, unaware, I now realise, that Bob and I had once ran around trying to attack Nazis together.

[1] Oxford Boys had a head, Dick Proctor, whom my dad admired a great deal, and of whom he once said “you know how you and I are about county cricket? We keep up with all the scores, follow and know the history of all the counties, we know who the up-and-comers are, and are as interested in the 20’s and 50’s as much as the present day? Compared with him we’re rank amateurs”. When dad was Chief Education Officer the Express asked him to allow a young journalist to spend a week in a comprehensive school and, knowing she planned to do a hit job, he sent her to Oxford Boys, on the grounds that as a single sex former grammar school with Proctor as head it would be more difficult for her to skewer than other schools (like my own). She did the hit job anyway, and has been very successful since (For a long time she was a regular presenter of The Week in Westminster, the only one of whom I had formed a seriously bad impression, and that was before hearing dad’s story).

[2] I’ve had other communist friends who were denied the joys of The Beano and The Dandy on the more plausible grounds that reading them would encourage anarchistic heterodoxy