On the face of it I was the most unlikely bod to engage ‘politically’, or better, to seem to engage politically. And I must confess that my motive was ‘fun’ and my tongue was firmly in my cheek.
It was in about 1969 or 1970, and I was about 20 or 21 and knew little about politics and understood less and was even less interested. As a Roman Catholic-born – cradle-Catholic – product of the English public school system – ‘public’ as in ‘private’ in that wacky way we Brits like to confuse the world – I was expected to, or better it was assumed I would, cleave to soft-centred small C conservatism.
I didn’t, however (and as I’ve ‘grown up’ and seen a little more of the world, I find, despite what is expected of ageing gents, to be drifting to the left, though to social democracy not to all out communist fascism).
For some reason, as the child of a German mother and British father who attended German schools for four of his formative years and was in many ways more German than British, I didn’t feel particularly British when we returned to live in Britain from West Berlin in July 1963 and the whole ‘public schoolboy’ schtick just didn’t catch with me.
For three of the previous four years I had attended Das Canisius Kolleg, a Jesuit college in Berlin-Tiergarten (just over a mile through the park to the Brandenburger Tor) whose ethos was one of positivity and ‘doing your best’.
Then in September of 1963, I began life as a boarder at the Roman Catholic Oratory School in Woodcote, Oxfordshire, where it seemed to me the ethos – that is the true ethos of the boys who made up the school rather than the ‘official’ ethos the school might have thought it was inculcating – was almost nihilistic.
I must stress, though, my line about ‘it seemed to me’, as now, in later life, I am far more aware how perception is far more potent than what what might, ludicrously, be called ‘the reality’. I am not denying ‘reality’, as such I am suggesting that there is no one ‘reality’ but pretty much as many ‘realities’ as there are men, women and children on this world.
So to speak of ‘reality’ is in one sense a little pointless.
I had been looking forward to ‘going to boarding school’ because after spending my boyhood reading Billy Bunter (below) books, I anticipated it to be an enjoyable romp of jolly japes, but it was anything but. Of my year’s intake
49 boys, 47 had attended a ‘prep school’ for at least four or five years and, to be blunt, they had already developed the shell which protects our inner selves from the world. I had not and I was miserable and homesick for what seemed like and extraordinarily long first term of fifteen weeks.
I now know that many boys and girls, men and women have a sense of alienation in one way or another. Perhaps, depending upon the situation and circumstances, such alienation is quite common.
But for me it was partly ‘not feeling English or British’ and not relating to a great deal of what the others seemed – that word again – to have in common. I hadn’t had The Wind In The Willows read to me, I had never played ‘pooh sticks’. Much, perhaps all, of my childhood had been German what with even before moving to Berlin my mother read stories to me in German.
So although when I arrived at Dundee University at the beginning of October 1968, with an impeccable ‘boarding school’ accent and no doubt many ‘public school’ behavioural tics, I did not quite fit the bill, especially in the political role into which folk were ready to give me.
Until just a year earlier, Dundee University had existed as Queen’s College, St Andrews, but then gained its independent status as part of the then Labour government’s determined expansion of university education.
This expansion meant – in fact, to achieve this was its prime reason – that the intake of colleges and universities was from a far broader social spectrum, notably of young men and women who not ten to fifteen years earlier might never have considered attending university.
Anno domini 2025, modern Britain, rather smugly, likes to see itself – perception and ‘reality’ again, you’ll notice – as classless; but as far as I am concerned, the only difference is that more than 60 years ago ‘class’ distinctions were simply more obvious (and let’s face it snobbery will never go out of fashion).
Pertinently, the 1960s – the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and always remember that these silly, though catchy, descriptions are all invented by national newspaper sub-editors (US copy editors) – became an apparent sea-change in social attitudes, though it didn’t really take off until the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the 1964 general election.
In fact, there had previously been several such broad, though slow, changes from the mid-1950s on. I suggest they occurred as boys and girls – though it was still very much a male-dominated society – born just before World War II came into their own, found their voice and made themselves heard.
In other words, it was the same old story of a new generation demanding that the previous generation made way!
‘Deference’ went out of the window, it was the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it was reported that ‘the working class has found a voice’ and novels, plays and films became ‘gritty’ observations of ‘how the other half lived’. That, not uncommon phrase then used, is very, very telling.
One such change was that the new young generation – who I suspect were not quite doing any more shagging then in earlier years but were certainly talking more about – also found their voice, especially those on the left.
This was 1968, the age of ‘student politics’, though if any of that gang had more than a fleeting knowledge of history, they would have known that ‘student politics’ were as old as the hills, as old as greed, altruism, incest and gullibility.
Britain’s young might, with Labour in charge, believe it had it’s ‘left-wing’ government, decried by those on the right as ‘socialists’ (which description was enough to frighten the horses in many a shire parlour), but it was not very left-wing at all and certainly not at all left-wing enough for many of the protesting firebrands.
It wasn’t that many of Labours MPs were more than nominally middle-class, many were not actually socialist but social-democrats who broadly aimed to achieve the same improvements for those at the bottom of the pile. They certainly did not sign up for the hard ideology of ‘all means of production must be nationalised and in the hands of the working man’.
That phrase gives me occasion to trot out an old joke of mine when politicians pledge to take care of the ‘hard-working’ man: ‘So what about the rest of us?
This, then politically naive, young man was well aware of the iniquity of America’s Vietnam war but couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.
Then there were the protests about the apartheid regime in South Africa and how that nation’s, then all white, cricket team should not be allowed to come take part in a Test series in Britain. The various protests even involved
digging up a cricket pitch and grounds being defended by strands of barbed wire. But, I wondered, why couldn’t they just sit down and sort it all out. Surely to goodness, was it really that hard?
The ‘protest’ I organised was against Tony Benn, then still Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who at the time was Labour’s – if my googling is correct – minister for technology, but despite his slow drift leftwards from a ‘soft-left’ stance, he was something of a hate figure for the hard left.
For the non-lefty young he was also disliked because previously as Labour’s ‘postmaster general’ he had begun the government process of outlawing the ‘pirate radio stations’ swimming in the English channel, though by the time
the relevant bill outlawing the stations became law, he had just been promoted to technology minister.
In my book Tony Benn (right) is something of a good egg. He was born and brought up in a ‘progressive’ household (in brackets because I don’t much like the word, but I use it because most will know what I mean).
Both his grandfather and his father were Liberal MPs, but his father crossed the floor and joined the Labour government of Ramsay McDonald in 1928 (when Tony Benn was just three).
When Tony Benn was seventeen, his father was created Viscount Stansgate and when he died in 1960, Tony inherited the title, although he had previously several times, unsuccessfully, tried to renounce his succession and as a peer could not longer sit in the Commons
Finally, in 1963 because it, too, had useful MPs who were due to inherit titles and would thus have to leave the Commons, the Conservative government passed an act allowing peers to renounce their titles. Benn did so and won a seat in a by-election the same year and remained a sitting MP for the next 38 years.
Benn’s drift to the left and to becoming something of a saint of the left began after Labour lost power to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, although he claimed it had started more than a decade earlier when he was in Wilson’s 1960s governments, partly with his impatience by how the civil service was frustrating many attempts at reform.
When I organised my ‘protest’, Benn was still regarded as just another Labour minister, and few if any thought of him as the figure of the left he would become.
My ‘protest’ began in the students’ union coffee bar on the morning when Benn was duet to give a speech in the, then still new, lecture hall of Dundee’s social science building. And I have no idea why I thought of ‘organising’.
But for some reason I suggested to those I was sitting with that we should go to the meeting and disrupt it. It was certainly not a political gesture on my part.
As I say, Benn was not a figure of the left and on the face of it, this seemed to many a good idea, so a gaggle of us, I should think about six or eight of us, possibly more, took ourselves off to the social science lecture hall and sat up far at the back.
We began, again I should imagine at my instigation, to chant ‘give peace a chance’ and bang our fists in the desks in front of us. And that, dear friends, is all I remember of the ‘protest’ itself.
Whether Benn was forced to abandon his speech, whether we finally gave up and departed and left him to it I have no idea and no recollections at all. As I say as far as I was concerned it was simply a hoot and while it went on it was certainly good-natured.
When we left, we retired to the coffee bar and sat down, talk began of staging another protest, although there was no obvious reason to do so or cause to protest. And it was then I noticed something odd and, for me, quite disturbing.
The small, good-natured group who had returned to the coffee bar had been joined by several others who had somehow heard all about it and before my eyes in a matter of minutes that small good-natured group was evolving into a small mob. It was uncanny and I was not imagining it.
As we can walk into a room and sense joy or sorrow or whatever is the mood of the room. Well, the mood of the group I as sitting with definitely changed and not for the better: it turned dark and nasty.
It was no longer a case of ‘what fun can we have doing something similar’ but more, far more, what ‘damage’ can we do now? And there was a very definite desire to cause ‘damage’ of some kind.
I had inadvertently and innocently created a mindless mob. Or better, the mob had created itself, drawing on the darker elements which, to a small or greater extent, are a part of our psyche.
It was at that point I wanted nothing more to do with whatever they were hoping to do and I never heard reports later that they had done anything. But I could not deny that I had witnessed something which I did not like at all but for which is was, though indirectly, responsible.
I am not suggesting that I don’t, in one way or another, also have a darker side and I could give several examples – but shan’t – of my behaviour of which I am not proud and would condemn. But there and then in the coffee bar, I wanted nothing to do with the small mob I had created.
It did, though, give me an insight as to how, on both the left and right violence can become almost natural, evolve from nowhere and almost seem legitimate. Very odd.
I now know that many boys and girls, men and women have a sense of alienation in one way or another. Perhaps, depending upon the situation and circumstances, such alienation is quite common.
But for me it was partly ‘not feeling English or British’ and not relating to a great deal of what the others seemed – that word again – to have in common. I hadn’t had The Wind In The Willows read to me, I had never played ‘pooh sticks’. Much, perhaps all, of my childhood had been German what with even before moving to Berlin my mother read stories to me in German.
So although when I arrived at Dundee University at the beginning of October 1968, with an impeccable ‘boarding school’ accent and no doubt many ‘public school’ behavioural tics, I did not quite fit the bill, especially in the political role into which folk were ready to give me.
. . .
This expansion meant – in fact, to achieve this was its prime reason – that the intake of colleges and universities was from a far broader social spectrum, notably of young men and women who not ten to fifteen years earlier might never have considered attending university.
Anno domini 2025, modern Britain, rather smugly, likes to see itself – perception and ‘reality’ again, you’ll notice – as classless; but as far as I am concerned, the only difference is that more than 60 years ago ‘class’ distinctions were simply more obvious (and let’s face it snobbery will never go out of fashion).
Pertinently, the 1960s – the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and always remember that these silly, though catchy, descriptions are all invented by national newspaper sub-editors (US copy editors) – became an apparent sea-change in social attitudes, though it didn’t really take off until the Labour Party under Harold Wilson won the 1964 general election.
In fact, there had previously been several such broad, though slow, changes from the mid-1950s on. I suggest they occurred as boys and girls – though it was still very much a male-dominated society – born just before World War II came into their own, found their voice and made themselves heard.
In other words, it was the same old story of a new generation demanding that the previous generation made way!
‘Deference’ went out of the window, it was the heyday of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it was reported that ‘the working class has found a voice’ and novels, plays and films became ‘gritty’ observations of ‘how the other half lived’. That, not uncommon phrase then used, is very, very telling.
One such change was that the new young generation – who I suspect were not quite doing any more shagging then in earlier years but were certainly talking more about – also found their voice, especially those on the left.
This was 1968, the age of ‘student politics’, though if any of that gang had more than a fleeting knowledge of history, they would have known that ‘student politics’ were as old as the hills, as old as greed, altruism, incest and gullibility.
Britain’s young might, with Labour in charge, believe it had it’s ‘left-wing’ government, decried by those on the right as ‘socialists’ (which description was enough to frighten the horses in many a shire parlour), but it was not very left-wing at all and certainly not at all left-wing enough for many of the protesting firebrands.
It wasn’t that many of Labours MPs were more than nominally middle-class, many were not actually socialist but social-democrats who broadly aimed to achieve the same improvements for those at the bottom of the pile. They certainly did not sign up for the hard ideology of ‘all means of production must be nationalised and in the hands of the working man’.
That phrase gives me occasion to trot out an old joke of mine when politicians pledge to take care of the ‘hard-working’ man: ‘So what about the rest of us?
This, then politically naive, young man was well aware of the iniquity of America’s Vietnam war but couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about.
Then there were the protests about the apartheid regime in South Africa and how that nation’s, then all white, cricket team should not be allowed to come take part in a Test series in Britain. The various protests even involved
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. . .
The ‘protest’ I organised was against Tony Benn, then still Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who at the time was Labour’s – if my googling is correct – minister for technology, but despite his slow drift leftwards from a ‘soft-left’ stance, he was something of a hate figure for the hard left.
For the non-lefty young he was also disliked because previously as Labour’s ‘postmaster general’ he had begun the government process of outlawing the ‘pirate radio stations’ swimming in the English channel, though by the time
In my book Tony Benn (right) is something of a good egg. He was born and brought up in a ‘progressive’ household (in brackets because I don’t much like the word, but I use it because most will know what I mean).
Both his grandfather and his father were Liberal MPs, but his father crossed the floor and joined the Labour government of Ramsay McDonald in 1928 (when Tony Benn was just three).
When Tony Benn was seventeen, his father was created Viscount Stansgate and when he died in 1960, Tony inherited the title, although he had previously several times, unsuccessfully, tried to renounce his succession and as a peer could not longer sit in the Commons
Finally, in 1963 because it, too, had useful MPs who were due to inherit titles and would thus have to leave the Commons, the Conservative government passed an act allowing peers to renounce their titles. Benn did so and won a seat in a by-election the same year and remained a sitting MP for the next 38 years.
Benn’s drift to the left and to becoming something of a saint of the left began after Labour lost power to Margaret Thatcher in 1979, although he claimed it had started more than a decade earlier when he was in Wilson’s 1960s governments, partly with his impatience by how the civil service was frustrating many attempts at reform.
When I organised my ‘protest’, Benn was still regarded as just another Labour minister, and few if any thought of him as the figure of the left he would become.
. . .
But for some reason I suggested to those I was sitting with that we should go to the meeting and disrupt it. It was certainly not a political gesture on my part.
As I say, Benn was not a figure of the left and on the face of it, this seemed to many a good idea, so a gaggle of us, I should think about six or eight of us, possibly more, took ourselves off to the social science lecture hall and sat up far at the back.
We began, again I should imagine at my instigation, to chant ‘give peace a chance’ and bang our fists in the desks in front of us. And that, dear friends, is all I remember of the ‘protest’ itself.
Whether Benn was forced to abandon his speech, whether we finally gave up and departed and left him to it I have no idea and no recollections at all. As I say as far as I was concerned it was simply a hoot and while it went on it was certainly good-natured.
When we left, we retired to the coffee bar and sat down, talk began of staging another protest, although there was no obvious reason to do so or cause to protest. And it was then I noticed something odd and, for me, quite disturbing.
The small, good-natured group who had returned to the coffee bar had been joined by several others who had somehow heard all about it and before my eyes in a matter of minutes that small good-natured group was evolving into a small mob. It was uncanny and I was not imagining it.
As we can walk into a room and sense joy or sorrow or whatever is the mood of the room. Well, the mood of the group I as sitting with definitely changed and not for the better: it turned dark and nasty.
It was no longer a case of ‘what fun can we have doing something similar’ but more, far more, what ‘damage’ can we do now? And there was a very definite desire to cause ‘damage’ of some kind.
I had inadvertently and innocently created a mindless mob. Or better, the mob had created itself, drawing on the darker elements which, to a small or greater extent, are a part of our psyche.
It was at that point I wanted nothing more to do with whatever they were hoping to do and I never heard reports later that they had done anything. But I could not deny that I had witnessed something which I did not like at all but for which is was, though indirectly, responsible.
I am not suggesting that I don’t, in one way or another, also have a darker side and I could give several examples – but shan’t – of my behaviour of which I am not proud and would condemn. But there and then in the coffee bar, I wanted nothing to do with the small mob I had created.
It did, though, give me an insight as to how, on both the left and right violence can become almost natural, evolve from nowhere and almost seem legitimate. Very odd.
