Hot Politics 1967

 

Ye Olde Blue Bell, Hull

The girls in our Hull sixth form were thrilled when some of us went to London to a National Sixth Form conference in Westminster Hall.  This was in 1967 and I don’t remember much about the actual conference.  What I do remember is the bunch of students, distributing political leaflets outside the main entrance. 

I got chatting to them and, as I was a dedicated Bob Dylan fan, the message of peace and social justice in the world was just down my street.  They invited me to a Young Communist meeting that night in a pub in Paddington. Well, I couldn’t persuade any of the others so I went by myself, somehow finding my way to this pub and to the meeting.  I was so excited as a 17 year old Yorkshire girl who hadn’t travelled much to be sitting in a London pub surrounded by really cool people.  When I left they gave me the name of a pub in Hull and the name of a person to ask for in order to continue my political education.

Ye Olde Blue Bell in Hull old town was (and still is) down an alley near the Market Place.  I think, even now, it was the best pub I’ve ever known.  It had a big, genial landlord, Charlie, and the customers were a brilliant bunch of bohemians, eccentrics, oddballs and political types.  In the room upstairs the Hull folk group The Watersons ran a weekly folk club that attracted wonderful musicians.  It was perfect and I threw myself into the Young Communist League with gusto.  These Vietnam War protesters and and battlers for a perfect world seemed to me to have more in common with Bob Dylan and Jack Kerouac than did the wet boys I knew in the suburbs.

YCL stall with Barry, our leader, publicising his
Bike Ride for Vietnam

It wasn’t long before I was helping out on the  YCL market stall, giving out leaflets and selling badges and Che Guevara posters.  We also sold a variety of books by obscure and revered thinkers which I’m certain that no-one read, just bought to carry about.  

We sold the communist paper ‘Challenge’ in the street in the daytime and outside pubs in the evening.  It often didn’t go down too well with landlords, or their clientele after they’d had a few pints and we would occasionally have to run away fast.

During my A Levels, as a diversion for my mates and I in class, I had recorded things we got up to in a series of cartoons.  Ye Olde Blue Bell opened up a whole new vista for this, enabling me to chart a sort of  'Pam's Progress'.  They're very rough and 'of their time' but I've included a couple here.

Fleeing from an Angry Landlord

Those were the days when left wing activists were solidly working class. As a middle class private school girl I was a distinct minority group. I sometimes managed to persuade a friend along but they never seemed that keen on the politics. However, although I was the butt of plenty of jokes, the fact that I could borrow my father’s car meant that we could expand the range of our Challenge sales.  

I was appointed Chief Challenge Organiser.  Looking back over years of varied volunteer work I realise that anyone who joins an organisation and is willing to take any responsibility will soon be weighed down with onerous tasks.  At that point I was just very proud!

My letter appointing me
Challenge organiser

I repaid my father’s generosity with his car by calling him ‘bourgeois’ and trying to explain that he, a chartered accountant, needed to have more understanding of the redistribution of wealth.  This would be taking place very shortly so he’d better get used to the idea.  He must have been impressed with my arguments as he became a Conservative Parish Councillor.

After an intense few months with the YCL things started to pall.  Everyone was so earnest and the meetings rather long and dreary.  I kept getting frowned on for having a jolly time at the bar with friends and being late to drag my feet upstairs for the next interminable session with the ‘comrades’.  Also my parents wouldn’t let me go to the big Anti Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square which made me a bit embarrassed. It was time to take a paddle on the wilder shores of political debate. 

I had taken up with a bloke from the SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain), doubling the number of Hull members.  This was very convenient as he held his meetings with the CND, Peace Pledge Union and the Anarchist group, there being so few of each.  It wasn’t like the YCL with its boring minutes and agenda.  Everyone just sat round talking total bollocks. 

'Everyone sat round talking total bollocks.'

I remember we all had to read R.D.Laing’s  ‘Politics of Experience’ which seemed to say, according to Tommy the Commie, that sane people were mad and mad people were sane.  This provoked roughly the same discussion week after week as the Blue Bell contained some fine test cases.  Another of our favourites was Anarchist Pete’s version of Existentialism.  The principal was that things were only there because you believed they were.  You could walk through the snug wall if you didn’t believe it was there.  My goodness, that one took us in circles, but not through the snug wall. 

I was quite warming to Anarchist Pete to be honest so, when he said he was going on holiday and asked me to look after his cat, I was keen to help.  I took the cat home, not to the delight of my mother, and tried to make it as happy as possible for the next couple of days.  Then, disaster – it escaped and never came back.  As it turned out, neither did Anarchist Pete so it wasn’t too much of a problem.

 Eventually my bohemian aspirations took a step up as I became a student at Manchester Art College and it wasn’t long before I started to dabble in the Student Union.  I was part of a delegation to the NUS Conference when Jack Straw (left) was the president.  He had the most amazing capacity to keep a hall full of bickering and arguing students in some sort of positive direction. 

In general it wasn’t any fun though.  You daren’t really take part in discussion in case you said the wrong thing and everything was dominated by people shouting ‘Point of order’ and objecting to every item on the agenda.  Everyone had to vote for what they were told.  The genuine enthusiasm, love of politics, care about the welfare of others and camaraderie that I’d enjoyed so much in the Blue Bell was nowhere to be found and, to be honest, at this point I had other fish to fry.

So that was the end of my youthful political activism.  I still love politics but I'm a Centrist Gran now.