When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies

by Andy Beckett

  The lobby was warm and dim. There were TGWU pens and polo shirts for sale. A muzak version of ‘Yesterday’ was playing, and there was the faint chink of coffee cups. A few men with lived-in faces sat contentedly in deep armchairs. Everything looked faintly institutional but spotless. Then the manager appeared, grey-suited, young-looking but twenty-two years in the job, and showed me into his office.

  ‘This was Jack Jones’s brainchild,’ he began, sitting down at a pristine modular seventies table and offering me tea or coffee, his manner somewhere between a vicar and an estate agent. ‘It was his baby … One hundred and thirty bedrooms. Designed by the union’s architects. No outside paintwork for ease of maintenance. Built by British workers with British materials. The slates are Welsh, the tiles are from Stoke-on-Trent. It was built to a very high standard for the time. The carpets lasted for twenty-five years. Every room was en suite – in the seventies, it was unheard of. Fitted radios in the headboards. We had a projector in our conference room …’ He beamed. ‘Unheard of!’

  Room rates were low – between £6 and £6.50 a night for full board in the beginning, depending on the season – and subsidized by the union. Many guests did not have to pay at all. Some were convalescing: any TGWU member off sick from work for more than two weeks was entitled to a free fortnight at Eastbourne for them and a partner, with food and travel also paid by the union. Other guests came to the centre for TGWU conferences and seminars. ‘Shop stewards will be able to benefit from educational services,’ as Jones put it in a speech at the opening ceremony in September 1976 which cleverly blurred the political, the personal and the pleasurable, ‘while their families benefit from a holiday.’ Showing his unusually clear-sighted understanding, for a union leader, of the relationship between unions and everyday life in the seventies, he went on: ‘Many wives who have criticized their husbands for spending too much time in trade union activity will see the Union in a new light when they enjoy a holiday here – and vice versa … because these days it is often the women who are the strongest advocates of trade union rights. The shop steward wife will be able to explain “all about it” to her husband and children very convincingly in these surroundings.’

  Jones envisaged TGWU activists being schooled at Eastbourne in negotiating techniques, in how companies worked, and in the whole widening social, economic and political role he envisaged for unions. He envisaged foreign trade unionists coming to stay to ‘exchange ideas’ and aid ‘international understanding’. At times, as the noon sun shone on the crowd of middle-aged TGWU officials gathered for the opening ceremony, his rhetoric turned panoramic and idealistic. ‘This building’, he said, ‘epitomises our hopes and our dreams … the forward march of the people towards a richer and fuller life … the increasing demands for shorter working hours and earlier retirement … the maximum participation of all our members not only in union policy … but also in decisions which determine their standard of living and conditions of employment.’ He concluded: ‘This centre charts a new path for trade unionism. It is an encouragement to abandon pessimism and gloom.’

  The actual life of the complex in the seventies was sometimes more prosaic. ‘Eastbourne is a very Conservative town, a very Conservative town,’ the manager told me in his office. ‘The building was nicknamed the Kremlin. It was very much, “The Reds are here on the seafront.” You’d just gone through the early seventies …’ – he scratched his knee – ‘all the disruption from the unions. I don’t think we were that welcome. We used to have hordes of people trying to look in through the glass. We had one local sea captain – sadly passed on – who liked to drink and see how far he could get into the building without being caught.’ Regardless, the guests played snooker and sat on the sun roof. They took notes in seminars and drank in the bars. They ran into old colleagues. They spotted visiting dignitaries: often Jones, sometimes Scargill. They relished the colour TV in their rooms and the one-to-four ratio of staff to guests. ‘The restaurant was designed as self-service, but that arrangement only lasted a matter of weeks,’ the manager said. ‘People in the seventies didn’t want to stand up and queue.’

  He took me on a tour. We walked up staircases with rich wooden bannisters and through mahogany doors. We looked at en suites still with their original raspberry and avocado decor. We saw the kitchens – ‘built above ground, to be better for the staff’ – with their cauldrons of cabbage and chips. We talked about the in-house carpenters, engineers and cleaners, and the centre’s model workforce: still unionized, largely self-sufficient, loyal. We passed delegates attending a TGWU conference – ‘Winning in the Global Workplace’ – with their coats thrown over the chairs in one of the bars and the union religion still in their eyes. We saw a man peering in from the street through the smoked glass. Then we stopped for a few minutes in a huge corner bedroom. ‘Two walls of glass!’ said the manager. Below us, a white sun caught the pier and the curve of the beach, but a cold draught crept across the carpet. ‘We lose a lot of heat in winter,’ he conceded, ‘but the complaint we have about these rooms is that people can’t see the TV from the bed. It’s too far.’

  The room was unoccupied. It was February, but filling the centre was getting harder all year round. ‘When I started there were 2,500,000 members in the T&G,’ the manager said. How many did the union have now? He dropped his voice: ‘About 800,000. Last week, I was given the go-ahead to look further afield for guests – people from other unions, possibly non-union members … Since the mid-nineties we have looked at our staffing levels.’ He sighed. ‘Like every industry. We have looked at it quite radically. We now have thirty-two full-time members of staff.’ At the busiest times in the seventies there were sixty.

  He left me in the restaurant. Lunch was over and the room was empty; the muzak had switched to ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’. Yet the room still had a certain grandeur. Great bulb-lit glass globes hung in clusters from the high ceiling on black cords, as if in some modernist concert hall. A long mezzanine level faced out to sea. Along its curving parapet there was a mural from the seventies, all bold reds and blues and greens, and a plaque ascribing it to something called the Art Workers Cooperative. Three artists’ names were listed – Simon Barber, Christopher Robinson and Michael Jones, one of Jack Jones’s sons. Then the plaque explained that the mural told the story of trade unionism in Britain.

  It started with men ploughing fields. Then the fields became a gloomy forest of mill chimneys, and the men became bent-backed factory workers and miners. A cartoon capitalist in a top hat squatted on a Monopoly board. Then there were policemen in earlytwentieth-century uniforms beating union demonstrators with truncheons; thunderous scenes from the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War; and then a new sunlit post-war landscape, with jets streaking overhead and smokeless modern factories. On an idealized production line a clear-eyed worker looked at his watch, as if timing some high-tech process or thinking of his next tea break. Then there was the silhouette of the TGWU Centre in Eastbourne, with a saxophonist playing to guests and the English Channel glittering. Finally, there was a man in a flat cap with his shirt off, lying against a tree, eyes half-closed. Another man ran across a nearby beach with two women in bikinis. More off-duty trade unionists lounged on a yacht in the blue distance.

  The whole painting was slightly absurd. Its lack of subtlety, its crude historical transitions, its mixture of travel-brochure and socialist-realist imagery – it verged on the kitsch. Yet there was something moving about its idealism and mistaken confidence. In September 1976, as Jack Jones was opening the TGWU Centre in the sunshine, hopes for the advance of the unionized working class in Britain were still very much alive.

  13

  Marxism at Lunchtime

  Bolder left-wing visions also survived deep into the British seventies. In the autumn of 2008, as I was making some of the last alterations to this book, a slim envelope arrived in the post from my cousin Simon. I vaguely knew he had been politically active in the seventies, but somehow I had always
been too busy to talk to him. Inside the envelope was a tiny yellowed, creased booklet. ‘A bit late but might be interesting!’ said a Post-it note attached to the cover. I carefully peeled off the note, and on the front of the booklet were four words in heavy black and red capitals: ‘The Little Red Struggler’. And then, in smaller type: ‘A handbook for student militants 30p’.

  The handbook did not have a publication date, but inside it no years were cited after 1975. There was also an inky photo of some protesters with beards and thick sideburns in the style of serious young men in the mid-seventies, and a caricature of Richard Nixon turning into Gerald Ford. The handbook had been printed in Manchester, at somewhere called the Progress Bookshop, and its publisher was listed as the National Student Committee of the Communist Party.

  For sixty busy pages a whole dead political world sprang to life. There were London contact details for Marxists in Medicine, the Women’s Liberation Workshop, the Angola Solidarity Committee and the British Campaign for Peace in Vietnam. There was a surprisingly objective guide to ‘political groupings in the student movement’, from the Workers Revolutionary Party to the International Marxist Group to the Communist Party itself. There was a sober and detailed guide to campus occupations:

  DO …

  Decide whether the action is to be demonstrative or disruptive … Have specific demands which are negotiable, as well as raising issues which question the role of education in society …Look forward to the initial organisation inside [the occupation], eg food, entertainments, sleeping arrangements, study facilities …

  DON’T …

  Rely on a small elitist/vanguard invasion … Allow [campus] staff, particularly security staff, inside the occupation … Smoke dope; get drunk; damage the place; leave a mess when it’s all over.

  Most strikingly of all, the booklet gave a chronology of notable political interventions by British students since the mid-sixties:

  1968: Feb. Leicester. 200 students in sit-in … 1970: May. Keele. Situationists, helped by Edgar Broughton Band and spraycans ‘liberate’ Keele … 1972: Oct. Queen visits Stirling … Students union concerned over cost of visit … less than sober demonstration takes place. Press uproar … 1974: Mar. Essex. Police break student picket … 1975: Mar. Lancaster … students occupy administration block … May. Warwick students sit-in over rents issue …

  *

  By the mid-seventies, in Britain, as in many other countries, campus radicalism of a loosely Marxist nature was no longer the shock to the system it had been in the sixties. It was becoming something equally interesting: a new political orthodoxy, with its own confident patterns of thought and public rituals. Some of this confidence came from the apparent advance of the Left and retreat of the Right in the wider world. In 1974, fascist dictatorships in Greece and Portugal had been overthrown by left-inclined rebels. In 1975, the Americans had withdrawn, humiliated, from Vietnam. Africa was full of left-wing liberation movements. The Soviet bloc and China, whether you approved of their version of communism or not, seemed increasingly strong as Western capitalism struggled with the oil crisis and economic downturns. In Britain, the media, more interested in foreign affairs then than it is now, conscientiously brought news of it all.

  Intellectually, too, the British campus left had a momentum in the mid-seventies. The Tory right and the free-market think tanks may have been plotting their counter-revolution, but their publications were still far less prominent on university bookshelves than those of their ideological opponents. Since its establishment in London in 1970, New Left Books (now Verso) had been successfully importing the ideas of left-wing thinkers from continental Europe, such as Walter Benjamin and Louis Althusser. More mainstream British publishers moved into the same market. In 1975, Jonathan Cape issued Leninism Under Lenin, a long didactic book by a Belgian Marxist historian, Marcel Liebman, which described the leader of the Russian Revolution over half a century earlier as ‘one of the men who did the most to shape the world of today’. In 1977, Penguin included in its Modern Masters series, alongside studies of Einstein and Gandhi, a stylishly designed layman’s guide to the thoughts of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist of the twenties and thirties.

  The increasing ‘hegemony’, to use Gramsci’s then fashionable term for cultural dominance, of left-wing notions at British universities in the seventies was famously satirized by the liberal academic and novelist Malcolm Bradbury in The History Man, the exquisitely black campus comedy he published in 1975. Bradbury’s villain and main protagonist was Howard Kirk, a bullying, philandering Marxist sociology lecturer. Kirk taught at a fictional college which closely resembled the most politically combustible British campus during the seventies, the concrete-and-grass crucible of the University of Essex. In an interview decades later, Bradbury said he had always thought of Kirk as the kind of Marxist who was more ‘opportunist’ than ideological: ‘He reads political trends, perceives the political flow and goes with it.’ Kirk was the ‘history man’ of the book’s title – academic shorthand for a believer in inevitability. The novel was set in 1972, but it did not date quickly. For the rest of the decade, for more British students and academics, almost certainly, than at any time before or since, the one inevitability in political life was the victory of world socialism.

  My cousin Simon arrived at Middlesex Polytechnic in 1974. He was nineteen and already had a head full of politics. His parents were both mildly left-wing and had sent him to a private but radical Quaker school, where underground papers like Oz had been passed around. He studied politics for A-level and cut out general-election results from the Guardian. He sent off for all the parties’ literature, and chose Labour.

  But at Middlesex he found politics being conducted on a different level. The polytechnic was only a year old, and had been formed out of a scattering of facilities across north London, including Hornsey College of Art, which in 1968 had been the site of the biggest British student rebellion of that revolutionary year. An occupation of the college had lasted two months, and the students had temporarily set up their own university there with the aid of a few sympathetic staff. At Middlesex in the seventies, the Hornsey sit-in lived on as a memory and a mythologized happening, and as a model for further actions.

  ‘The campus I was taught at was a pretty tatty old technical college with a few Portakabins stuck on the back,’ Simon, in his early fifties now but still skinny like a student, told me as he cooked me supper at his semi-detached house outside Watford. ‘The whole diaspora of left-wing groups there was a bit mind-boggling to me compared to where I’d come from. There was the International Marxist Group, the International Socialists, Militant. The Communist Party were always regarded as fairly mainstream. I aligned myself’ – he was still fluent in the jargon – ‘with a group called the Broad Left, which dominated the National Union of Students.’ The Broad Left was an alliance of communists, left-wing Labour supporters and more free-floating socialists which had been established in 1973. Like the other radical student groups, its policies ranged from the relatively parochial – a big increase in the student grant – to the revolutionary and universal – the ‘nationalisation of all building land’. ‘I wouldn’t have called myself a Marxist when I arrived at the poly,’ said Simon, ‘but, theoretically, I got very Marxist.’

  At Middlesex he grew his hair halfway to his waist, had a beard ‘on and off’, and cultivated a Che Guevara moustache. Officially he studied ‘humanities’, an adventurous new type of degree which let students do modules in different subjects. He chose history, law and English literature. Yet really he studied Marxism. ‘The teaching staff all called themselves Marxists. They were young academics, probably radicalized in ’68. In history, we learned to point at the majority of historians as apologists for capitalism. Most of the books on our reading list were written by Marxists.’ He read Das Kapital. He read Parliamentary Socialism by Ralph Miliband, father of David and Ed Miliband, yet a ferocious critic of Labour’s compromises with capitalism when in office. He read Th
e World Turned Upside Down by Christopher Hill, an influential Marxist reinterpretation of the seventeenth-century English revolution which saw immense potential in its small radical sects, such as the Levellers and the Diggers. He read books about the Spanish Civil War; about ‘colonialism and imperialism’. And he saw what happened to students at Middlesex who questioned such categories: ‘You could be howled down for disagreeing with Marxism in a seminar. Even in law. That was funny: students doing law modules from these quite staid backgrounds, coming up against these Marxist law lecturers who were trying to explain that the law was a blunt instrument of capitalism.’ Simon smiled to himself, and it was hard to tell whether the memory left him delighted or appalled, or both. I mentioned Malcolm Bradbury’s book, and he nodded. ‘There were lots of “history men” lecturers at Middlesex.’

  Away from seminars and lectures, the political education continued. ‘You couldn’t get away from it. There would be political speeches being made in the refectory as you were having your lunch. Someone would get up. There would be a crude PA. People would listen. People would get up and argue. I don’t ever remember a Conservative student making a speech.’ Did the dominance of the Left at Middlesex feel at all unusual? ‘I assumed that was just the way it was at colleges everywhere.’

  Frequently, the political satisfactions of public rhetoric and student elections would not be enough and the undergraduates would go on strike. The spark was usually fees for foreign students: with the government’s finances under pressure, these were increasing rapidly, and Middlesex had a lot of overseas pupils. But the strikes quickly took on a more all-encompassing quality. Pickets would be established simultaneously at the gates of all the Middlesex campuses. ‘I wasn’t the most confident or outgoing of people, but I went on the picket lines,’ Simon remembered, ‘and they were 100 per cent effective. Most students didn’t even try to cross.’ College buildings would regularly be occupied for days at a time. ‘We had a whole alternative counter-curriculum during the occupations. Some lecturers joined in with us and gave lectures they said they weren’t usually allowed to give: about the role of art in the revolution, about the last stages of capitalist decline.’ During one sit-in, Simon and the other students watched Winstanley, a 1975 British film about the leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, who had briefly put into practice an early version of communism by leading land occupations and setting up communes in England during the 1650s. Sid Rawle, of the free-festival movement, the Diggers’ closest seventies equivalents, had a substantial part in the film. All the strands of British left-wing utopianism seemed to be coming together.