Just some stuff on Wildcat and teachers. Doesn't belong in the Fred Vermorel thread.
OK, some further observations on Wildcat and some of the related scene...
I was never a member but I used to hang out a bit with two guys who were close to it in Stoke and then Nottingham.
My own 'affiliation' was with some dudes in Paris and the south of France, where I first hit Europe after leaving Australia, where I'd lived since moving there from proletarian south London. I drank a great deal with Guy Debord and his mates around 1983, but fell out with him because his wife Alice basically stole 4000 francs from me. She was very rich, and I'm not surprised that she's pulling all this 'literary widow' crap, 'denying people the right' to publish some of his personal letters. She isn't anything like anyone a sensible person would call revolutionary. She hated the priesthood, but some of her talk was about how broad-minded and Gypsy-influenced the Spanish aristocracy were compared to the French bourgeoisie.
Guy wasn't like that, but he backed her up with regard to the 4000 francs, so I told him to fuck off and damaged one of his wife's very expensive chairs. Imagine how much I could get if I did a Reid-style collage about that one! 
Any gallerists reading this...want to offer me a commission maybe?
We - me and some of the people from France around Guy, in his 'entourage' as some people would put it, including him - took part in a violent way in both the Warrington print battle and the much more prolonged miners' strike, in county Durham and elsewhere. I'll have to leave those stories for another time.
For a year or so I was a girlfriend of one of the guys in Nottingham, and was well up on the internal papers and info fom Wildcat. I'm making that sound underhanded, but it was always OK for members to show internal papers to their mates and comrades - it was never taboo, as it was in some less well-sussed politico groups. Our own (smaller) scene, I should add, was much much more security-conscious, and there were things we never ever discussed with outsiders, but we weren't a politico/agitational group, and the two positions are very very different. Half of us had cops looking for us on an international level half the time, so being a wuss where security was concerned would mean one thing only. And several years of it too.
The guy from Nottingham/Stoke was the best shot with a brick I have ever seen. I've seen people use more vicious weapons, including heavy-duty caterpults and handguns, in various places including Belgium and Spain, but this guy could (and did) knock helmeted riot cops off their horses from 50 metres, and whacked three in one night so they were stretchered off. Wonderful. That was at Wapping in London.
(I think that was the last time I was ever in or near the East End. I went to Freedom once, but never again - the place stank of manipulative bullshit, and I wasn't surprised to hear one of the bigwig anarchists from upstairs refer to the 'girls in the office', whom he paid a pittance to do his typing for him).
I remember nearly getting the shit beaten out of me by two cops (I clearly remember their leather-clad fists for some reason), after I'd gone to defend someone getting a kicking on the ground, who I thought was 50-50 likely to be the Notty guy, but when I got up close it wasn't him.
I also recall one of the cops screamed at me that I was a 'nigger bitch'. I'm a half-cast - my father was an Australian aborigine, my mother a white Cockney - but I didn't bother educating the filth on the difference between negroid and australoid. (Incidentally, my father was tortured by officials of the fascist regime in Queensland, and degraded over a long period of time, but he after the age of about 15 he was always a cunt, so I have no illusions that suffering necessarily makes someone a great person - it certainly doesn't. I'm sure there were some cunts among the prisoners at Auschwitz too).
But he wasn't that cop was most concerned about. It was his pal who I sensed was on the point of smashing me in the face (I had my arms held but later escaped). I let a third one grope my tits to make 'em all think I was putty in their hands, but having noticed that one of them wasn't wearing shin guards (the idiot probably didn't realise why he was supposed to), I used some of my light-duty combat knowledge with success, and got away.
The Notty guy sometimes said the Manchester Wildcat people were racist (or some of them anyway), but I never found them so. Unless you count the guy who was a well-paid housing official, who once shook my hand with both of his in a very patronising way, as if to say 'how lovely to welcome someone of your ethnicity to our circles'. But I would not call him racist at all, and if you didn't know about his job, you'd say he was a nice guy, although a bit slow intellectually where things like the critique of democracy were concerned. If he hadn't met an abbo before, and was a bit nervy, I don't hold it against him in the slightest. That is not racism. He wasn't a revolutionary - he didn't ever risk anything, and let's recall that in the early 1980s the level of working class struggle, although quite low, was CONSIDERABLY higher than it is now - but he wasn't racist either.
I knew three guys in Wildcat in London too. One was a stuck-up arsehole, actually from a working class background in Glasgow but with a whole Lenin thing going on (or was it Hitler?), probably better suited to the Tory party. I wouldn't be surprised if he's on the far right now. The others were more mates with each other than they were with him. One was a big coward whenever there was trouble. The other I met a few times in Paris as well as in the English midlands but he didn't seem very into Wildcat and I don't know why he was in it. They were all British as far as I can recall.
The teacher issue was a big thing for my mate from Notty. The teachers didn't socialise with the rest of us in the heavy dope-smoking sessions that went on (not something I'd engage in now, but I did then). These sessions happened both after meetings (which I didn't go to), and when people used to meet up from different towns. They couldn't even be called friends of most of the comrades they were supposed to be 'organising' stuff with. They only met my mates at meetings, never socially, and never to do anything in the class struggle, never to go to meet strikers or rioters, or carry out acts of sabotage etc. I doubt they ever did any of these things anyway. They seemed like people of the past even then.
I told him he shouldn't bother so much. I said they didn't matter. In a revolution, they'd shoot you and you'd shoot them. But we're not in a revolution. More likely anyway, they'd run off and hide. Fuck 'em. He once wanted to slash the tires of one of them, 'anonymously', but at my urging we slashed the tires of some Moss Slide petty slumlord instead. Nice one! (Bloody good thing we didn't end up shot).
Don't let the politico stuff be so important to you anyway, was what I told him. Best thing is to leave the group. He did, although to be honest I don't think he did much good afterwards, becoming an artist of some kind. So the people in Paris told me. Occasionally he used to doss at their places for a bit of kudos, well into the 1990s so I'm told.
OK that was enjoyable.I'm off to do some gardening now, and don't expect to be back here for some time, except to count up the results of the poll on "Are school-teachers in the working class?"
yelt
