Sad to hear of the death of Ken Keating who certainly deserves the title 'Salford's Class War Warrior'
I lost touch with Ken but used to see him many years ago when I was involved with the old 'Wildcat' Group in Manchester.
We didn't always see eye to eye but he was a genuine warm hearted guy with his friends and almost as fierce as his dogs with his class enemies.
There is a short piece of Ken talking to 'hatless john' just before he died on Ian Bone's blog:
http://ianbone.wordpress.com
There is 2 videos of Ken
There is 2 videos of Ken speaking on youtube.
this one is on the SWP
This one is on setting up an unemployed workers union
If you ask me they are both anarchist oral histories in there own right
Great videos, thanks for
Great videos, thanks for sharing. Never heard of the guy before watching those and reading the bios but it seems like he had an top quality bullshit detector and a proper passion for class struggle. Wish I had his courage. Here's to him!
Ken Keating will be sorely
Ken Keating will be sorely missed-I wish i knew him.A true class warrior and an inspiration!Sincere condolences to his friends and family.
Land and Liberty!
(No subject)
[youtube]uV4WxhLqIEE[/youtube]
Love this. Love this so much.
Love this. Love this so much.
For quite diff. reasons I love the commie banner waving at 4.45.
I wish he was around now so I
I wish he was around now so I could ask him about the unemployed union he set up.
Here's some of the transcript of an interview I did with the two people who interviewed Ken whilst he was in hospital:
J'TH’: The first in this series of episodes was one where, I wasn’t there but Ken told me about it and that’s where he was living in some place and there was a lot of trouble with rats and rubbish that was building up and the council were not clearing it away. So he bagged it all up one day and I think he had a donkey and a donkey cart and he took it all down to the council offices and took it all inside and started tipping out bags of rubbish straight up and down the corridor, on people’s computers and stuff on this donkey. And they started cracking up saying ‘Oh we’re going to have you, call the police, call the police’ and he says ‘No, I’m just returning council property’, cos it was their property, all their rubbish.
People were kind of dismissive of Ken’s brand of what we call anarchism... Manchester anarchists a lot of them seem to think Salford... you’ve got to take two buses to get there, it’s too far away. I think it’s not just anarchists, it’s pretty much everybody around Manchester, it’s not as if you need a passport. And people from Salford are the same about other parts of Manchester.
We were trying to get other people to do it again and we couldn’t and eventually Ken just gave up trying to find enough people and turned to the SWP. I know I slag them off a lot but credit to them, they did actually do the business, they got a miniture dumper truck, stuffed full of old mattresses, babies’ napies and stuff like that, and took it down to the Civic centre in Swinton and dumped it. Only they weren’t going to go up and down the corridors like Ken kicking it up and down, tipping it out onto the computers. I was with him outside the main doors only you had the BBC there as well. And that was like really well covered, we got on national telly. And they couldn’t hide the fact that Ken was the motivating force behind all this, even the SWP couldn’t do that. So after this event, we reconvened outside Ken’s place near Salford precinct, before he moved to the place where he died, and we had another interview outside Ken’s home. Then of course, it was the SWP that ended up taking all the credit for all this cos they’ve got their own media machine. That’s the sort of stuff you don’t find people do, not willing to take to the street and do something a bit more inventive than dishing out leaflets.
KD: He was 21 when he threw a carton of milk at [Edward] Heath. He found out they were shipping kids in from Cheshire to this Salford school while there was this visit going on and he lobbed these two cans and they splattered all over Ted Heath.
He went down, did that and then was taken to court. What he did was slapped a supersede on everyone , all the press that was there, to bring their evidence, and luckily for him none of them could provide evidence of him doing that so he got away.
And he was telling us another story time when he threw shit on Prince Phillip. Now he never got to the end of this and my battery died so we never get the punch line. Again he was at Broad street at the time and he’s just looking out the window and sees these council workers tidying up stuff, blasting stuff and doing the drains and he’s like ‘What’s going on here then?’ and the council worker tells him that they’ve got this royal visit coming and he’s goes ‘Oh right, have they? I’ll have to be there’ right. Now, the drains have been really bad so Ken and who ever else was there at the time, they’ve been literally shitting in a bucket. So they’ve got these buckets, Dawn [his daughter] had one of the buckets apparently Ken had another and they took it down to where it was and lobbed a shithole at Prince Phillip. As a consequence of that, if there was ever was a royal visit in Manchester or Salford Ken Keating wasn’t allowed in the area.
He used to just go take a megaphone from time to time to Salford police station and start reading off stuff about cop killers and about how corrupt they are. People would be like ‘what’s going on here’ and the cops would be like ‘oh it’s alright, he used to have that repport...’
http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/pub-7rcgrcp.html#rcg
http://paulstott.typepad.com/
http://paulstott.typepad.com/i_intend_to_escape_and_co/2006/07/the_mancunian_w.html
http://www.mediafire.com/file/iieden8em2i5cr6/K_Keating.pdf
I'm told that it was more a case of Ken using the Firm as a vehicle for Class War rather than him being an 'unofficial spokesman'...