I joined the Party, in one of its East London branches, at the end of the war. The night I went to join I heard Charlie Lestor lecturing on the Paris Commune of 1871, the seizure of power out of war by working men, and portending world-shaking events. ‘Now is the time for socialist to go to their books, and prepare themselves with socialist knowledge,' he said. ‘Great things are about to happen. ’
I do not think one was ingenuous in being thrilled a little. People all over Britain — all over the world — had the sensation of the imminent lifting of a curtain. As far as the SPGB was concerned, the expectancy took two forms. It was confident of being proved right in its prophecies by the reassertion in peacetime of the inexorable laws of capitalism: the anticipation permeated the Party. The other expectation, that ‘great things’ might come to pass, belonged particularly in areas like East London, where the working-class tradition and the spirit of the nineteen thirties were strongest.
The branch was a small one, its meetings attended regularly by perhaps a dozen of the thirty on the books. The other branches on this side of London were bigger and noisier, but the basic pattern of their existence was the same. On one Monday night there was a ‘business’ meeting, when the reports, letters and finances were considered; the alternate week would be given to a lecture followed by discussion. The rules of procedure were strictly observed at the business meetings, and we all had to take a turn at chairmanship. The lectures were given either by Party speakers, to whom this was part of the round almost equally with outdoor speaking, or by members of the branch who had ‘swotted' special subjects.
The branches’ rooms were almost always dingy, unattractive holes in institutional buildings, but the education offered by these fortnightly meetings was quite remarkable. In two or three years I heard lectures, most of them very well informed, on practically all the things which came within the scope of the scientific-socialist view of society. Social and economic history; the structure and finance of industry; wage and price theory, value theory, the rate of profit and the commodity equations. Besides these, there were lectures expounding subjects through
the eyes of the materialist conception of history. Old Moses Baritz had spoken thus on music for many years, and delightful little Ted Kersley the image of Mr Punch — gave lectures on the social history of art.
It could not be called a liberal education. The teachings were assertive, the interpretations of history and economic activity often over- mechanistic. Nevertheless, the learning was — largely because it challenged all of one’s previous learning — stimulating to a high degree. So were the people. The arrogance of the Party in those halcyon years was magnificent, the certainty with which it faced the world tremendous; it was impossible not to be infected by them. Everyone outside the Party was either a fool or a knave. They wrote up Professor Joad in the Standard, and a gentle reader complained of the epithets — ‘ignoramus’, ‘fathead’, etc; the EC informed him that they thought the words precise and correct.
They made Bernard Shaw lose his temper. Clifford Allen, an SPGB member, wrote in the Western Socialist criticizing an article by Shaw and sent a copy to him. Shaw responded affably: ‘I am much Indebted to Mr Allen for having, by his article in your issue of May, called my attention to the Western Socialist.’ Allen then, in a second article, examined Shaw’s political claims and history in detail. Shaw replied furiously: ‘The packet of your issues since May with which you threaten me has not yet arrived. I hope it never may . . . My time — of which there is so little left — is too precious to be wasted on Mr Allen . . .’27
The young members were like peacocks strutting, displaying socialist knowledge like dazzling feathers (‘You read “Dialectics of Nature” ? Read the bloody footnotes at least, before you argue with me .’). And the old ones were like prophets at judgement before the huge audiences which came to their meetings.
There was Charlie Lestor, in his mid-seventies now, thundering doom on the system and on Russia most of all; when he spoke of the Russian workers he raised his hand aloft and cried ‘I would rather be a dog ! ’ — his great voice crashed through the hall. Groves, strident, shrill and crushing; Turner, playing on every emotion to force the truth into his audiences’ hearts. There was Sammy Cash, starting new and hopeless businesses, lecturing on sexual life in the socialist future. There were the Kerr brothers from West Ham (one was blown down from the rackety high platform in Hyde Park in a gale and fractured his skull, another had in his arm broken in a fight after a meeting); leather-tongued, rumbustious Harry Young; a small tribe of patriarch speakers and hopefuls, to whom the image in the last of the Party Principles was almost literal — the work¬ing class mustering under a banner, millions in an infinite Hyde Park
acclaiming the truth the orators spoke.
These were the leading lights, of course. The most curious thing about the ordinary members who came to my branch and the other branches was that hardly any of them seemed to have been brought to the Party by its organized efforts. One wondered whether the meetings, the papers and everything else were for conversion or confirmation, whether they were agents of new growth or served chiefly to provide dramatic satisfaction for the members themselves. Most members had come through personal contact, friendship and even family connection
Thus, Lestor’s two daughters Joan and Lily were members. There were several men from a cycle-racing club to which Lew Jones, the branch secretary, belonged. One man was the son of a former member; another had joined on account of a friend, who in turn had been brought in by a couple who had converted him first to vegetarianism and then to socialism. The branch treasurer belonged to a pacifist family and had gravitated naturally to an anti-war party. One member, however, did present a startling example of self-education. I had known him as a boy, when he was a neighbourhood butt: a near-simpleton, doomed to the bottom of the class and the meanest of lives. He told me that in his late teens, unemployed, he had drifted into the public library for warmth, and been struck by the thought that he knew nothing. He earned his living as a window cleaner, and was one of the best-read men in the branch.
The Lestor girls were among the small number of women who played an active part. There were one or two women speakers — before the war Stella Jackson, and in the post-war period Joyce Millen and Lisa Bryan. They were characteristically the capable, independent-minded women found, but few and far between, in movements for emancipation. Forty years earlier they could easily have been suffragettes. Joyce Millen was a better speaker than most men. Without losing in feminity, she had the toughness and resilience that outdoor speaking demanded; after she made some appearances on the platform at Croydon a news¬paper there was rapturous about this ‘raven-haired, barb-tongued beauty’.
The Party was predominantly masculine, however. The standard socialist book on women’s position was still Bebel’s Woman Past and Present, dating from the beginning of the century. While domesticity made women chattel-slaves, the women members who repudiated con¬vention were disapproved by the majority of the Party. A girl brought up in an SPGB household said, concerning Lisa Bryan: ‘Oh, she’s one of those emancipated women.’ (Lisa herself asked me once what I thought the members’ attitude to the women speakers was, and agreed heartily when I said it was close to what Dr. Johnson’s had been, two hundred years before: ‘Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog’s walking on its hind
legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’) ‘Emancipated’, applied to women, was simply another word for ‘fast’; one woman member who swore like a trooper was detested by most of the men for it.
The free-love faction in the Party rejected marriage because it was a property institution, not from any intention towards wild bohem¬ian living. The unmarried couples lived together as respectably and permanently as if they had taken the religious vows of matrimony; the discussions on the subject always revealed most of them as ready to argue that, for all the perniciousness of institutionalized marriage, man was monogamous by nature. Nevertheless, ‘without distinction of sex’ remained part of the vision of the socialist world where everything would be different. The talk and attitudes never obstructed women from working equally with men in the Party; whereas in most radical groups, even today, they are taken only as teacup and typewriter fodder.
The sole concession to ‘emancipated’ or ‘progressive’ tendencies that SPGB members made was their attachment to dietetic fads. At the time I joined, the enthusiasm for natural diet was at its height. One found members gathering in vegetarian restaurants; the price of discussion - to philistines like myself, at any rate — was a mountain of grated carrot, or a mock steak made of nuts. The most astounding assertions were made, on both the personal and the social levels, about food and health. I remember a questioner at a lecture asking something about cancer in the ancient world, and the speaker pronouncing that it could not have existed then. ‘The ancients didn’t eat white bread,’ he said, and the cause of cancer is white bread, you see.’
True, not all the Party were food reformers. Bill Read, an East London speaker who kept a workmen’s eating house, used to bellow that vegetarianism was a capitalist plot to lower labour costs by making the working class feed on grass. Harry Young gave lectures with a similar theme, entitled ‘Diet Reform: A Pernicious Fraud’. But the diet and health zealots were unshakable. One member who was a nature-cure practitioner wrote an article for the Socialist Standard — it appeared in December 1947 — called ‘Medical Economics’, which approached asserting that doctors artfully promoted disease in order to make small fortunes curing it. Mercifully, the craze died out in the years of ‘political apathy’ in the late nineteen-fifties.
Three months after joining, I became a Party speaker. The test was accomplished in a corner of the library room at Rugby Chambers, Hardy, Rubin and Turner questioned me for nearly two hours; no indication of success or failure, of the answer being right or wrong, was given until the end. The Propaganda Committee which supervised
meetings was told I had passed. I was placed on the Speakers’ List, and every month I received duplicated sheets allotting speakers to outdoor stations for the next four weeks, with my name ringed for as many meetings as I had asked to do.
There were others besides me. Almost every young man in the Party was eager to speak — thirty or forty new speakers must have been created in two years. A number of them fell quickly by the wayside: the test in knowledge was passed, but they lacked the temperamental attributes to become speakers. Nevertheless, there remained a zestful body of young platform men, each longing to discover in himself another Turner. We did not know it, but we were sharing in the last opportunity of wholesale experience in public speaking. In ten years the days of the street platform would have ended and popular demagogy would be dead.
In 1946, however, there were meetings galore as there had been in the ’thirties, and experience was there to be gained. Indeed, experience was the only teacher available. The Party gave practically no encourage¬ment — when a man had become a speaker he must sink or swim on his own. The harshness of the process was impressed on me only the second time I spoke. I had gone to Beresford Square, a big open market street at Woolwich; there you spoke with trams clanging behind you, and competed with buskers and stallholders as well as other meetings. With sixty or seventy people round, I pitched my voice (my only earlier experience of declamation had been as an amateur actor) to reach just the edge of the crowd and not beyond: a good technique, I thought. When I got down one of the elder members was waiting. In a sepulchral voice he said: ‘For Christ’s sake don’t speak in public any more. You’ve got no voice.’
I learned and survived. At some places a speaker had to shout: the little court at Richmond, for instance, where there were crowds of day- trippers to listen if one’s voice could be heard above the din from an amusement arcade overhead. Sometimes organized opposition had to be overcome, from Communists or Conservatives or from hooligan factions to whom a soap-box orator was fair game. But, for all the traditional association of meetings with hecklers, audiences generally were tolerant and helpful; if the speaker was interesting them, they themselves would shut up interrupters.
A meeting was always started by a ‘chairman’, a member of the local branch whose function was to save the speaker the work of gathering an audience. Some were young members practising to become speakers themselves, others were already competent men who were satisfied by this weekly half-hour on the platform, and still others were simply the only ones in their branches who would do it. The best kind of chair¬man was the man — charming, cantankerous Harry Berry of Kingston,
for example — who spoke vigorously but sympathetically, threw out challenges, and retired leaving the speaker with forty or fifty people whose interest had been stimulated. The worst by far was the occasional egomaniac member, eager to display himself but with nothing to say; there was one man who used to read the Party Principles in a high- pitched chant, and another who attracted people by his striking appear¬ance and drove them away with boredom in five minutes.
The speaking stations were market places, parks, town squares, railway approaches, road junctions — wherever people were out in num¬bers. Most of them were long-established as meeting places, and a few had the nature of special reservations. Street meetings had no legal stand¬ing, however. While there was no law preventing one’s setting up a platform anywhere, there was no law establishing the right to do so either. The police supervised all meetings (they always asked for the speaker’s name and address: almost all of us said we lived at the Party head-quarters). A meeting could always be prevented or closed on the grounds of obstruction of the highway. Any battle to maintain a speaking station against encroachment — from traffic, for example — was bound to end in a speaker’s being summoned and fined for obstruction.29
Thus, on one of my provincial speaking trips I went with Jim D’Arcy to try a meeting in Liverpool. We put our platform on a comer which looked promising, and in twenty minutes had a crowd of two hundred listening. Policemen came and argued about obstruction. Finally we moved away from the high road, and were about to resume when a police officer of high rank arrived. There was to be no meeting, he said, because meetings in Liverpool led to trouble; the Catholic and Protestant factions showed themselves, and there was always a fight in the end. We assured him we should rouse no fights, but he was adamant that we were not to speak. We said he could not stop us unless an obstruction was caused. ‘Quite right’, he said. ‘And the moment so much us a dog stops near your platform, I’m nicking you for obstruction.’ We gave in.
Public speaking is the finest of stimulants to the ego. To overcome a difficult audience, to establish an atmosphere in which a crowd will listen and be moved, gives indescribable satisfaction. That is not to say that every man who stood on a platform for the Party had such satisfaction. Every aspiring speaker knew it was there, and when men dropped away it was usually because they recognized in themselves a lack of the qualities to make it come. Some, however, recognized no such thing and persisted unattractively for years, blundering and tub- thumping on in the hope that revelation would come. The Party allowed little presumption that speakers like these needed guidance. I recall
trying to advise one speaker who plainly needed a course to win friends and influence people. His eyes bulged angrily at me. ‘I state the Party case, don’t I ? Then how else can there be any criticism ? ’ he said.
Most of the speaking stations were good, simply because the bad ones were not kept up. Occasionally one struck poor places where experiments were being made — the same spot could be deserted on one night and busy on another — or where the local members had not yet admitted defeat. The most bizarre of all my speaking experiences was at a town outside London. No branch existed there, but a young man reputed to be a live-wire was trying to promote activity. The name of the town was appearing regularly on the speakers’ lists for Sunday evening meetings. I took the train there; I was met by the live-wire young man and led through the town until we reached a wide deserted plain.
We trudged across the plain, and in the middle he pitched the platform. There was not a soul in sight. The young man said he would ‘chair’.
He stood on the rostrum, I stood before him, and he harangued me as if I were a thousand people.
It did not dawn on me that no-one was going to come — no-one at all. I had seen unlikely-looking places before, and always an audience of some kind appeared from somewhere; possibly this lonely plain would become alive with evening strollers. After half an hour I offered to take the platform. I expounded socialism from half-past eight — the path of history, the economics of the capitalist system, the theory of revolution — till ten o’clock. The plain seemed as immense and lifeless as the Sahara Desert. I asked the young man if a crowd was likely now; he said no, he thought not. We walked back through the town and had some beer, and I caught my train.
I kept this strange experience to myself, wondering what had gone wrong. A few years later the Executive, alarmed by the decline in outdoor meetings, called the speakers together to hear their views. When discussion turned to the quality of some of the meeting-spots, Harry Young rose and related how he had gone to that same town and addressed an audience of one in a vast field. The initial confession made, the rest followed; half the speakers in the Party had been there, had spoken to the air, and had decided to tell nobody. It had gone on for something like two years. I have wondered continually about that young man. Was he perhaps a connoisseur, a collector of speakers for his private pleasure " Or was it we who were mad instead ?
But under normal conditions speaking provided fun and stimulation. It was conflict, the clash of ideas and personalities. After a time one became accustomed to the common objections and questions, and learned until it was almost instinctive to identify the questioner’s political
beliefs from the language he used. A speaker like Turner lived and thrived on questions and arguments, knocking down opponents like ninepins. Many speakers were persuaded by this that outdoor meetings were sustained by questions alone, and were capable of saying very little on their own account. Once I was hauled from a teashop to replace a speaker who, having been asked nothing, had exhausted his resources after twenty minutes. Partly it was due to the Party’s preoccupation with opposing everyone, but it pointed also to something deeper. Claiming In interpret the world, one must first be in touch and conversant with it; what is called communication is, too often, a one-way address.
There were strong, often bitter, rivalries among the Party speakers. Specially good meeting places tended to be dominated by one or two speakers, and there were often quarrels over them. At intervals attempts were made to break Turner’s monopoly of Hyde Park, and there were hot disputes for a time over the large mid-day meetings at Lincoln’s Inn fields. One speaker, a fiery young man named Lawler, tried to make his point by taking the stand early and refusing to come down. Members passed up notes to say that Turner and Lestor were waiting; Lawler look out pre-written answers from his pocket and tossed them back. The trouble culminated, as always, in a tumultuous row in the Executive room — Lawler raging, Turner growling, and Groves shrilling ‘Enfant terrible ! ’
Only a minority of the Party’s speakers were considered suitable for indoor meetings, which demanded coherence — without the help of questions and interruptions — and sufficient originality to hold the Interest of a captive audience. The highest test of speaking ability, however, was a debate. The choice of speakers for these, and for the major indoor meetings, was always made by the Executive itself. The care was justified, for to conduct a debate well required not only rhetoric but skilful organization of facts and arguments. It had, I always thought, many similarities to a physical fight. There was the initial probing,
testing the opponent and displaying one’s own armoury; there were false moves, designed to lure him; there was the search by both contest¬ants for a fatal weakness, at which blow after blow could be aimed.
I spoke in several debates for the SPGB. I had one of the rare encounters with a Communist representative (the Communist Party insisted that they provide the chairman, who cheated outrageously with the times of speeches to try and protect his man at the end). I debated with anarchists, with Liberal and Labour speakers, churchmen and secularists, and exponents of the theories of strange sects. Each one involved weeks of preparation, carefully investigating the opponents’ case and finding the precedents and statistics relevant to it. Minority organizations
presented the greatest difficulty, chiefly because their tendency was always to more complicated intellectual arguments. Besides this, they often had excellent speakers: men like Philip Sansom the anarchist and Len Ebury of the National Secular Society were a match for anybody, though the best of all the speakers I met in debate was a Roman Catholic priest, Bernard Rickett.
The SPGB was at its best and most sensible when it took apart the assumptions of other minorities. So far as the preparation of a case was concerned, the most interesting of my debates was with the Social Credit organization. The Social Credit scheme, the brain-child of the late Major Douglas, proposed simply to remedy economic problems by governmental use of the power — which, it claimed, banks already had and used — to create credit, or purchasing ability. It claimed to have had the approval of the Macmillan Committee in the early nineteen-thirties, but a reading of the committee’s minutes showed nothing of the kind. (Hardy told me he had written to individual members of the Macmillan Committee asking if they had said or meant the things claimed by Social Credit, and received replies in the negative from all of them.)29 The case we worked out and I presented in the debate was a flat denial either that banks could create credit or that there was vast over-production which could be balanced to everyone’s advantage by giving additional consuming-power all round the community. The Social Credit speaker, a clergyman, had no answer at all.
However, these elaborately-reasoned debates did not have the thrill for Party members of the crashing attacks on the major parties which participated in government. And the representatives of the Labour and Conservative Parties were singularly defenceless against the SPGB. Politicians of note showed up poorly in contrast with the Party speaker,., and were, more often than not, deficient in facts and even in coherence, The usual question for a debate was ‘Which party should the working class support ? ’ For Labour or Conservative this was in fact a half- irrelevant question, since they were already supported satisfactorily by the working class. Had support really been an issue from the strength of the arguments in these debates, the big electorate might have been decimated time and again. As it was, the SPGB gained little from them in the war for political supremacy but, insisting on definition and re-jecting broad unscientific sentiment, rarely lost a skirmish.
The decline in public meetings began in the early nineteen- fifties. At first it was not obvious. The tendency of the Executive and the Party Conference was to blame branches for failing to maintain meeting places, or speakers for irregularity in holding meetings. The branches retorted that the stations had ceased to be what they were; several
speakers added that many of them never had been. It was true that the growth of traffic and the re-building of urban areas after the war had eliminated place after place where meetings were expected. I went with other members of my branch to a dozen spots in the area which had once figured on the speakers’ lists. Some had become traffic-congested, leaving no room for platforms and audiences; others had been bombed in the war and the new buildings had, by either structure or character, removed the possibility of holding meetings.
Gradually, however, the truth impressed itself; audiences were no longer to be obtained, outdoors or in halls. I went to Watford and debated with a Liberal candidate in front of fifty people; two weeks curlier, I was told, a Cabinet Minister had spoken to even fewer. The monthly list of speaking arrangements shrank, as once-flourishing stations were given up. Only a few places were unaffected. Hyde Park remained, but its atmosphere was increasingly that of an attraction for tourists and provincial visitors. It still had huge Sunday crowds round the platforms, but they were largely dominated by snapshot-taking holiday¬makers; one’s enduring impression would be not words in someone’s memory, but photographs of a crank orator shown to friends in Indiana and Yorkshire. One Sunday, holding forth in the Hyde Park sunshine, I was taken again and again. I needed a haircut, and an American had passed round the word that a speaker here looked just like Johnny Weissmuller. Mom would love that.
The Executive appointed a special committee to enquire into what was happening. The report when it came blamed television, of course. Principally, however, it found that the Party would have to accept a situation which had arisen from, more than anything, the inexplicable absence of mass unemployment or trade depression in the ten years since the war. There was no discontent. Everybody had work, half the population had television sets, and nobody wanted to hear about the system. It could not last, but in the meantime there was nothing for the Party to do but wait.
The report was received quietly. Wilmott, sitting at the end of the Executive table, spoke with prescience of the decline of the entire labour movement; nobody wished to pursue it. The phrase ‘political apathy’ was soon to be on everyone’s lips. The nineteen-thirties had ended at last. To rub salt in the Party’s wound, there was scarcely enough willingness among the speakers to supply the few regular meeting- stations which remained. The younger speakers were talking about a loss of confidence, and several of them were asking openly if the Party had been right after all.
The controversies had begun.
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