Why
1968 in Manchester? Wasn’t 1968 distinguished for its global scope? Certainly,
but history from below has to look at what was happening on the ground, we have
to ‘dig where we stand’. And in so doing, we help defend 1968 from those who
would minimise its significance, those defenders of the status quo like the
former Communist Party member, Martin Kettle, for whom ‘no one serious’ today
calls themselves a revolutionary. For those of us for whom ‘the old world is
dying, a new world is struggling to be born’ this is an important task.
********* < > *********
Tuesday
25 November 1969, three black women and three black men, dressed in black
berets, jackets and gloves, members of the Universal Coloured People’s
Association, UCPA, marched into Manchester Cathedral. They interrupted a ‘service
of prayer for interracial harmony’ organised by the Anglican chaplaincies of
Manchester and Salford universities'. 150 priests would attend a
demonstration against apartheid, protesting the South African Springboks rugby
match being played by the following day. The service having stopped, one
of the six read a statement supporting the demonstration, going on
to say
But
we recognise that the same international power structure oppresses the black
people in this country too. Our protest is therefore directed not only
against racialism in South Africa but racialism in Britain and specifically in
Manchester.'
The Guardian report continued:
The
congregation was told that Black power demanded for Black people in Manchester
decent housing and a human environment: an end to unemployment and racialist
education. Having given the raised arm salute, fists clenched, with the slogan
'Power to the people. Power to Black People' they marched out.
The
UCPA was founded a week after Stokely Carmichael spoke at the Dialectics of
Liberation Conference in July 1967. As Kath Locke, the Moss Side based black
activist who as a teenager knew the Pan Africanists such as Ras Makonnen who
made the 5th Pan African Congress in October 1945 happen in Manchester, said
‘The name sounds liberal today but it was the most militant organisation.’
The revival of Pan Africanism in Manchester included the establishment of
the West Indian United Association as a ‘grassroots’ movement. Arising out of
the long-running battle against police brutality, as its membership card put it
By
demonstrating their true powers as a people, W.I.s can more than in any other
way, eliminate social, economic, and racial inequality.
CLR
James was persuaded to become president and from mid-1968 to mid-1969, when he
was not abroad in Africa, Cuba or the US, he came regularly to Manchester to
speak on ‘Black Liberation’ [photo], ‘Revolution in Africa, Asia, Europe and
Latin America’, ‘East Africa - the miracle of Tanzania’, also helping draft the
association’s constitution and raise money for what became the Nello James
Centre in Whalley Range in 1971.
The
first attempt to organise a demonstration against police brutality was in 1967
with the local branch of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination, CARD,
putting out a leaflet. The two people whose names and addresses were on the
leaflet were both visited by the police, the black activist Berry Edwards
having his house searched for drugs and the white activist, Colin Barker, a
member of the International Socialists, IS, asked to become an informer. Under
pressure from its more respectable members, CARD called off the demonstration.
When a few months later, April 1968, Enoch Powell made his notorious Rivers of
Blood’ speech, it was forty or so students from St John’s College in the city
centre who marched in protest while 700 students at Salford University held a
‘speak-in’ to discuss the speech at which ‘On balance, the anti-Powellites
outnumbered the pro-Powellites.’
Students
militancy increased dramatically in Manchester as everywhere else despite it
being one of the last student unions to merge the Men’s and Women’s Unions in
1967. Manchester was one of fifteen universities whose students protested the
rise in overseas student fees in February 1967, picketing lectures and marching
to a meeting in the city centre. A year later, students staged a noisy protest
in front of the Education Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker calling on him to
talk about student grants rather than ‘Polytechnic possibilities’ When two students were disciplined, a
thousand students signed a petition in support and the student union voted to
loan them each £100 so they could continue studying. There were four
coaches from the university to the March 1968 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign
demonstration that fought the police in Grosvenor Square. The first (and only)
delegate conference of the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation, RSSF,
was held in Manchester March 1969.
It
was students who organised, led and along with trade unionists and 150 priests
were the majority of the 4,000 who marched on the Springbok rugby match,
Wednesday 26 November 1969. At the stadium, there was ‘a 40 minute
running battle’ with demonstrators ‘kettled’ by the 2,000 police on duty who
made 150 arrests. The following day the chief constable boasted about how
he had frightened the demonstrators.
The police were not the only reactionary element. The
Tories controlled the council, having taken it from Labour in 1967.
Not that it made much difference which party governed.
Unelected officers dominated the Town Hall. The most senior of these, George Ogden, the
town clerk, soon to be Sir George, had been accustomed in his previous job as
town clerk in Leicester, to councillors standing up when he entered the council
chamber.
The
Labour group was led by ‘Sir Bob’, Robert Thomas, knighted 1965. On
retiring as leader in 1973, he told the Guardian ‘When I go up the steps of
Manchester Town Hall, I tend to think of it as my town hall.’ For many
years a full-time union official responsible for Manchester Corporation buses,
he consistently opposed Sikh bus drivers and conductors being allowed to wear
the turban, first brought before the council in 1958. At the fourth
and final council meeting to vote on the issue finally resolving the issue
after seven years he argued
A
driver and his mate have to work together, share their meals together, their
politics and their domestic problems. One doesn't want a mate with whom he
can't share his concerns...
At
this point ‘His words were drowned in shouts of ‘nonsense’ and ‘intolerance’ as
a Tory councillor supporting the campaign challenged Thomas ‘Within seconds the
council was in uproar... the Lord Mayor, Alderman Mrs. Nellie Beer, could not
restore order...' Two police officers were brought in and it was half an hour
before business was resumed and the vote taken to accept the turban as part of
a bus worker’s uniform.
The
local press was similarly reactionary. When Leo Abse was given leave to
introduce his bill for homosexual law reform on 7 July 1966 in the Commons, the
Manchester Evening News asked
How can
anyone talk of leadership in Britain when in times of economic crisis like
these another small group of MPs is to put forward a bill for sexual perversion
between consenting male adults? Until it gets back to its basic moral
principles Britain is likely to remain 'the sick man of Europe.'
Such
hostility did not stop Alan Horsfall with a small group of fellow activists organise
the only public meeting outside London calling for homosexual law reform before
the 1967 Act legalised homosexual acts between consenting adults in private.
Horsfall refused to see this as ‘job done’ as many in the national leadership
did, setting up the Committee (from 1971 Campaign) for Homosexual Equality.
The
Dean of Manchester, Alfred Jowett, chaired the meeting. Jowett was also
the leading figure on the Manchester Council for Community Relations, MCCR
which he saw not as a membership organisation but as an elite body. From
this standpoint he played an important role in getting the CARD demonstration
against police brutality called off arguing that the way to deal with the few
bad apples was to have a quiet word with the chief constable.
Ever
since large scale slum clearance began in the mid-1950s, officers and
councillors took little or no notice of the working class communities they
broke up as thousands of families were re-housed each year, mostly to overspill
estates outside the city. The city centre was ‘modernised’, at its heart
a giant shopping mall, the Arndale. David Beetham, a Labour councillor for Moss
Side, describes how in early 1970
A
meeting of the finance committee, on which I served, was called for half an
hour before the full council meeting to approve the plans. At 11 pm the
previous evening a fat dossier was delivered to our homes ... the financial
arrangements were far from fair to the city’s rate-payers. The development
company would take all the profits, while the council would be liable for any
losses they incurred.
When
he queried the proposal, Beetham was told
the
company would simply walk away from the project if the terms were less
favourable, and, anyway, negotiations were too far advanced for anything to be
changed at this late stage, even though it was our first sight of the plans.
Moss
Side was the last large section of the inner city to be due for demolition.
A movement challenging the council began in January 1969 with a 500
strong meeting initiated by the Moss Side People’s Association which local
clergy and social and community workers had established ‘from above’. The
meeting, reflecting the Moss Side community’s mix, two thirds white, one third
black, was chaired by Rick Sumner, a steel erector. Rick told the meeting he
...
felt it was tremendously important that we made an effort to be rehoused
together, that we've got something special, we'd got a well integrated
community and, in the state of the world today, it would be nice to sort of say
'Look how good this is, we should preserve it.' We should say ‘Rehouse us
altogether, white and black, not perpetuate a black ghetto that's the last
thing we want. What we want to do is to perpetuate an integrated area.’ I put
this to the meeting of 500 people and no one said that wasn't what they
wanted. I said, you know, 'Is this what
we're about? Is this what we like to see?' and just about everybody said 'Yes'
and it was a nice moment, a very good moment.
Out
of the meeting came a Housing Action Group which though failing to win its main
demand for Moss siders to be rehoused together, succeeded for the first time in
forcing the senior Town Hall officers to actually meet with local people to
discuss demolition and re-housing plans.
As
so often, working class solidarity showed its greatest strength when resisting
an employer attack. A North Carolina company took over a modest sized
engineering company in Stockport to create Roberts-Arundel and proceeded to
attack the workforce, provoking a strike at which point, November 1966, all 150
strikers were sacked and their jobs advertised in the Manchester Evening News.
The
next 18 months saw daily pickets, a weekly strike levy supported by every
unionised engineer in Stockport, Manchester, Ashton and Oldham, a determined
blacklisting operation across the country and a number of demonstrations. On
two occasions there were mass pickets of over a thousand, the first of which
saw every window in the factory smashed. Airport workers told KLM management
that if one of Roberts-Arundel’s machines was not removed from a plane, there
would never be another KLM flight from Manchester. The machine was duly
removed. Reflecting the level of local support for the strike, Stockport
councillors voted to turn down a request from the Chief Constable of Cheshire
to ban all demonstrations connected with the strike. Shortly afterwards,
November 1967, the police injured three pickets, two of whom were students, who
were later able to win over £2,000 compensation in the courts. The Chief Constable tried unsuccessfully to
get the Director of Public Prosecutions to take a conspiracy case against John
Tocher, the leading figure in the strike, local engineering union district
secretary, soon to be chair of the Communist Party national executive.
Robert-Arundel
was an exceptional dispute winning huge press coverage, everyday stoppages at
work, often over piece-work earnings, were much less visible. Attempts to
organise this rank and file militancy politically had to create their own means
of communication. The IS member Jack Gately, on whom Jim Allen modelled the
union militant in his TV play ‘The Lump’, published ‘Rank and file, the voice
of the building worker’. Jack Sutton,
working at Manchester Royal Infirmary, edited ‘Germ’s Eye View’ for hospital
workers. There was also a thriving
underground press with Grass Eye, Guerrilla, Universal and
others. In 1970 Manchester hosted a national conference of underground papers.
There
was a readiness to use direct action. In protest against the pro-US
Vietnam war film ‘The Green Berets’ starring John Wayne, released late 1968,
one of the two twins Wendy and Sarah Henry, threw curry at the screen'.
When the case came to court, the two sisters both appeared and the case
was dismissed as the prosecution couldn't identify which of the two had done
it. Manchester University student Dave Clark, one of 150 travelling by coach to
the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign demonstration, March 1968 made detailed plans
to bring down a police horse in Grosvenor Square by pulling on its reins. Other
plans included keeping everyone together. A profound sexism was also apparent
with Dave Clark telling a TV journalist on the coach on to London ‘We have to have
someone to look after the girls.’
Conclusion
1968
was a year in which fresh forces emerged with students leading the way.
International in their inspiration, they become a substantial force. When
the Warwick files issue hit in February 1970, the Manchester occupation was the
largest in the country with three thousand students involved. By 1971
members of the Manchester Schools Action Union are ‘ask[ing] coloured pupils if
they were treated differently from white children’ and ‘whether they thought
their textbooks or lessons were racialist.’
Industrial
militancy lagged behind at least until the upturn of 1972 which included thirty
or so factory occupations in Manchester. Such traditional militancy
reflected the strength of the Communist Party, CP. With a thousand members in the area, a
significant portion in workplace branches, often engineering factories, the
Communist Party had ‘muscle’ but was slow and sometimes reluctant to relate to
new movements. Their ‘Broad Left’ strategy of working with Labour lefts to win
positions in the unions was at the cost of organising the rank and file.
It was what the CP called ‘the ultra-left’: the ‘groupuscules’ to borrow the term from
the French événements of May ‘68 in Paris, Trotskyists, anarchists, syndicalists,
who called meetings, produced bulletins, pushed for occupations. Colin Barker
relates a failed attempt by himself and a handful of building workers, also
members of the International Socialists to organise an occupation of
Robert-Arundel during a big march in September 1967. In the event they
were too few in number to carry through a plan to lift the factory gates off
their hinges and start an occupation as the march encircled the factory before
its CP leadership steered it back to the centre of Stockport.
Often
though the ‘groupuscules’ were successful, not least in winning new members.
Even so, revolutionary socialists, Pan Africanists, gay activists, counted
their members in tens rather than hundreds. Their success depended on the
capacity to keep much larger numbers involved. Colin Barker says that the
march to Roberts Arundel in September 1967 was the day he understood the need
for a revolutionary party. Even with the
lively Moss Side News selling around a thousand copies each month, the Housing
Action Group was unable to keep large numbers involved. It was hardly more than
a couple of handfuls who went to the Town Hall to force officers to talk to
them. The most striking absence from the list of ‘gropouscules’ is the women’s
liberation movement. Unlike the others movements, I have been unable to
find any ‘pre-history’. The first sign
I’ve found is a leaflet supporting the Ford sewing machinists strike in
Dagenham, June 1968 given out by the Manchester International Socialists.
1968
was a year when revolution became recognised as a serious topic. While
this can only be properly understood if the growth of the other movements is
recognised, students were central. Inevitably the question ‘What way forward?’
was asked and the relationship between student power, workers power, guerrilla
action scrutinised. Should revolutionary students focus on links with workers?
Or should building ‘red bases’ on campuses be the priority? However, the
question was answered, the solution could only be a global one, involving the
involvement of billions. The old world was dying, a new world was struggling to
be born.
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