1968 in Manchester

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.

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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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