The Young Revolutionary

The young revolutionary...and erm...is that a horn sticking out from my head?


The first political book I bought was a biography of Lenin by David Shub. I showed it with some pride to John Ward, an active Young Socialist and electrician, who asked to borrow it. The following week I asked what he thought of it. ‘I threw it in the bin’ he said. ‘It was thoroughly rightwing.’

It would be neat conceit now if I was to use this anecdote as an early insight into a closed, totalitarian world, but as an earnest ‘class warrior’ and afraid of being labeled petit bourgeois, I swallowed the hurt. A true Leninist had to be disciplined.

My self-image, the man I aspired to be was ‘Strelnikov’ the Bolshevik zealot in ‘Dr. Zhivago,’ striding the streets of a revolutionary Liverpool, in greatcoat and boots. The reality I disguised from myself for as long as I could was the petit bourgeois spirit that had shaped me from birth. Grandfather Parry worked in the Docks but he was a man of aspiration. His father had owned a small business, his sister a ‘Ballroom Dancing School. Grandfather Keyton had died a Sergeant in the Boer war, his widow bringing up my father single handedly, and he in turn had risen from deck-hand to Chief Officer in the Merchant Navy. A Catholic education gave it the final gloss.

I read the book, Dr Zhivago and I remember crying (in private) when Zhivago lost Lara. I cry quite easily - Jude the Obscure did it for me some years later. My daughter’s quite embarrassed by it. I’m old enough not to be.

But then - the late sixties - it was a different matter. Bolsheviks were calculating and cold. I was Strelnikov lacking only the scar. We discussed Zhivago when the film came out and I remember the general sneer that the story in itself was trivial, ‘petit bourgeois’ - the masses were portrayed unsympathetically - the revolution revealed as an unnecessary inconvenience to the love life of a bourgeois doctor - and so it went on. I loved the poetry but said nothing.

By this time I was devouring the works of Trotsky, rehearsing his arguments, wishing that I too might one day be a great and inflammatory orator. And then I met Peter Taaffe and realised that someone had beaten me to it. Peter was a key figure in ‘The Militant’, a Trotskyite organisation that was infiltrating the Labour Party. He was a powerful and persuasive speaker with a habit of ending a provocative sentence with ‘…you know!’

The ‘you know!’ was delivered in the imperative, and the effect - in my case at least - was for my head to nod…of course I knew!

I began this post with the observation that it in many respects it was a closed and totalitarian world I had entered - and as hard as any cult to break out from - not because of any overt or sinister pressure on the part of those around me, more the guilt and habit of mind I had created for myself.

The Militant was, I know, monitored, almost certainly penetrated by our Security services; it had its share of scoundrels along with men and women of immense moral stature and strength of will.

I discovered eventually that I was no Strelnikov and that I cried too much to be a true revolutionary. I’d resented the Church telling me what to do, and now I realised I resented - really resented John Ward, telling me what books I could and could not read. Basically I hate being told what to do. No Leninist then. But I’m grateful for what ‘Militant’ gave me - belief in myself - an intuitive Marxist sense that life is largely governed by class, and an acceptance of my petit bourgeois heritage.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has a lot to answer for

The first issue of Militant and the first serious paper I read and identified with.

The Last issue of Militant. By this time I was in a more cynical place

It was in Mabel Fletcher Technical College I first met Ken Pimlett, severe of face and hair cut in a neat but spiky brush. He in turn introduced me to the Young Socialists, and in particular Garston Y.S., which met in the offices of the Boilermakers Union. I owe them a debt, which I acknowledge to this day, but more about that later.

Two things stand out: Ken Pimlett’s bedroom, which was covered from ceiling to wall with photos, clippings and posters. I thought it the coolest thing. Our bedroom was pale yellow emulsion with a single crucifix as its main decorative feature. The other was the spartan meeting room of the Boilermakers union in which it was easy to imagine ourselves as Russian revolutionaries.

Music and revolution seemed to go hand in hand, and it was at Kens I was first introduced to Rhythm and blues - John Mayall, Chickenshack with Christine Perfect. Sometimes we played along on air-guitar; sometimes I got criticized for my appalling rhythm on an empty four-pint beer tin. And once we all sat round and listened to a Paul Butterfield Blues Band album - Ken’s finger rising gravely when the bassist fluffed the note we were listening out for.

We met in Garston once a week and discussed Marxism. Sometimes we had speakers, one in particular, a Methodist minister who had been cynically invited to bond us in our vehement mockery of God. Within thirty minutes a smiling man had been reduced to banging his fist on the table, telling us we were all damned.

We were harmless and of good intent, but possessed of certainty.

I wasn’t. Not then. But that was about to be taken in hand

We were always short of speakers, most of the meetings based on one of us taking the floor and talking about an aspect of Marxism. That was easy for the likes of Geoff Fimister and Dave Martin, both doing their A levels and enroute to University, easy too, for Dave Galashan who lived and breathed Marxism, along with Clint Eastwood movies and small black cheroots. But what could I talk about. I didn’t know diddly squat - apart from making sausage rolls.

Talk about anything, they said.

“Anything?”

“Anything.”

My talk was on the lost continent of Mu. It was the first time I’d ever stood up and talked in public. Within ten minutes I had a roomful of Marxists in hysterics.
The talk began promisingly as I assembled the geological evidence (there was none) and the concurrence of myths that suggested the existence of a sunken continent in the Pacific. Mu, or Lemuria both are essentially the same, I asserted confidently to rows of disbelieving heads. They just stared.

The rot set in when I began talking about the Third Root Race

“How many Root Races were there then? “Somebody asked.

“Seven” I said. A serious question, a serious answer. “There were seven root races.”

I went on to describe the Third Root Race - seven-foot tall, egg-laying bipeds. I heard the first titter. The tittering spread as I went on to describe in detail a previously unknown race of bandy-legged reptilians who hopped rather than walked,and of how the Lemurians' mindless cross-breeding with mammals had angered the gods.

The laughter was becoming hysterical and I realized much of it was coming from me.
But still I continued, describing with passion Lemuria’s cataclysmic demise. Bodies doubled over. John Ward nearly fell off from his chair. This was deviating slightly from an analysis of Das Kapitol.

I was wheezing, infected by ribaldry, choking out the words in between giggles. What was I doing here? What was I saying? Where was the door?

But they had to know. They had to know that the survivors of Lemuria now lived in a network of tunnels beneath Mount Shasta in Northern California . . .white robed figures gliding over scree.

There were few questions. Somebody asked me about sources and I made the mistake of telling them about Madame Blavatsky and of how Tibetan wise men had revealed to her The Book of Dyzan, a pre Atlantean book. Confidence returning I told them of Alice Bailey with her stanzas of Dyzan, dictated to her telepathically by a Tibetan mage called Diwal Kul.

They never asked me back for a follow-on lecture on Atlantis. I don’t recollect them asking me to speak again.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky has a lot to answer for