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THE PARTY'S OVER? THE ANGRY BRIGADE, THE COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE BRITISH NEW LEFT, 1967–1972

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2015

J. D. TAYLOR Open the ORCID record for J. D. TAYLOR [Opens in a new window]
J. D. TAYLOR*
Affiliation:
University of Roehampton
*
Department of Humanities, Digby Stuart College, University of Roehampton, London sw15 5phtaylord2@roehampton.ac.uk
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Abstract

This article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It analyses the group's development, actions, communications, as well as surrounding media discourses, subsequent police investigation, and the criminal trials of ten individuals for their involvement in the Angry Brigade. The article reappraises their overlooked historical significance among the wider countercultural militancy and discourses of political violence of the late 1960s to early 1970s.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 58 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 877 - 900
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 See for instance Arthur Marwick, British society since 1945 (London, 2003), p. 147; Roy Porter, London: a social history (London, 1996), pp. 362–3; Peter Clarke, Hope and glory: Britain, 1900–1990 (London, 1997), pp. 290–2; Jerry White, London in the twentieth century: a city and its people (London, 2002), pp. 341–51. For a refreshingly critical take on these two decades, though again lacking analysis of political violence, see Kenneth O. Morgan, Britain since 1945: the people's peace (New York, NY, 2001), pp. 261–2, 294–7.

2 Dominic Sandbrook, White heat: a history of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London, 2006), p. xi.

3 Jonathon Green, All dressed up: the sixties and the counterculture (London, 1999), p. xii; Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: marching in the streets (New York, NY, 1998), p. 10.

4 Based on a quantitative study of targets referred to in their fourteen communiqués issued to the underground and national press. Note that the originals of these communiqués no longer survive, and historians are necessarily dependent on either archives of the underground press which quote them, or Carr's comprehensive account of the Angry Brigade, based on an initial 1973 BBC documentary and later published in 1975 (republished 2003 and 2010). See Gordon Carr, The Angry Brigade: a history of Britain's first urban guerrilla group (Oakland, CA, 2010), pp. 237–48.

5 Stuart Christie provides an exhaustive chronology in Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 194–237.

6 Marwick devotes more significance to the Garden House Hotel protest in Cambridge: see Arthur Marwick, The sixties: cultural revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (New York, NY, 1998), pp. 751–2. Its absence is conspicuous in Jeremy Black's discussion of Britain as ‘ungovernable’ in chapter 4 of Britain since the seventies (London, 2004); I refer also to Andy Beckett, When the lights went out: Britain in the seventies (London, 2009); Clarke, Hope and glory; Morgan, Britain since 1945; Porter, London: a social history; White, London in the twentieth century.

7 Tom Vague, Anarchy in the UK: the Angry Brigade (Edinburgh, 1997); Green, All dressed up, pp. 272–92.

8 Tim Pat Coogan, The IRA (New York, NY, 2002), pp. 385–6.

9 Jeremy Varon, Bringing the war home: the weather underground, the Red Army faction, and revolutionary violence in the sixties and seventies (Berkeley, CA, 2004), pp. 4–5; Samantha M. R. Christiansen, ‘“The Brigade is everywhere”: violence and spectacle in the British counterculture’, in Timothy Brown and Lorena Anton, eds., Between the avant-garde and the everyday: subversive politics in Europe from 1957 to present (New York, NY, 2013), pp. 48–9.

10 Christiansen, ‘“The Brigade is everywhere”’, p. 57; Robinson, Lucy, ‘Carnival of the oppressed: the Angry Brigade and the Gay Liberation Front’, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 6 (2003), pp. 4–8Google Scholar.

11 A feeling evoked by contemporaries, and used directly by Sheila Rowbotham, Promise of a dream: remembering the sixties (New York, NY, 2001), p. 205.

12 Hall, Stuart, ‘Life and times of the first New Left’, New Left Review, 61 (2010), pp. 177–8Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 178; Geoff Andrews, ‘The three New Lefts and their legacies’, in Geoff Andrews et al., eds., New Left, New Right and beyond: taking the sixties seriously (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 67–8.

14 I have also drawn broadly on three histories of the British New Left: Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British intellectuals after Stalin (London, 1995); Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh, 1993); Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in postwar Britain: history, the New Left, and the origins of cultural studies (Durham, NC, and London, 1997).

15 Thompson, E. P., ‘Socialist humanism: an epistle to the Philistines’, New Reasoner, 1 (1957), pp. 105–43Google Scholar; and, in response, Taylor, Charles, ‘Marxism and humanism’, New Reasoner, 2 (1957), pp. 92–8Google Scholar. Discussion would continue in subsequent issues.

16 Alan Hooper, ‘A politics adequate to the age: the New Left and the long sixties’, in Andrews et al., eds., New Left, New Right and beyond, pp. 16–19; Tom Steele, ‘Hey Jimmy! The legacy of Gramsci in British cultural politics’, in Andrews et al., eds., New Left, New Right and beyond, p. 31; Andrews, ‘The three New Lefts and their legacies’, pp. 68, 75.

17 Steele, ‘Hey Jimmy!’, pp. 32–4.

18 Nigel Fountain, Underground: the London alternative press, 1966–1974 (London and New York, NY, 1988).

19 John Barker, ‘Review of Tom Vague's “Anarchy in the UK: the Angry Brigade”’, in Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 184–5.

20 Tariq Ali supplies strong evidence of its internationalist focus throughout 1968: marching in the streets.

21 Students for a Democratic Society, ‘Introduction: agenda for a generation’, Port Huron Statement, in William S. McConnell, ed., The counterculture movement of the 1960s (Farmington Hills, MI, 2004), p. 45.

22 Jonathon Green, Days in the life: voices from the English underground, 1961–1971 (London, 1988), p. vii.

23 Clarke, Hope and glory, pp. 288–9.

24 Good biographical information is provided in Jackie Leishman, ‘A trial without the Angry Brigade’, Guardian, 7 Dec. 1972, pp. 12–13.

25 Clarke, Hope and glory, pp. 291–2.

26 Green, Days in the life, p. 112.

27 Caroline Hoefferle, British student activism in the long sixties (New York, NY, and London, 2013), p. 102.

28 H. L. Malchow, Special relations: the Americanization of Britain? (Stanford, CA, 2011), chs. 3–6; Mark Donnelly, Sixties Britain: culture, society, and politics (New York, NY, and Abingdon, 2005), p. 85.

29 Theodore Roszak, The making of a counter culture: reflections on the technocratic society and its youthful opposition (London, 1970), pp. 1–7.

30 Rowbotham, Promise of a dream, p. 225; Barry Miles, Hippie (London, 2003), p. 330.

31 Carol Hanisch, ‘The personal is political’, in Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds., Notes from the second year: women's liberation (New York, NY, 1970), pp. 76–8; Fountain, Underground, pp. 49–50; Hooper, ‘A politics adequate to the age’, pp. 16–18; Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 23.

32 Clarke, Hope and glory, pp. 291–2; White, London in the twentieth century, pp. 341–3; Bob Dickinson, Imprinting the sticks: the alternative press beyond London (Aldershot, 1997), p. 59.

33 Clarke, Hope and glory, pp. 317–18; Morgan, Britain since 1945, pp. 262–3.

34 Peter Townsend and Dorothy Wedderburn, The aged in the welfare state (London, 1965); Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, The poor and the poorest (London, 1965).

35 Fountain, Underground, p. 188. This mood of pessimism within the establishment would continue into the 1970s, reflected in Frank Kitson's British counter-terrorist work, Low intensity operations (1971), Alan Burns's The Angry Brigade, and B. S. Johnson's Christie Malry's own double-entry (both London, 1973), whose plots revolve around terrorist campaigns; and Anthony Burgess's anti-TUC pessimistic prophecy, 1985 (London, 1978).

36 Morgan, Britain since 1945, pp. 288–9, 300–5.

37 Time Out, 13 June 1970, quoted in Chad Andrew Martin, ‘Paradise now: youth politics and the British counterculture, 1958–1974' (Ph.D. thesis, Stanford, 2003), p. 282.

38 Hoefferle, British student activism, pp. 109–15.

39 Malchow, Special relations, pp. 52–63.

40 Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 199, 208.

41 Ibid., pp. 29–32; Fountain, Underground, p. 53.

42 Fountain, Underground, p. 61.

43 Ibid., pp. 56–60.

44 Hoefferle, British student activism, pp. 110–11; ‘Sauce Box’, IT, vol. 1, no. 28, 5 Apr. 1968, p. 2Google Scholar.

45 ‘Jagger/Miles’, IT, vol. 1, no. 31, 17 May 1968, p. 3Google Scholar; Fountain, Underground, p. 38; Tariq Ali, Street fighting years: an autobiography of the sixties (London, 2005), p. 300.

46 New Society, 21 Mar. 1968, in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 205.

47 White, London in the twentieth century, pp. 205, 349–50.

48 Martin, ‘Paradise now’, p. 280.

49 Donnelly, Sixties Britain, pp. 148–50.

50 Dickinson, Imprinting the sticks, p. 54.

51 Barker in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 32.

52 Malchow, Special relations, pp. 62–3.

53 See for instance Rowbotham on the schisms within Black Dwarf: Promise of a dream, p. 250.

54 Ibid., p. 206.

55 Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in postwar Britain, p. 193.

56 Fountain, Underground, pp. 124–5; Dickinson, Imprinting the sticks, p. 69.

57 Leishman, ‘A trial without the Angry Brigade’, p. 12.

58 Green, Days in the life, p. 358.

59 Guardian [editorial], ‘Angry Brigade: revolutionary Pollyannas’, 7 Dec. 1972, p. 16.

60 Brown, Timothy Scott, ‘The sixties in the city: avant-gardes and urban rebels in New York, London, and West Germany’, Journal of Social History, 46 (2013), pp. 830–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 John Windsor, ‘Defendant tells of meeting members of the Angry Brigade’, Guardian, 14 Oct. 1972.

62 IT featured a Situationist-inspired cover on its 16 Feb. 1969 issue, originally fly-posted on their office; Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 19.

63 Guy Debord, The society of the spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York, NY, 1995), ii §42, p. 29.

64 Weir, ‘Introduction’, in The Angry Brigade, 1967–1984: documents and chronology (London, 1985), p. 21.

65 Friendly, John, ‘The daily grind’, IT, vol. 1, no. 84, 30 July 1970, pp. 7–10Google Scholar; Fountain, Underground, pp. 57, 154, 162–3.

66 Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 54.

67 White, London in the twentieth century, pp. 296–7; Mike Phillips and Trevor Phillips, Windrush: the irresistible rise of multiracial Britain (London, 1998), pp. 277–80.

68 Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 47, 199. The First of May group were a geographically dispersed network, targeting symbols of Spanish authority in other European cities, including Paris, Turin, The Hague, and Bonn.

69 Ibid., pp. 45–9.

70 Ibid., p. 212.

71 Evidence of these obscure attacks has again been exhaustively collated by Stuart Christie, and appended to Carr's documentary history of the group. See Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 214–18.

72 ‘Street fighting man’, IT, vol. 1, issue 92, 20 Nov. 1970, p. 8Google Scholar.

73 Including a BBC broadcast van at the Miss World 1970; two attacks on the home of Attorney General Rawlinson; the home of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Waldron; four Barclays’ branches; six Conservative associations; and a generator in Altrincham, all undated. See ‘first communiqué’, communiqués 5 and 7, and Christie's timeline of later ‘Angry Brigade’ attacks, in Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 226, 237, 239, 241–3.

74 Most end with ‘power to the people’ or ‘revolution’, and there are frequent addresses to ‘brothers and sisters’ and ‘comrades’ in many, though these were fairly common forms of address. The exuberance and frequently capitalized phrases of seven and eight (again of a style similar to a typical article in the underground press) are dissimilar to the paranoid cautiousness of six, the violent threats of twelve, or the calm eloquence of five, six, and thirteen. See Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 237–48.

75 Ibid., pp. 50–5.

76 Ibid., p. 215.

77 Communiqué 13, in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 248.

78 Such as the 18 Aug. 1970 bombing of Iberian Airlines in London, and the attack on the home of Waldron claimed by ‘Butch Cassidy’ and ‘the Sundance Kid’ twelve days later. See Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 51–3, for further investigation of these links.

79 Ibid., pp. 45–6; Stuart Christie, The Christie file (Sanday, 1980), p. 68.

80 Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 57.

81 IT, vol. 1, no. 94, 17 Dec. 1970, p. 2Google Scholar.

82 Varon, Bringing the war home, p. 120; Dan Berger, Outlaws in America: the weather underground and the politics of solidarity (Oakland, CA, 2006), pp. 136–7.

83 Reflecting a growing internationalism, Tupamaros were named after Uruguayan Marxist rebels, and all three groups received training in a Palestine Liberation Organization camp in Jordan. See J. Smith and André Moncourt, eds. and trans., The Red Army faction: a documentary history, i:Projectiles for the people (Oakland, CA, and Montreal, 2009), pp. 583–5.

84 RAF, ‘The urban guerrilla concept’, in Smith and Moncourt, eds. and trans., Red Army faction, p. 100.

85 Ibid., p. 86.

86 Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group, If you want peace, prepare for war (London, 1972), p. 15.

87 Interviewed in Martin Bright, ‘Look back in anger’, Observer, 3 Feb. 2002.

88 On the Industrial Relations Bill of 1970, and enactment the following year, see Chris Wrigley, British trade unions, 1945–1995 (Manchester, 1997), pp. 85–9.

89 Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 238.

90 Communiqué 4, in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 239.

91 Ibid., pp. 94–7; Leishman, ‘A trial without the Angry Brigade’, p. 13.

92 Quoted in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 224.

93 Fountain, Underground, p. 147.

94 Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 217–26.

95 Daily Mirror, leader comment, 14 Jan. 1971. For detailed analysis of newspaper coverage of the Angry Brigade, see Steve Chibnall, Law-and-order news: an analysis of crime reporting in the British press (London, 1977), pp. 96–7.

96 In Chibnall, Law-and-order news, p. 96.

97 Lynne Segal, What is to be done about the family? (Harmondsworth, 1983), p. 49.

98 Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 241.

99 Ibid., p. 240.

100 Ibid., pp. 61, 72–8.

101 Adam Gearey, Wayne Morrison, and Robert Jago, The politics of the common law: perspectives, rights, processes, institutions (Abingdon and New York, NY, 2013), p. 297.

102 Gary Slapper and David Kelly, The English legal system, 2013–2014 (14th edn, Abingdon and New York, NY, 2013), pp. 519–26.

103 Barker in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 183.

104 Elizabeth Nelson, The British counter-culture, 1966–1973: a study of the underground press (London, 1989), pp. 117–22.

105 David Hendy, Life on air: a history of Radio Four (Oxford, 2007), pp. 93, 95, 98.

106 See for instance Anderson, Jim, ‘The anarchist cookbook: “turn on, burn down, blow up!”’, Oz, 33 (1971), pp. 38–40Google Scholar.

107 Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group, If you want peace, p. 15.

108 Elizabeth Wilson with Angela Weir, Hidden agendas: theory, politics, and experience in the women's movement (London, 1986), pp. 42–3.

109 Daily Express, 7 Dec. 1972, in Christie, Christie file, p. 365.

110 Fountain, Underground, p. 179.

111 Mendleson was released on parole in Nov. 1976, and Creek in Apr. 1977; Barker and Greenfield were released after six years; with Prescott released after eight years: see David Pallister, ‘Angry Brigade man Prescott released’, Guardian, 27 Feb. 1979, p. 2; Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 177.

112 News of the World, 10 Dec. 1972, in Chibnall, Law-and-order news, p. 112.

113 Sun, 7 Dec. 1972.

114 Chibnall, Law-and-order news, pp. 110–11.

115 In Vague, Anarchy in the UK, p. 114.

116 Quoted in Hoefferle, British student activism, p. 179.

117 Ibid., p. 179.

118 Coogan, The IRA, pp. 389–91, 517–19.

119 Leishman, ‘A trial without the Angry Brigade’, p. 13.

120 Christie, Christie file, p. 245.

121 Barker in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 180.

122 Ibid., p. 180; Creek and Prescott in Bright, ‘Look back in anger’.

123 Quoted in Fountain, Underground, pp. 180, 220.

124 As put by Andrew Marr, A history of modern Britain (London, 2007), p. 331.

125 Fountain, Underground, pp. 141, 159–60; Jonathon Green, ‘The urban guerrillas Britain forgot’, New Statesman, 27 Aug. 2001; Dickinson, Imprinting the sticks, pp. 65–6; White, London in the twentieth century, p. 350.

126 Stuart Hall et al., Policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order (London and Basingstoke, 1982), pp. 291–2.

127 Ibid., p. 292.

128 Ibid., p. 292.

129 Quoted in Carr, Angry Brigade, p. 184.

130 Communiqué 6, in Carr, Angry Brigade, pp. 221, 240.