| NOTES |
I believe I'm right in saying that Mike Taylor's sudden loss of interest in the Brighton Hostel Project came about immediately after the dreadful 'meeting' described in the previous chapter. The two were not necessarily linked, but they certainly happened at about the same time. Most of the rest of the committee also disappeared at about that time. Nobody resigned - they just stopped holding meetings or doing anything for the project. The exception was the warm-hearted and hearty Carolyn Holland, to whose Ship Street flat we continued to repair after each fortnightly jumble sale. The bank manager, also nominally a committee member, had only ever been to a couple of meetings anyway. |
| The workers - that's to say the students who helped us collect and sell jumble under the leadership of the irrepressible 'Sidge' Sidgewick, and who now also held regular collections of money in the university, carried on as before. The very word 'committee' was an offence to their ears, so they were perfectly happy to accept me and Carolyn as the only authority. Carolyn, though, worked full-time at the university, so in practice I now found myself pretty much at liberty to do as I pleased with the workforce and the money they raised. It seems odd that, although Mike and the committee had pressured me into taking a job, almost certainly so that I would stop dipping freely into the funds, no-one had ever suggested that a second signature should be required on cheques. Now that the committee had melted away, the funds enjoyed not even the weak protection of the occasional raised eyebrow. My army of student volunteers who worked hard to raise the money, endangering their studies in the process, seemed incapable of suspicion. |
| In their apparent eagerness to forget their less-than-respectable roots, the present-day Brighton Hostel Trust shouldn't forget that without this rebellious attitude on my part, they wouldn't exist at all. | Crucially, Mr Gurney had not withdrawn his offer of the Islingword Road property, following the fiasco of the public meeting. The offer was not even withdrawn when the Corporation inevitably turned down the hostel committee's application for planning permission (the decision coming some weeks after the demise of the committee itself). I found out about the Corporation's refusal from the Argus, not from Mike - I was no longer regularly in touch with him. Mr Gurney now communicated directly with me. The continuing availability of the premises, free of rent, the selfless dedication of the students, the disappearance of all restraining influences upon me and the heady age-of-the-rebel atmosphere of the late sixties all combined to prompt me to say to myself "To hell with the Corporation, the residents, committees and any other obstacles whatsoever. Brighton Hostel will come into being." |
| But it was not going to be just another 'rehabilitation' or 'resettlement' project - in fact, not a hostel at all, in the usual sense. I was now free to remember my original revolutionary desire to offer an alternative, communal way of life to a few carefully selected dossers. Well, as you will know from earlier chapters - and as I had apparently forgotten - it wasn't uniquely my idea at all. it was almost pure Simon, the movement that I openly derided. I was already beginning to dream of opening a chain of units, Simon-like, for various 'levels of inadequacy', throughout the country. Of course, the one big difference was going to be in the leadership. The great rival of the earnestly self-sacrificing, fellow-suffering, frugal-living Anton would be the beer-guzzling, gut-stuffing, party-crashing Vic. |
| Mr Gurney, however, said that I couldn't move in to 105 Islingword Road until he had managed to sell off most of his old ironmongery stock that was still cluttering the place up - some of it was quite valuable even as scrap. He predicted that this process would take a few months at the present rate of progress. But I was soon going to have good reason to hurry him up. I had put an ad in International Times for voluntary workers to live in the planned dosser community They were to be given a pound or two a week pocket money (again, all very Simonesque). I was still living in the bedsit in Buckingham Road. Bedsit‑dwellers rarely had telephones then, but in any case it was fairly common for people to put their addresses in advertisements. |
| See photo of Marcus & Angela, taken the previous year. | I was soon visited by a couple who had assumed, fairly reasonably, that the address given was that of the 'commune' itself, and that they could move in straight away. Their names were Marcus and Angela. I found them excitingly exotic and had little hesitation in offering them my bed for the night while I slept on the floor. Angela, wishing to visit the bathroomt in the middle of the night, went through the wrong door - into the bedroom of the landlady's terrified daughter, in fact. The next morning a note was pushed under my door ordering me to leave immediately. Mrs Pleecer had seen me in the Argus a few times in connection with the various publicity stunts and, more recently, the disastrous meeting. She therefore knew that I was involved in some project to accommodate dossers and Angela's midnight mistake had convinced her that I was in the process of setting up a hostel in my room. |
| I moved out straight away, without argument. It meant that I had, temporarily, to go back to the 'beachnik' scene to seek shelter. However, in view of the long-term consequences of my premature advertisement in IT, it would be an understatement of considerable magnitude to say that it all turned out for the good in the end. |