VT Coughtrey - Brighton Hostel: Grosvenor Square

NOTES	So at the end of 1968 it became necessary for me once again to find someone to put me up pending the availability of the Islingword Road premises. But before we leave 1968 at last, I must backtrack a bit to October to reveal my part in a great event of that year.
	You may remember my significant encounter with Janie in Chapter 56. As I mentioned there, she was a bit of a revolutionary. She introduced me to a group, of which she was a member, called SCREW. This stood for 'Support and Communications for Revolution in Europe and the World'. They were a bunch of very angry students and drop-out students who met conspiratorially in a basement flat in Lewes Road to plan ways of supporting various revolutionary groups, particularly in the area of fundraising. I quickly latched on to them, not so much because they were working towards the overthrow of Capitalism, as that I was constantly working on expanding the circle of people throughout Brighton and Hove that I could drop in on from time to time, to score a meal. Combined with the ongoing practice of party-crashing, this frequent dropping-in on people meant that I was able to concentrate all of my unofficial income as leader-by-default of the Brighton Hostel Project (an income which had by now grown to become roughly one and the same with the entire income of the Project) on the serious business of propping up the bars of the Norfolk, the King & Queen, the Harvey Arms, the Basketmakers and other hair-friendly pubs that I may already have mentioned. This occupation in turn led to my making the acquaintance of yet more people of the type you could drop in on at any time for a meal and a drink. There were many of them in Brighton (and elsewhere) at that time, and very interesting people most of them were, too - poets, artists, musicians and people who were interesting enough without any such labels at all.
	Well, although it was not, as I say, primarily their revolutionary zeal that was the attraction, I nevertheless soon began to feel rather ashamed of myself in their company. After all, from quite an early age, as you will already have read, I had lived under the impression that I was one of only a very few true revolutionaries in Britain, possibly the only one, in fact. Of course, during my Leeds era I had discovered that this wasn't quite true any more - times were changing, and the demo described in Chapter 39 had shown that among the growing liberal protest movement was a tiny band of real overthrowers. Through SCREW and some of Mike Taylor's associates from the CBR lockout (Chapter 53), I now discovered that, having burgeoned in my absence, the revolutionary element had swamped and subverted the protest movement, at least as far as street action was concerned, and that this was happening all over Europe and even in the USA. My hour had come at long last, but I had turned my back.
	The old revolutionary sap began to rise again and fast, especially when I heard that a great Vietnam demo was planned for London in October, and found that the press was getting worked up about the likelihood of violence and destruction. The Vietnam demo of '66 had been organized by pacifists, the slogan was "Peace in Vietnam!" and the street-fighting revolutionaries were in a tiny minority. This one was obviously going to be different. The organizers themselves were hard-line revolutionaries, the slogan was "Victory to the Vietcong!" and the press (and events in Europe) were ensuring that it would be a great gathering of the Politico-Angry. I knew that I had to be there. Not to go would have been a self-betrayal and a wanton waste of all the dreams, fantasies, angst and anger (not to mention hundreds of hours of hard thinking) of the past. I was back on the boil.
	On the eve of the great day, I got a train to Victoria in the company of Bob Stokes (see the description of the Beats in Chapter 51) and Robert, a quietly spoken but inwardly seething Scottish teenager who had recently joined the beach scene. I had heard that students had seized and occupied the London School of Economics, as a base from which to plan the imminent Revolution. We made our way over to Aldwych, somehow skirted round the mass of police holding the building under siege, and got in. I've no idea how we managed that, but manage it we did. Inside, beyond the mangled remains of flimsy security barriers that had been lowered from the ceilings during the initial assault on the building (which had caused the death of a security officer from a heart attack), we found quite a high degree of organization. Seminars and lectures on various aspects of revolution were being held in a number of rooms and the catering facilities had been taken over by the insurgents (not all of whom were really students, by any means). A hall had been prepared for dossing down for the night, and the three of us made use of it.
	The next morning everyone - there were about five hundred of us, I should think - was ushered into the main hall of the building for a series of fiery speeches aimed at inflaming our passions for the big march, which was due to start in a couple of hours. The only one I can remember is the one in which the speaker urged us to forget all the political claptrap and the official cause of the march and just go out there and "destroy everything because we're all BUGGED!". The speaker was quickly chased from the platform. He'd got too near to the truth. After the speeches, the occupation was declared over and we all came out of the building to form our own mini-march on Trafalgar Square, from which the main march to the US embassy in Grosvenor Square would be starting. The police had largely disappeared from outside the LSE. They were desperately needed for the main route of the march. The remaining few attempted no action as we came out. They allowed us to form up and march to Trafalgar Square.
I wrote this in 2004, just a year after the march of 2 million against the second Gulf War. That's what I would have had in mind when I wrote "by today's standards".	Eventually, some 50,000 were assembled in the Square for the start of the march. Of course, this is very few by today's standards, but a sizeable number for those days before marching became a popular pursuit - and a positively frightening number when you consider that we were mostly hard-liners, not the picnickers of today's massive and extraordinarily peaceful marches. The first thing I noticed, to my satisfaction, was that the anarchist flags, of which there were a handful in the '66 march, were this time in great abundance. There was going to be a ruck! This was even more certain after the rousing send-off from the plinth of Nelson's Column by Vanessa Redgrave, who exhorted us very powerfully to "storm the US embassy!". The march got under way.
	The anarchists formed themselves into disciplined blocks from the start and obviously thought of themselves as marching to war. They tried to antagonize the police at every opportunity along the route both by taunting and by throwing things ripped off cars, etc, and a number of skirmishes broke out in Oxford Street. When the police responded by trying to halt the march several times, the main mass of the marchers surged forward chanting "Link arms, resist arrest!" and broke the police lines by sheer weight. The police were pretty pathetic by today's standards. They lacked proper riot equipment, for one thing. The mass linking of arms was a great tactic, not seen on marches any more. It automatically organized the marchers into formidable-looking ranks stretching right across the road and had an electrifying effect, especially when we broke into high-knees jogging and chanted "Ho-Ho-Ho Chi Minh!" (the founder of the Vietcong guerillas). But the great chant of the day was "London, Paris, Rome, Berlin - we shall fight and we shall win!" There had been a lot of street action in Rome and Berlin, and France actually seemed on the brink of revolution, with workers joining students at the barricades (this was very far from happening in Britain, where the miners' riots were still sixteen years in the future and students were at their lowest ebb of popularity).
	By the time we arrived at Grosvenor Square, the chanting, the inflammatory leaflets, Vanessa's pre-march speech, the minor clashes with the police and the sight of the broken windows of shops along the route all combined with the thrill of reclaiming the streets from the internal combustion engine, to send me into a high state of system-smashing fervour. This was, I believe, the last occasion on which a major demonstration was allowed anywhere near the US embassy, and there was about to be good reason for this enduring ban. The sight, as we entered the square, of that great golden symbol of US imperialism spreading its wings over London from the roof of the embassy sent us all into a fury. Led by the gallant anarchists, thousands of us tried time and again to break through the wall of police sealing off the area in front of the Embassy. Mounted police were brought in, but we actually charged towards the horses in our frenzy.
	As the situation deteriorated, the police began to look ferociously angry and the atmosphere started to vibrate with dark high-voltage menace. I noticed that young Robert, who was still with me, was actually crying. "Let's get out of here!" he whimpered. I told him he'd have to go without me, which he did. I don't think I ever saw him again. We had become separated from Bob Stokes some time earlier. ;Suddenly a huge roar of applause went up behind me. I looked round and there was Stokes descending from some scoffolding, carrying a long scaffold pole that he had liberated. A section of the multitude was now attempting to break into and occupy the garden in the centre of the Square, which was being protected by police several rows deep all around its perimeter. Taking the gardens would mean that a much greater weight could be put directly behind those trying to storm the embassy. Stokes and about a dozen others were standing line abreast behind the scaffold pole but seemed uncertain as to what to do next. I forced my way over to them, pointed at the police protecting the garden and screamed "Charge!" They charged somewhat half-heartedly towards the police lines but were easily repulsed, although the police were unable to wrest the pole from them.
Newsreel clips of the event look extraordinary today, as the police were all in the everyday uniform of the time, including the traditional helmet! Riot gear, riot vehicles and police 'spies' infiltrating political movements were all introduced as a result of this one conflict.	This feeble attempt at a charge infuriated me, so I joined them on the pole. Suddenly, everything that had ever bugged me, which was a good deal, came before me and filled me with great strength and fury. It was a religious experience. "Charge!" I screamed again, and we found ourselves accelerating with unalterable purpose towards the police. The police scattered and our pole took us through the hedge into the garden. The garden must have been invaded from several other directions at the same time, for it was instantly full. We dropped the pole and joined everyone else in ripping up turfs to fling at the police who were protecting the front of the embassy. Suddenly the police went berserk. There was a mounted charge from the wings, followed by complete mayhem. A long piercing scream from a girl somewhere near the front, who was being trampled or truncheoned, enraged the rioters still further. That scream can still be heard today in television replays of the event. We were now on the run, being chased by police on foot, in cars and on horseback. I saw people being thrown violently into police vans with accompanying kicks and blows.
Had I known what I learned much later, that darts had been thrown at police horses and marbles spread over the road to try to bring them down, I would have been very confused, as cruelty to animals enraged me every bit as much as 'the System'.	A few hundred of us eventually found ourselves in Hyde Park, still being pursued by police. Most of the comrades were now intent only on escaping without arrest or injury but a handful of us kept regrouping to taunt the police. After an hour or so of running battles, with the number of police and rioters diminishing all the time, it was just between me and one very young policeman. Evidently, we both believed in holding out to the very last man. He could run fast, but I could run faster. He managed to grab my coat for a second at one stage, but I wriggled free and ran towards Kensington Gardens until he gave up, exhausted. It was a bizarre end to the revolution. I hitched back to Brighton crestfallen and deliberately infuriated Arnrid and other students in the non-revolutionary camp by relating the events. They knew that students would now have an even blacker name and suspected that in the long term the student grant system would be threatened by some future vindictive government. How right they were!
	Many years later (it may have been in 1988, when newspapers were marking the 20th anniversary of the riot) I chanced to see a picture in a discarded Daily Telegraph of the Great Scaffold Pole Charge. Bob Stokes was clearly visible, and there was a character who could have been me, but he was too indistinct for me to be certain. Possibly this picture showed the first feeble charge, not the one I was in.
	I was even more surprised last year (2003) when, having gone to Parliament Square when the invasion of Iraq began, I overheard one of the many thousands of children who had bunked off school to protest, referring to "the Battle of Grosvenor Square in '68". Someone had been teaching them the folklore of the British revolutionary Left. I was curiously elated by this.