NOTES
Well, I suppose there were plenty of Sussex students at the time who were not in either camp, but I was hardly likely to notice their existence. They would have been of no interest to me one way or the other. |
The fund-raising stunts thought up for me by Mike Taylor necessitated the support of a team of willing helpers. The obvious place in Brighton to find such people in the late sixties was at Sussex University. The middle-class students there were sharply divided into political revolutionaries and militant do‑gooders like Arnrid and Sidge (Chapter 50). Even the many student parties I gatecrashed were usually for one type or the other, not both at the same time. Mike had enrolled the help of many students during the CBR lockout but, of course, they were from the political camp. The extremists among them excited me much more than the do‑gooders of course, but they were no good for the task in hand. Mike therefore urged me to renew my acquaintance with Arnrid and Sidge and also arranged for me to give two or three talks at the University on the problem of dossers in Brighton and what we proposed to do about it. I soon found, to my great surprise, that I quite enjoyed public speaking and was actually quite good at it. I've since found that this is often the case with people who, like me, are generally awkward and shy on social occasions (unless drunk). We feel inferior and out of place when required to mix on an equal footing, but stick us on a stage with all eyes and ears giving us undivided attention, and we instantly feel at ease and in control, provided the audience is not too hostile. Also, after giving a talk, the socializing is easier, because people come up to you, wanting to discuss what you were saying. |
| Of course, what helped in the case of the students was that, although they were eager to help anyone at all who seemed to need it, they found the idea of getting involved with dossers particularly exciting. They were, after all, from very sheltered backgrounds in the main. Sensing their excitement, I piled on the sordid details about dossing and painted a picture of myself as a superdosser (this was not at all difficult, given that I still dressed in dirty old ill-fitting clothes with holes in them, and rarely washed). I soon had a large team of passionately keen volunteers, headed by Sidge and Carolyn Holland, who was not a student, but secretary to the professor of biology. |
| This was the origin of the Brighton Hostel Trust, which in 2009 celebrated its 40th anniversary - a year late! The missing year is significant. They have failed to acknowledge messages from me about the early days, or to accept them on their website. It smells like a conspiracy by what eventually became an establishment-friendly organisation, to conceal its origins. Sorry BHT, but there's a lot more about your weird beginnings in the next few chapters! | Mike set a fundraising target of £500 (an ambitious sum then) and opened a bank acount - the Brighton Hostel Fund. I hated the word 'hostel', as it totally misrepresented my aim of a three-tier system of rough shelter at the bottom, self governing household in the middle and self-supporting community at the top. However, Mike persuaded me that a little misrepresentation would be no bad thing, in the interests of keeping it simple and not shocking potential donors. The Brighton Hostel Committee was formed, with Mike as Chairman, Carolyn Holland as secretary and the manager of our bank, the Bank of Ireland, as treasurer. Other members were the vicar of Hove and a couple of Labour councillors (probably the only two - Brighton was solidly Tory at that time). I was horrified when Mike announced that I was to be known as the Warden (although no 'hostel' existed yet) and furthermore, that it wouldn't look good if the mere Warden were to be a member of the committee. When I thought about it though, I realized that the Committee had a very great vulnerability, which was that its members were all hard‑working people with precious little time to maintain much control over what was going on. Mike himself was about to embark on a career as a trade union official and had his philosophical work to complete. I could steer the thing any way I wanted, if I were sufficiently devious, because it would inevitably be left to me to carry out the Committee's (i.e. Mike's) weekend pronouncements. |
| To raise the £500, Mike came up with two main activities for the student volunteers. These consisted of touring the smarter parts of Brighton and Hove every weekend in a hired van, collecting jumble to be sold in church halls, and organizing and participating in a series of sponsored walks. Additionally, I was to take part in a number of stunts designed to attract the attention of the media, so that I could appeal for funds. Firstly,
I had to get into a pantomime cow with Sidge and trot through the streets of Brighton. Sidge was the front half and to my horror, led us into the foyers of all the smartest hotels on the seafront, including the Metropole. Although we caused sufficient panic among the staff of these stuffy places for them to push us out angrily with many harsh words and even to call the police, we failed miserably to make it into the local newspapers. |
| The next stunt was more successful. It consisted of my walking all around the boundaries of East and West Sussex (about 120 miles I think someone calculated) accompanied by an eighteen-year-old female student, Gayle. Gayle was a delightful person and cheerfully put up with trudging up to thirty miles a day, getting soaked and dossing down at night in barns in damp clothes. Actually, she was also a naïve girl who clearly saw no danger in spending three nights lying next to a strange man in pitch dark and lonely places. I have to confess that it was my usual embarrassment rather than chivalry that held me back from trying anything on, especially when one night she clung to me as we were lying on bales of straw in a barn because she'd been scared by a strange noise. This idea of an innocent girl volunteering to spend three or four days and nights in the open country with a character looking as disreputable as I did, all for charity, captured the attention of the local paper and Southern Television. The Brighton Evening Argus produced a very nice picture of us together, but they don't seem to keep photographs going back that far. Can anyone help? |
| Despite his apparent cautiousness, Pee Wee Judge was killed at Farnborough air show two years after my encounter with him. | .Another stunt was linked to the longest of the students' sponsored walks, from Brighton to Horsham. I had made the mistake of telling Mike about my one flying lesson the previous year and it gave him the idea of sending the two hundred or so walkers on their way with an aerobatic display over the seafront, with me in the aircraft as a passenger. I went to Shoreham airfield to see Pee Wee Judge, the famous aerobatic pilot and chief test pilot of Beagle Aircraft. He said it was a crazy idea and he wouldn't dream of it, but it would be alright by him if any of his staff were daft enough to do it. Someone offered to do it - at a price. |
| I believe Cessna later brought out an aerobatic version. | On the day of the big walk, I walked to Shoreham airfield and was conducted to, of all things, a Cessna 150. "But surely", I asked my pilot, "these are not stressed for aerobatics?"
"Oh, I expect it will hold together" he shrugged. I climbed into the Cessna and sat next to him. He fumbled about for a while, then asked in exasperation "How the hell do you start these 150s?"
"Have you not flown one before?" I asked in alarm. "No" was the unnerving reply, "but you soon get the hang of a new type". Eventually, he got it started, and we took off. After a few minutes we were over Brighton seafront. "Here?" he asked. "Yes, please - that crowd you can see at the entrance to the Palace Pier are the walkers" I replied. Having circled a few times to gain a good altitude, he pointed the nose of the aircraft at the start of the pier, went into a steep dive, then pulled up and over, in a big loop. The second time round, he rolled off the top. Then came a series of stall turns and a spin, at the end of which there was very little room left (so it seemed to me in my somewhat altered state) between ourselves and the pier. "Enough? Or shall I go upstairs and start again?"
"I think that will do, thank you" I replied, trying not to sound ruffled. Actually, I would very much have enjoyed it, in a different aircraft. As it was, my gaze had been pretty much fixed on those extraordinarily flimsy-looking Cessna 150 wing struts rather than on the Metropole, the pier and the walkers, all churning round and round, and over and over. |