Project: Recovering the regional radical press in Britain, 1968-1988

A project based in the Regional History Centre at UWE(University of the West of England) Bristol. [From Twitter via email notification]

Background

From the Summer of Love through the Winter of Discontent to the rise of Thatcherism – these were heady days for radical community organisations and the news media that supported and connected them. Small, co-operatively produced local papers played an important role in radical politics in these critical decades, but few are now remembered and their history has been largely overlooked. Our project will rediscover these lost papers and reconnect with the people who produced them.

The best known radical papers were London based and enjoyed a national reach: Titles like International Times, Undercurrents, Peace News and the Leveller acted as a mouthpiece for countercultural opposition groups, broadly leftist in outlook but politically non-aligned. Some of these papers have been digitally archived; the complete run of International Times, for example – 1966-1978 – can be viewed on the International Times archive, and Peace News, which continues today in online form, maintains a digital archive from 2001 to the present.

What remains largely unrecorded is the regional and provincial network of local journalism that flourished in the same period. At its peak, some 79 publications of this kind were being produced, mostly by co-operatives of self-taught volunteers, writing, typing, designing and pasting up by hand and using new offset litho technology for printing.

Most appeared fortnightly, monthly or bi-monthly and were either sold in the street or in radical bookshops and one or two friendly newsagents. Most offered readers a mixture of local news from an independent perspective, campaign information, and an alternative ‘what’s on’ guide – a vital section in each edition since the grassroots press was often much more closely aligned with the local underground music and cultural scene than commercial newspapers and magazines.

Some titles broke stories that mainstream papers wouldn’t touch. Rochdale Alternative Paper, for example, printed allegations of sexual misconduct against city MP Cyril Smith in 1979, none of which would resurface in the commercial press until after Smith’s death in 2010. Brighton Voice campaigned effectively on housing issues and became a mouthpiece for the city’s squatting movement. Swansea’s Alarm, by far the most cheaply and roughly produced of the lot, garnered a reputation for exposing corruption on the city council and ran a slate of candidates for election in 1979. Working on papers like these was formative for some now very prominent writers and campaigners. Lynne Segal helped to found the Islington Gutter Press in the 1970s, for example.

None of these papers exist now and many may have disappeared forever. Some are preserved locally in hard copy. For example, Leeds Other Paper can be read in bound volumes in the city’s local studies library in a run spanning 1974-1994, and Bristol Voice in the central library at Bristol, but few papers like these will be found in the British Library’s newspaper collections. Some, like Brighton Voice, which has an informative Wikipedia page devoted to it, have left tangible traces, but few are so easy to track down now.

Today, as more and more news services switch to online platforms and readers expect content to be delivered for free, the future of newsprint publishing looks increasingly precarious. Whether radical self-help publishing will be forced to fight for attention on the internet or find the resources to reinvigorate the physical newspaper remains to be seen. Crowdfunding is one possibility; indeed it is being actively pursued at the moment here in the South West by a new generation of levellers.

The project

Recovering the Regional Radical Press in Britain, 1968-1988, is a project based in the Regional History Centre at UWE Bristol and is co-ordinated by Phil Chamberlain (Journalism) and Professor Steve Poole (History).

We have four main objectives:

1. To identify and locate full runs of each paper.
2. To identify and make contact with former members of regional radical paper production teams.
3. To enable the production of new oral and archival histories of radical regional publishing in Britain.
4. To make these papers publicly available again (through digitisation).

We are currently (2018-19) working on the first two of these objectives. And we’re going to need plenty of help!

How you can help

Please contact us if:

1. You once worked on a paper like this.
2. You know the whereabouts of any existing copies today.
3. You have memories of buying and reading them.

The project can be contacted at rhc@uwe.ac.uk


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RaHN blogger adds:-
Just one example of the sort of thing they may be looking for, from Aberdeen Protest blog):

Aberdeen People’s Press (1973 – 1983)

September 7, 2014 by aberdeenprotest

 

The Press, ‘Scotland’s Socialist Community Printers’, was established as a non-profit making company in 1973 and ran until 1983. The Press produced the community newspaper ‘Aberdeen People’s Press’, was a commercial printing service for socialist and community groups and also published relevant works.
The newspaper ran to some 60 issues from 1973 until summer 1976, with a circulation of between 800 and 1700. Although billed as a local newspaper: its viewpoints, news and analysis were radical. There were in depth reports on criticising the effects of the oil & gas industry, military bases in the north-east, abortion providers in the north-east, health and safety in the oil & gas industry and councillor’s business interests etc. After the newspaper finished another similar publication called ‘Big Print’ was issued and it ran to some 21 issuesbetween 1978 and 1980. The Big Print termed itself ‘A local libertarian socialist newspaper’ and was more stridently political than its predecessor.
Although the newspaper was no longer published, the Press started to commission and publish books with more in–depth analysis. These are still excellent publications: ‘Oil Over Troubled Waters: a report and critique of oil developments in north-east Scotland’, ‘Aberdeen in the General Strike’, ‘Fascism in Aberdeen: street politics in the 1930s’ and ‘James Leatham (1865 – 1945)’.
The Press were initially housed at the Aberdeen Arts & Community Workshop, then at a house in Rubislaw Den South. In 1976 though the Press moved into the basement of 163 King Street, and shared the space with the Workers’ Educational Association, and shops on the ground level: a wholefood shop (Ambrosia Wholefoods/Cairnleith Croft) and a bookshop (Boomtown Books).


References: see below. Also, Scottish Community Newspapers (Brian Murphy and Alan Marshall, Aberdeen People’s Press, 1978).
Sources: papers held at University of Aberdeen Library as well as a near complete set of the published newspapers. Also representative works from their own library including hundreds of publications from across the UK and a number from overseas. The publications date from the 1960s through to the 1980s and represent a variety of socialist, anarchist, ecologist, anti-capitalist and feminist groups.


Responses

1. on July 22, 2015 at 2:58 pm | Reply chan

   Aberdeen Arts and Community Workshop was not based in Powis house, but in a ground floor Powis flat given rent free by the council to a small group of activists who had been involved in the Holland Street/Hutchison Street tenants group and rent strike. For three years it ran a summer playscheme for local kids, offered housing advice, and ran an active claimants union all funded by donations from charitable trusts. Six of the latter claimants group were arrested on breach of the peace charges for washing the walls of the DHSS office’s waiting room after a fruitless months’ long campaign to have it cleaned up. The workshop eventually was granted Urban Aid and was handed over to members of the Powis community.
   Aberdeen Solidarity mutated into a left-communist group called Revolutionary Perspectives in the early 70’s, becoming the Communist Workers Organisation in 1975 when it fused with a Liverpool group called Workers Voice.
2. on September 25, 2015 at 8:29 pm | Reply aberdeenprotest

   Great thanks for the extra information.

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UPDATE ON PROJECT, December 2018

Jess, the new research associate on Recovering the Regional Radical Press project at UWE, just started a few weeks ago. She writes:

  

A lot of people made contact so there’s been a lot of forwarding going on! 

Basically what I'm doing at the moment is 'stage 1': compiling databases of newspaper titles, people and any local radical newspapers holdings in personal collections and archives. I'm adding all the info that has been sent, along with that which I'm finding otherwise (trawling archive holdings and old publications etc). 

... As you know we are trying to build a network of ex participants, readers, hoarders, archives and people with related interests.  

We’ve set up a website for sharing finds and updates about how its going, as well as a twitter account, so if you want to follow either of these and share them around, we’d be really happy. 

Our twitter name if you do that kind of thing is @RegionRadPress

The website is https://radpresshistory.wordpress.com and I’ve just written an update post (the link takes you straight to the post). 

If you come across anyone else that wants to get in touch about the project, please feel free to pass on my email address. 

For now, just to say many thanks – and here's to getting some of this rich, messy history and its newspapers together! 

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Selection of rich, messy history as illustrated on Aberdeen Protest blog

Call for participants (Claimants' Union and other activists) to help a research project

A social policy lecturer at the University of Edinburgh has contacted us about a research project entitled ‘Bringing labour back in: class antagonism, labour agency and Britain’s active labour market reforms’.

He writes:

As part of the study I am conducting oral history interviews with people active in claimants unions/ advocacy and campaign groups/ Unemployed Workers Centres/ relevant trade unions during the 1980/90s.

The main aim is to recover a ‘bottom up’ story of people's response to the introduction of various social security and employment programme reforms of the last 30 years and how they and their organisations sought to shape them and were shaped by them.  

I’m especially interested in speaking with individuals who were active in initiatives around Restart/Job Training Scheme/YTS/ Stricter Benefit Regime in the 1980s and/or Project Work and JSA/ New Deals in the 1990s

(The research is supported by the Independent Social Research Foundation and more about the project can be found at http://isrf.org/about/fellows-and-projects/jay-wiggan/)

Dr Jay Wiggan

Lecturer in Social Policy

School of Social & Political Science, University of Edinburgh

15a George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9LD

Tel: +44(0)131 650 3939

E-mail: j.wiggan@ed.ac.uk

Twitter

University of Edinburgh profile

MSc Policy Studies Programme  

(The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336)

He adds:

I’m hoping to complete most of the interviews between now and the end of June, prior to people's most likely holiday period. I am though more than happy to speak to people at any point during the summer.

I will of course come down to London to conduct interviews unless the person would prefer to speak over the telephone.

RaHN adds: 

Previously on this blog:-

Claimants and unemployed issues and struggles in the 1970s and 1980s (especially in Tottenham in the 1980s) - what can we learn from them?

Haringey Solidarity Group - some activities past and present [1990-2005]

Solidarnošč 1980: How (some of) Solidarity Saw It

It was 35 years ago that events in Poland, hitting the world headlines, were giving hope and encouragement to many on the anti-authoritarian left. In London, members of the Solidarity group – including Chris Pallis, as noted previously – were among those who reacted most promptly and positively. [This was not a ‘party line’, however: some people associated with the group took a less sanguine view, at the time or with hindsight. One later recalled, “in 1980-1 over the Polish strikes … an understandable but rather desperate desire to whistle in the dark led us all to overlook the deeply reactionary aspects (in retrospect, these were the most important aspects) of Solidarnosc.” For others, the most important aspect was that such a movement should have got under way at all after so many years of repression in all areas of life.]

A demonstration marked the first anniversary of the imposition of martial law

The article reproduced here appeared (p.S16) in a 24-page Supplement, ‘Summer in Gdansk’, included in the magazine Solidarity for Social Revolution, no. 14, Oct.-Nov. 1980, pp.S1-S24, and also distributed separately.          

          

MEANWHILE IN BRITAIN…

TWO MEETINGS

A meeting was held at the Conway Hall, on Tuesday August 26, to discuss events in Poland. It was called under the auspices of the London Solidarity group, in cooperation with other tendencies and individuals. The widespread interest aroused by the Polish workers’ struggle was shown by the numbers who attended, in the holiday season and at very short notice. The Small Hall was packed to the door, standing room only. At the end of three hours we went away feeling that something had been achieved: the setting up of a Polish Solidarity Committee; planned intervention at TUC Conference with the aim of stopping the proposed delegation of fraternal bureaucrats; and the sending of two telegrams, one expressing solidarity with the strikers through B [initial only given] in Paris, and one to the Polish government supporting the workers’ call for the establishment of free trade unions.

Success, then? To a considerable extent, certainly, and well worth doing. But there were some dissenting voices (as readers of Freedom may have noted) and criticisms which are worth considering. It could all, perhaps, have been done better, and there may be some lessons for future occasions.

For a start, like an earlier meeting we held in the same place (on the anniversary of Kronstadt) this one was traditionally structured: platform of speakers and chairman behind a table complete with jugs of water, etc., facing the rest of us, the audience. Without claiming (cf. World Revolution) that we only have to sit round in a circle, séance-like, to invoke the true spirit of libertarian revolution, it is worth noting that this non-Solidarity style of meeting accentuated one of the worst mistakes of the evening: the fact that it looked like the presentation of a ‘united front’ from the platform, instead of a forum open for discussion of different views.

This is important because some of the views presented differed widely from ours: there was one speaker from Solidarity, Terry Liddle; an anarchist, Philip Samson; and two Poles. One [of the Poles] was an ex-Labour councillor (in close contact with the KOR [Workers’ Defence Committee] and its publications in Polish) who gave an interesting factual description of current events, the other a member of the Polish Socialist Party in exile, affiliated to the Second International, who went on about what he had said to Willy Brandt the last time they met. If the traditional structure of the meeting was inevitable, all the more care should have been taken to emphasise the open, un-‘fixed’ nature of the set-up – the organisers had not met all the speakers and certainly did not know what they would be saying. (Those who think that meetings should only be held if the organisers do know who will be there – and what they will be saying – should say so explicitly.)

By the time the collection was taken, and the gist of the proposed telegram(s) mooted, time for discussion from the floor was limited to just under an hour, so that the chairman had to be firm in trying to ensure a maximum number and variety of contributions. Nevertheless the adverb ‘ruthlessly’, applied to the chairing by Freedom’s correspondent, is not inappropriate. This appeared to some extent in the debate, although quite a number of opposing views were heard. It became more obvious when the final wording of the telegrams was discussed. There was no chance to do this properly, the formula ‘supporting the struggle for free trade unions’ being taken to express the feeling of the meeting. A proposed amendment, from the only Solidarity member to speak from the floor, that the words ‘independent class organisations’ replace the words ‘free trade unions’ was not accepted. And it was only thanks to a quick-thinking and persistent anarchist that ‘All power to the workers’ was added at the  end of the first telegram, thus differentiating us from the wide range of right-wingers and social democrats currently professing solidarity with the  Poles, and suggesting that our aim was not the sort of trade unions prevailing in the West.

So we can observe, once again, that participation in any sort of united front or concerted action with other tendencies requires extra care in clarifying, not blurring, our particular views. Otherwise the dominant ideology prevails by default, and we find ourselves being used for ends we do not support – and ultimately playing false to those we do. 

MEANWHILE, AT THE OTHER POLE…

But whatever our self-criticisms about failures of perfect libertarian practice, we can console ourselves with the thought that it could have been worse. This was demonstrated by the SWP meeting on the same subject three nights later, attended by a few of us armed with leaflets, doing a ‘World Revolution’ (needless to say, WR were also there, doing the genuine thing!). One of us even stayed until near the end.

After a cheering cock-up at the beginning over what time it was due to start (Socialist Worker had said 9 p.m., Time Out 8 p.m., so they made it 8.30) the meeting (smaller than ours) swung into the familiar routine: two quite lengthy speeches, the first more narrative in style, the second giving the line; collection (Let’s not hear the clatter of coins, comrades, nor yet the rustle of paper, but the squeak of pens writing substantial cheques); questions from the floor to the platform, answered in batches for added glibness; and final summings-up with exhortations to build the revolutionary party (at this point our reporter made no excuse and left). Of course experienced questioners took the opportunity to put a few points across. The lad from World Revolution did his stuff, about the counter-revolutionary nature of all unions, and two people involved in the [newly formed] Polish Solidarity Campaign gave some information about it and asked for a statement of the SWP position. The answer was that the SWP supported the ‘existing rank-and-file trade union movement of solidarity with the Polish workers’ and would not ally itself with the right wing in the unions by calling for withdrawal of the [TUC] delegation. The SWP evidently preferred, even at this time, to maintain its alliance with the stalinists on the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions.

 L. W. and M. B.

Participants’ history of PSC

(Giles Hart, who edited the booklet, died on 7 July 2005, a victim of the London Bombings)

Other analyses are available...

A couple of titles for further reading:

Peter Raina, Political Opposition in Poland. London, Poets’ and Painters’ Press, 1978. 

            Marjorie Castle and Ray Taras, Democracy in Poland, Westview Press, 2nd edition 2002.