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:
- To identify and locate full runs of each paper.
- To identify and make contact with former members of regional radical paper production teams.
- To enable the production of new oral and archival histories of radical regional publishing in Britain.
- 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:
- You once worked on a paper like this.
- You know the whereabouts of any existing copies today.
- 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):
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
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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
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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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.