My Friend Brian Bamford. By Les May

My oldest friend died today. Readers of NV will know him as ‘Bammy’; I knew him as Brian. We first came to know each other sixty years ago through CND, which perhaps tells you something about where on the political spectrum we were and are to be found. But our politics were not the same. Brian was a lifelong anarcho-syndicalist, I’m a democratic socialist. So this isn’t a political obituary, it’s a memoir of my friend, with a few political comments thrown in. I tend to think of most anarchists as incurable romantics; Brian was not like that. He certainly had a romantic view of what anarchists achieved during the Spanish Civil war, but he had an essentially practical view about anarchism too and was strongly drawn to the ideas of Colin Ward. If he was a bit of a romantic about the anarchism in Spain, he was also very knowledgable about its history and went to Spain in 1963 to find out for himself. He went on to visit Spain for extended periods several more times in later years and learned to speak and read Spanish sufficiently well to be able to translate pieces from Spanish newspapers which found their way onto the NV blog. Brian’s other political preoccupation was trades unionism which I imagine derived from the syndicalism bit of his political philosophy. A year or so ago a piece on the NV blog drew the comment from someone who thinks that indulging in such name calling will change the world, that it was ‘racist’, an easy comment to make sitting in an armchair, rather than heading to jail. What I, and no doubt many others know, is that in the early 1970s Brian had been arrested whilst supporting ‘asian’ workers at the Arrow mill. Brian continued his involvement in the trades unions until he became ill. This included co-authoring a booklet on ‘Blacklisting’ and acting as Secretary of Bury Unite Commercial Branch. Brian started Northern Voices as a print publication and worked extremely hard not only at the writing and editing, but also at the distribution. Only later did it develop into a ‘blog’ which was available on the World Wide Web. Initially NV was intended as a cultural and political publication. Brian tried to keep the ‘cultural’ side alive with book, film and theatre reviews many of which he wrote himself. I started contributing regularly only after the publication of Simon Danzcuk’s book about Cyril Smith. Before Smith died in 2010 Brian had used NV to remind people of the 1979 story about Cyril’s antics at Cambridge House in Rochdale’s Alternative Paper (RAP). Brian knew a lot more about this story than Danzcuk and Baker because he had been involved in the distribution of RAP when national newspapers were sending taxis to buy multiple copies of the paper and because of his continued friendship with one of the editors, John Walker. As a co-editor of NV Brian took a robust attitude to freedom of expression. He was happy to give space to people whose views he strongly disagreed with. He had no time for the people who used words like racist, islamophobic, antisemtic, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic etc as weapons to prevent others expressing views they did not like. He took as his motto the words on the wall of Broadcasting House behind a statue of his hero George Orwell, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear", from an unused preface to Animal Farm. That is how I shall always remember him.