Steve Platt on Colin Ward & John Rety

In the 2010 April / May issue of Red Pepper

Steve Platt wrote in his column 'PLATTITUDES'

a feature on the deaths of Colin Ward, aged 85, and

John Rety, 79.  He said that this 'had deprived the

British anarchist movement of two of its most

original and influential thinkers.' 

He added:

'I first came across them through squatting campaigns in the 1970s, by which time they were already veterans of the pre-1960s generation of political activists who kept a left libertarian flag flying before it became fashionable to do so.

'Both men helped with Squatting-the Real story (Bay Leaf Books, 1980), a book for which I was the main writer.  Colin wrote a chapter on the post-war seizure of army camps, hotels and other buildings, when tens of thousands od ex-servicemen and their families laid down a challenge to the 1945 Labour government to deliver on its promise of decent homes for all. 

'John, who was a key squatting activist in Camden Town, gave generously of his time, knowledge and activist energy in helping me to assemble the history of the later squatting movement that emerged in Britain from the late 1960s.

'Indeed, the survival of Camden Town as we know it today owes much to the resistance initiated by John and his partner Susan Johns in 1973 to their eviction by a property developer from the shop they ran at 220, Camden High Street.  At the time, companies associated with Cromdale Holdings owned a quarter of the properties in the area;  50 shops were empty pending redevelopment.

John and Susan's squatting of their old shp acted as a catalyst for the fight to save the high street, which was eventually won...

'For me, Colin and John were key communicators of the message that there was life on the left beyond state socialism.  From housing cooperatives to allotments, from holiday chalets to garden sheds, Colin's approach to "anarchy" in action ( the title he chose for what is still the best - and certainly most readable - book on the subject around) was rooted in the practice and everyday in a manner that made his most utopian of visions seem no more than ordinary common sense. 

John's anarchism sparkled most fully in his love of poetry and commitment to live performance, notably at Torriano Meeting House.  First squatted as a arts centre, which provided early platforms for artists as diverse as Emma Thompson and John Hegley.  There was delicious irony, that one-time bastion of the British Communist Party.

'I was too young to enjoy Colin's editorship of the journal Anarchy and John's of the paper  Freedom at the time they were published.  But the back issues I saw later helped to inspire in me a belief in the potential of small-circulation publications with often esoteric interests to have an influence way beyond their immediate readerships.  That's one reason why I'm associated with the magazine I'm writing for here.'



John Rety the anarchist poet by Harry Eyres

John Rety, a former anarchist editor of

Freedom newspaper died in February 2010

and Harry Eyres wrote this

essay about him in the Financial Times:

THE last time I saw John Rety, in a café at the Royal Festival Hall in London, three floors beneath the Poetry Library, he told me he didn’t feel old. He was off to play in a British Senior Masters chess tournament in Austria, close to the border with Hungary, the land of his birth.
'I don’t really believe in old age,' he said, as if this was another of those myths, like the overriding importance of money, that needed puncturing.  I had no idea how old he was and didn’t think much about it.  He looked exactly the same as he had always done: hair and beard thick, trousers and jersey rumpled, deep brown eyes peering out from under bushy brows with what I thought was an inextinguishable mischief and contrariness. 
But John, poet and publisher – of my poems and those of others, some well-known and others not – died suddenly at home last month.  It turned out he was coming up to his 80th birthday.  For the past 30 years he’d been publishing poetry at his small press, Hearing Eye, and hosting weekly poetry readings at Torriano Meeting House in north London.  He kept going, as small grants came and went, as the publishing and bookselling climate became more and more inhospitable to small press poetry.
John refused to publish my work while I was poetry editor of the Daily Express, as he disapproved so strongly of that paper’s politics. But he did show interest in the Daily Poem column that I ran there for nearly five years in which, more by accident than design, I ended up featuring a number of poets from his stable. One day he said to me, 'Why don’t you print your commentary on the Daily Poem upside down, like the solution to a chess puzzle?'
As the poet Julia Casterton rightly remarked, quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, John 'had an eye for all things counter, original, spare and strange'.
Politics was something that might have come between us.  I came to voting age just as Margaret Thatcher came to power, in what seemed a post-socialist world.  But John was a lifelong anarchist and peace activist who never renounced the political commitment and principles forged in the fight against fascism.  During the Vietnam war, he chained himself to the railings of the Imperial War Museum.
He was once asked when he had become an anarchist.  'During the war in Budapest,' he replied.  'I think I was part of the resistance.'  Maybe he was not quite sure because he was only nine when the war began.  On the day the war ended, in Budapest, his grandmother, who had looked after him when his Jewish parents went into hiding, approached a guard who had a Swastika armband and a rifle. 'You can put those away now,' she said.  He shot her dead.
Later, living in England, John became editor of the anarchist paper Freedom and more recently the poetry editor of the communist daily the Morning Star (presumably old rifts between anarchists and communists had been healed).  His anthology of poems from the Morning Star, entitled Well Versed, with an introduction by the veteran socialist politician Tony Benn, recently went into a second printing.
The reasons for this are more poetic than political. It is, in fact, an excellent and enjoyable anthology (I must declare an interest: it contains one short poem of mine) and not at all what you might expect. The best poems in it are not tub-thumping but intelligent, funny and human. Paul Birtill is a poet John supported and published for many years and time and again his dark humour hits the mark; I love his poem 'Global Warming', which ends like this:
'I’ve also/ noticed those old guys with/ "The End Is Nigh" signboards/ seem a lot more confident/ these days – have a certain/ spring in their step.'
There is also fine work by Jeremy Kingston – even better as a poet than as a theatre critic for The Times.  Well-known names include Dannie Abse and John Heath-Stubbs.
Open-mindedness and catholic taste do not always go with intense political commitment, but in John’s case they did. His short introduction to Well Versed is one of the wisest short statements you could find about the place of poetry in our time: “A choice of poems cannot be divorced from one’s view of life ... There is real love, there is real anger, there is biting satire, and there is also celebration when it is called for ... [These] poems hint at a new age when the ethics which exist behind closed doors might suddenly, as by quantum leap, take over the public domain.”
What John represented, battled for and supported all his life, was well described as a 'bizarre old-fashioned decency'.  Poetry readings at Torriano Meeting House were the least glamorous occasions you could imagine but they had something that the glitzy, vacuous gatherings more characteristic of this age are completely lacking; call it humanity.  And then you could ask why decency, and the expression of real human emotions, should have come to seem bizarre and old-fashioned

Next Meeting of Freedom Friends

Donald Rooum Resigns from Collective

PROVISIONALLY it is anticipated that the next meeting of the Friends of Freedom Press will be held next Monday the 11th, January 2016.  The last meeting of the Friends which we are told was poorly attended was held in December last year.

None-the-less, the board of Friends which has ultimate power and responsibility for the running of the property in Angel Alley is now meeting on a regular basis following criticisms on this Northern Voices' Blog and in the national journal Private Eye. 

As yet, there is little sign that a serious anarchist newspaper will be produced, as is required under the Articles of Association: which are the rules under which the managing body must operate.  The Freedom website, edited by the well-intentioned student Adam Lawrence Bar, is at present a rather poor substitute for the journal which I remember in the last half of the 20th century.  During that time it was edited by mature intellectuals like Vernon Richards and Colin Ward; experienced shop-floor workers like Bill Christopher, and the building worker like Peter Turner; people interested in the arts like John Rety and Arthur Moyse.  More recently in this century the quality of those who have contributed to Freedom seems to have declined to the likes of Simon Saunders, who not long ago admitted he didn't know the meaning of the word 'syndicalism', and the rather voluble figure of Nick Heath, a one-time librarian/ historian and leader of the Anarchist Federation.

A source close to the Friends of Freedom reports that the veteran anarchist and cartoonist, Donald Rooum, has now resigned from the Collective that closed down Freedom newspaper.  Mr. Rooum , who is also on the Friend's of Freedom Board has done this because he does not want a conflict of interests.



Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history 4.

The End but Not for Everyone…

by Chris Draper

ON March 10^th, 2014 FREEDOM announced:

“We have come to realise that a solid hardcopy newspaper is no longer a viable means of promoting the anarchist message…An underlying problem has been a lack of capacity to sustain it. We had hoped that Freedom would be adopted as THE paper of the anarchist movement…Although Freedom Press has changed from a political group with a particular point of view to a resource for anarchism as a whole, we have not managed to shake the legacy of the past and get different groups to back it as a collective project…the shop, publishing and book distribution will continue…As will the use of Angel Alley for meetings, events, offices…”   

Four aspects of this statement deserve close scrutiny:

1. no longer viable
2. a resource for anarchism as a whole
3. not managed to get groups to back it
4. shop, publishing, book distribution…meetings, events, offices.  

I dispute all four, interconnected, elements.  

Viability

FREEDOM’s viability was adversely affected by the development of the internet but in 2000 Freedom Press published a quarterly journal, the Raven, and a fortnightly newspaper so it should now be possible to finance a monthly paper.  The premises are owned freehold (and contribute almost 6K annual rental income), Aldgate Press printed the paper free (which alone equates to a 10K annual subsidy), hundreds of subscribers paid upfront, the paper had an established brand name and distribution network so FREEDOM enjoyed huge commercial advantages over other aspiring anarchist publications but as I’ve attempted to illustrate, successive collectives took all this for granted, alienated existing writers and readers and failed to secure a new constituency.

 

Resource for All

Under Charles Crute’s editorship FREEDOM welcomed articles of every variety of anarchist thought and practice.  When two articles presenting opposite sides of an argument were submitted both were published. Until 2001 FREEDOM relished controversy and open debate, after Toby’s ascendancy a narrow class-struggle line was enforced.  The collective’s claim to be a resource for 'anarchism as a whole' whilst consistently refusing to publish material that challenges their party line exemplifies their arrogance and dishonesty. 

Not Managed to Get Groups to Back It

I lied about disputing this section of the statement, for it indicates a rare flash of insight on the part of the collective.  As I argued from the beginning, groups, like SolFed and AF have enough problems maintaining their own organisations to put much effort into FREEDOM.  It’s the bit claiming:  

We have not managed to shake the legacy of the past'  that I dispute. 

Successive editors have not just shaken the legacy; the intellectual, moral and political legacy of pre-Crowe FREEDOM has been razed to the ground. 

Spoils of Class War (shop, book publishing, offices, meeting rooms etc)

Having provided a political play-school for aspiring class warriors FREEDOM newspaper is no longer of interest.  Like the Revd Toby Crowe, several members of the collective past and present have gained other pulpits for their sermons. Political organs from libcom to Morning Star now 'benefit' from the opinions of interns schooled in Angel Alley.   The alumni’s attention is now focussed on other assets in the FREEDOM portfolio and the collective privately admit that most were always more interested in getting their hands on the building than producing the paper.   'Within the Freedom Collective only a small minority were involved in producing the paper, not so much lack of commitment as not seeing it as central to what Freedom as a building was for.'   Vernon Richards must be spinning in his grave.

Conveniently situated between Aldgate East tube station and Whitechapel Art Gallery; the premises now provide convivial clubrooms for members and friends of the FREEDOM collective. Class-struggle groups might not have done much for the paper but ironically FREEDOM now provides them with convenient London meeting rooms.

FREEDOM’s book-publishing business was initially exploited by the clique to produce the decidedly dodgy,'Beating the Fascists'.  In 2014 they reprinted John Quail’s, 'Slow Burning Fuse' with the added 'benefit' of a new introduction penned by collective member and leader of AF, Nick Heath.

The collective have grand ambitions as Andy Meinke, who now runs the bookshop explains:

'At some point we want to move out of here, somewhere on a street front to get more passing trade.'  Sale of the freehold could raise around a million pounds.

Many of FREEDOM’s lesser assets have already been disposed of to friends and associates of the collective. In 2008, former FREEDOM editor John Retty discovered classic books from the shop of no appeal to class-struggle types were being destroyed en masse.  Confiding to friends at the London Bookfair that he’d managed to salvage a few copies of his own literary works, he appeared gloomy and depressed as he reflected on the significance of the destruction.

FREEDOM’s archive of historic books and newspapers has been similarly looted:

'We have multiple copies of pretty much every issue ever printed of our august newspaper, along with a big batch of foreign publications…Multiple copies are already kind of getting promised out…With the books, we’re hoping to keep a lot of them but of the ones which are going it’ll probably be first come first served.'   'I was in Freedom this week with Iain Mckay flicking through back issues of Freedom and War Commentary…We in AF have been discussing setting up an archive…its our history and pretty interesting too'.  Pretty interesting it undoubtedly is but is it not outrageous that individuals and groups like AF and Black Flag who unceasingly denigrated FREEDOM now exercise proprietorial rights over its assets?  

Authoritarian Asset Strippers

The takeover of FREEDOM didn’t require much planning, the new boys on the block were astonished how easily they gained control, 'When Vernon Richards died (2001) he handed over FREEDOM to the “Movement” on a plate but it was too surprised to notice, it was comrades coming out of the Anarchist Youth Network (AYN) who saw the opportunity with the paper and reclaimed it for class-struggle.'

Whilst the class warriors consider this coup commendable, to me it was invasive, cynical, dishonest and exploitative. The people who piled into FREEDOM had nothing but contempt for the paper’s political outlook. FREEDOM embraced a gentle, considered, constructive range of anarchist ideas and practice that contrasted sharply with the class-struggle politics of alternative anarchist organs (Class War, Black Flag, Organise! etc).  The new regime swept into power on a triumphant wave of youthful enthusiasm. Once Simon Saunders found his feet, stopped admitting his own ignorance and started proclaiming his infallibility there was no going back.  Gainsayers were systematically treated with contempt.

In 2006 Saunders described FREEDOM stalwarts as:

'reeking of allotments, of forgetting class, of irrelevance and reformism.'   

An obvious, yet demeaning, reference to Vernon Richards who ran a commercial organic market garden and Colin Ward who wrote extensively about allotments as a model of mutual aid.

Crowe, Saunders, Talent and associates ridiculed FREEDOM’s prefigurative politics and dismissed the paper’s distinctively anarchist critique of Britain’s welfare state, characterised by David Goodway as, 'Freedom Press being unswervingly hostile to the Labour governments and their nationalization and welfare legislation.'  

As a disenchanted subscriber posted on the History Workshop web-site following FREEDOM’s demise:

'The problem is that, for many years now, Freedom has been run by dimwits.  It has had nothing of value to say for a long while.   It is such a shame that this historically important paper has been ruined…In recent years, every edition of Freedom was anti-denationalisation and pro-welfare.  It was often difficult to tell it apart from a left Labour paper except for the juvenile photos of people in masks throwing things at the police.'

In 1986 Tony Gibson could still claim:

'FREEDOM has survived while many other anarchist journals have failed, because among its many virtues it has been flexible, intelligent and able to withstand periods when this or that bunch of bone-headed zealots have striven to turn it to the service of their own narrow creed.'  

From 2001 the 'bone-headed zealots' imposed 'their own narrow creed' with predictable consequences. 

Although the zealous class warriors had a range of apparently more appropriate newspapers available in which to indulge their class struggle fantasies they latched onto the fact that capturing FREEDOM offered them unique advantages.  FREEDOM loyalists were too polite, trusting and geographically scattered to react as swiftly and determinedly as the situation demanded.  Those of us who spoke out were constantly frustrated by the censorship and evasion of the new regime.

FREEDOM was taken over by entryists with no allegiance to the organisation whose assets they have now monopolised and exploited for more than a decade.  The collective have doubtless convinced themselves of their entitlement but are living off the hard won gains of anarchists they despise.

In the end just 2 of the collective of 14 voted against ending FREEDOM. For most of them, their heart was never really in it, their allegiance lay elsewhere.

Collective member, Nick Heath dismissed the newspaper as 'a pole for liberal anarchists' and used an internet thread mourning the passing of FREEDOM not to offer condolences but to advertise his own newssheet ('if you want to spread real class struggle anarchist ideas then think about ordering a bundle' ) until informed by a fellow contributor that it was;'in bad taste on a thread about the ending of another paper.'

Collective member Meinke was always, 'very sceptical of its (FREEDOM’s) liberal bent'  whilst Jim Clarke wasn’t at all bothered about FREEDOM’s disappearance:  

'I’m not sure FREEDOM had much of an illustrious history…I’m more concerned about Black Flag to be honest'. 

The tone of Charlotte Dingle’s joyful celebration of the ending of the newspaper more befits a party invite than the passing of an invaluable institution:

' * Waves * Hello, Freedom editor here…Frankly I am overjoyed that the paper is going online…(SMILEY FACE)…'

What is to be Done?

Those of us who loved FREEDOM are not prepared to sit back and see its ideas traduced and its legacy misappropriated by authoritarians. The primary aim of this essay is to puncture the myth and challenge self-serving accounts of the downfall of FREEDOM propagated by successive editors since 2001.

This is also an extended appeal to Steven Charles Sorba (Aldgate Press); Sonia Markham (Retired Illustrator), Richard Parry (Solicitor); and even rather plaintively to Donald Rooum (Cartoonist and collective member), the directors of the holding company, FRIENDS of FREEDOM PRESS Ltd. to belatedly get a grip on the legacy, both intellectual and material, handed down to us by anarchists who didn’t hide behind aliases or enforce their own narrow political creed.  Please do not allow the collective to sell the building without yourselves ensuring that the whole anarchist movement benefits not just the current ruling clique.

Finally the destruction of FREEDOM should give all anarchists pause for thought.  The very openness of FREEDOM left it vulnerable to subversion of its political ideals. We tolerated illiberal behaviour for too long and allowed authoritarians to take over.  FREEDOM stalwart Nicolas Walter had forewarned us:

'In a sense, anarchists always remain liberals and socialists, and whenever they reject what is good in either they betray anarchism itself.'  

A Final Challenge

I challenge any, or all of the current clique that closed down the paper to leave your comfy clubrooms for the day, come up North and politely debate, 'THE FATE of  FREEDOM' at the next (2015) Manchester Anarchist Bookfair. Hopefully you will offer a positive response, though I rather suspect open debate is not your preferred medium.                         

                                                            Christopher Draper, Llandudno, February 2015