May 68

2018 marks the 50th anniversary of May 68. This is the chapter from my book 'Left Field' - the central theme - how that year shaped and changed  my life

Essex 68   

Wired

If you ever wondered what an activist is or does, then read Left Field and you could be forgiven for thinking that Wilson was wired from a very early age for adventure and rebellion, from his mothers exacerbated remarks to the cobbler in Bromley, ’I don’t know what he gets up to’ as she handed over his battered Clark’s shoes, to his impulsive decision to set sail for Argentina when he was 16 years old. But along the way, this impulse towards action was leavened and combined into a burning commitment to the underdog across a host of groups and contexts at both a national and international level.

'Left Field' takes us through his rejection of the hypocrisy and elitism of the public school system, to which he was subjected, to his CND involvement, the Vietnam conflict, anti-apartheid protests, the miners strike and importantly the Bosnian war, which was a major and lengthy engagement for him through the role he played as founder and director of both the charity, War Child, and the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar. Alongside these political engagements, the creative and adventurous side of his life finds expression in his play writing and the sometimes dodgy deals in the art world of the newly emerging eastern European nations. This latter is thriller stuff!

Interlaced with humour, anecdotes and with a sense of irony, even in the most destructive of situations, the book is intelligently and engagingly written and gives a vivid and honest, blow by blow account of an exceptional life at both a personal and a political level. The many digressions from the political to the personal, from the moving last days of his fathers life, his home in Bromley, the many domestic challenges he faced and the extraordinary achievements of the Pavarotti Music Centre in a theatre of war, all work to weave together a mosaic of a life lived to the full.

What is refreshing about this book is the absence of ideological preaching. It is just Wilson, sharing his life experience but with a host of rather depressing implications for the reader to draw, significantly, how power elites at all levels, even charities, work to maintain the status quo, how ethnicity is used to divide and rule and the necessity for activists to stay close to the grass roots. It’s an absorbing read.

Maureen Larkin

12 June 2016

Protest and Survive

 In 1961, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) organised protests at five bases where nuclear weapons were to be deployed. I told my mother I was going to see The Guns of Navarone, but headed to the demonstration at RAF Ruislip in north-west London. I arrived to see thousands of people with placards and some with ladders to scale the perimeter fence. Though I had no ladder, I was held in a police van for four hours. Released without charge, my incarceration had lasted a lot longer than Navarone so I rang from Ruislip station to tell my parents not to worry. My mother answered and I heard her shouting at my father, ‘I blame you for this.’ Soon after Ruislip, a police inspector turned up at our house. He wanted to question me about a march I was helping to organise as secretary of South London Youth CND. ‘Are you the organiser?’ he asked. ‘I’m one of them.’ ‘What is your role?’ he added. I was being introduced to page one of the police training manual: Locate the leader. I said nothing, but my mother tapped him on the arm. ‘He’ll get over this,’ she said. But I didn't. I read Robert Jungk’s Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with its account of the shadows of the dead imprinted on the earth. It left me in shock. The book’s title is taken from Robert Oppenheimer’s words when witnessing the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I started to self-educate myself and read everything: from Marx to Dostoyevsky, from Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In 1965 I moved to Oxford and worked at Oxfam. I wanted to go to university, but didn’t have A levels. I took a correspondence course. Two years later, I was at Essex University. On the edge of Colchester, above the muddy River Colne, the half-built campus already seemed half-forgotten. We would change that. May came early for us. On 17 March 1968, 40,000 people marched to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square to protest the Vietnam war. I helped a friend from the chemistry department make paint bombs, sealed inside plastic milk containers. These two Peter Kennard montages cover the forty years from 1961 to the Iraq war – more brilliantly in images than I can do in words. But my words can be found in my memoir, Left Field.

Peter Kennard: Unofficial War Artist is at the Imperial War Museum, London SE1, from 14 May 2015. And here's a short film about those early Aldermaston marches.