The Long 1968

1967/8

On the radio the other morning I half-heard a discussion of various books relating to post-War France, and in particular les événements of May 1968. Three things registered out of the pre-coffee haze. First, the concept of a "Long 1968"; that is, that the "spirit of '68" was played out over a rather longer period than a single year. Obvious, really. Second, that 1968 is as long ago now as 1918 was then. Even more obvious – even I can do the mental arithmetic – but thought-provoking, nonetheless. Third, the image of that very strange man, the future conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, then a student, observing the riotous action in the Paris streets below from the safety of his girlfriend's apartment, and concluding that whatever was motivating them down there was the opposite of what, henceforth, would motivate him. I was also amused by his classically-conservative concession that, back then, student radicals were cut from a finer, better-educated cloth than today's student radicals. Which is true, self-evidently.

Ah, 1968. At the time I was 14, and probably had rather more in common with Roger Scruton than Daniel Cohn-Bendit. That is, I was a British grammar-school boy from an "ordinary" family, whose ideas and aspirations were increasingly at odds with those of his parents, a common condition in 1968. I don't think it is overstating the case to say that there have been few, if any, times when the gulf between generations living under the same roof has been greater. Watching the TV, my parents were appalled by everything that exercised such a strong pull on my developing adolescent desires: the revolutionary politics, the "mind-expanding" drugs, the loud music, the casual sex, the general urge to overturn the safe and cosy suburban world and build something new, young, colourful, and authentic.

Naturally, at 14, I had no real ideas of my own; even the most specious and shopworn stuff was new and exciting to me, particularly if it angered or upset my parents. I had no real idea of the difficult 50-year journey they had travelled, from 1918 to 1968, and why the safe, cosy, "straight" post-war world might have such a strong appeal for them. They seemed dull, conformist, and uninteresting to me [1]. They rarely left our flat other than to go to work, do a weekly shop, or visit family, and had no obvious interests beyond whatever happened to be on TV. I admit I had long nurtured ungrateful "changeling" fantasies. But also, already by 1968 a lot of the allegedly counter-cultural aspects of pop culture had been safely commodified and accommodated: I loathed the floral-shirted, kipper-tied types that appeared on TV, peddling a de-clawed sub-psychedelia, acceptable to my parents' generation because at least they were polite, neat and tidy, and playing a recognisable game of "fashionable young things". As the 70s arrived I was feeling an obscure all-round discontent that wanted to express itself in transgressive noise, dirt, scruffiness, and intoxication, and revelled in rejecting expectations and opportunities (mainly at school, the only arena of action open to me: in the classic Groucho formulation, I didn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member). My friends and I became regular under-age drinkers in certain tolerant pubs, and hung out as the self-styled cool, intellectual fringe at local youth venues. When the atmosphere at home became too stifling, I enjoyed nothing more than leaving the flat and going for long, aimless walks, the more uninviting the weather the better. Yes, I was a teenage Situationist in Stevenage.

Although, actually, I had no idea what a Situationist was. Or of anything much, politically. When I saw the news on TV, I saw rioting students all around the world: France, America, Japan, Germany, Czechoslovakia... It seemed like there was a world party of unrest and anger happening out there, and I couldn't wait to join in. Why and what anybody was actually rioting about was anybody's guess: I imagined that they told you about all that when you became a student. It looked like fun. Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against? What've you got? So, becoming a student was the entire horizon of my worldly ambitions. Not some "varsity" bod with a college scarf and an ironic teddy-bear, obviously, but a full-on, long-haired, dope-smoking, acid-tripping, rock-throwing, protest-marching, soixante-huitard with attitude. Unlike Roger Scruton, I concluded that whatever was motivating them was precisely what, henceforth, should motivate me.

Oxford Examination Schools Occupation 1973

© 1975 Fiona Thompson

It bears repeating that when, after a year out, I did eventually rock up at university in 1973 I was still a clueless, small-town stoner, with an unattractive and largely unexamined package of ideas about politics and life. It is probably true to say that I had absorbed what few ideas I had from a combination of rock lyrics and late-night banter with friends, leavened only by the texts I had studied at A-Level, some influential teachers, and a few cult books at the wackier end of the spectrum. My worldview spoke more of a close study of Sticky Fingers, Aqualung, and Every Picture Tells A Story than any acquaintance with Marx, Trotsky, or Lenin, none of whom I had read.

But, by pure chance, I found myself in a hotspot of the Long '68. The collegiate structure of Oxford University means that each college is a little self-contained planet, with its own atmosphere and life-forms, and at Balliol College in 1973 it seemed that everyone who was anyone was a member of some far-left group with a rival, subtly-different plan for toppling the established order. I may not yet have grasped the essential differences between Trotskyist, Marxist-Lenininist, or anarchist visions of revolution, but it was clear I was up for a lark and almost immediately I found myself at the conspiratorial core of no less than two occupations of university property. Result!

The first was a rather casual mass occupation which proved to be no more than a couple of sleep-deprived nights spent crashing on the extremely hard floor of the Examination Schools. I recall singing folk-songs with David Aaronovitch [2], then a Communist Party member, only to be harangued by certain female International Marxist Group members who found the lyrics sexist, a word that did not yet figure in my vocabulary. But the second was an invitation-only invasion of the Indian Institute, a university administrative building, by a soi-disant revolutionary vanguard, which was ended almost immediately with a certain amount of brutality on the part of the university and the police, and resulted in the ending of the university careers of several of my new comrades. Personally, on being ejected from the building, I ran through the police lines like a rugby wing-forward in pursuit of a loose ball, and not long thereafter began to reconsider the idiocy of what we were up to.

In short, for me, the Long 1968 ended on the afternoon of Wednesday, 13th February 1974, a few days after my 20th birthday. My political views had been changed, radically and permanently, and I had made some lifelong friends, but I really wasn't about to sacrifice my hard-earned university career as a spear-carrier supporting the factitious efforts of a few public-school revolutionaries, who had read their Marx, to instigate their own private May '68. I had no Plan B: to be a student was still the sum total of my ambition. So I decided to concentrate on the hedonistic part of the student formula, and ease up on the rock-throwing part. It hadn't yet occurred to me that some book-studying might be a useful element to add in.

Amusingly, one of my friends from that era once informed me that my unasked-for and unwanted candidature into one radical groupuscule had been rejected, on the grounds I was a "piss-artist". Which was entirely fair. Although, ironically, a few years ago I discovered that several contemporaries assumed I had been a member of that same group all along, simply because several of its members so regularly found my college room a congenial late-night stop-off (a room which, I also later discovered, had formerly been occupied by Howard Marks). Well, the long march through the institutions would have to start sometime, but not yet, O Lord, not yet.

1974/5

There are a number of distinguished people in this photograph, but

a three-term mayor of Baltimore is, for all the wrong reasons, 

easily spotted towards the back...

1. The fact that they were also kind, supportive, tolerant, and always willing to give me the benefit of the doubt didn't occur to me until it was far too late to atone for years of arrogant and boorish behaviour.

2. Aaronovitch may not be well-known outside the UK, but here he has become a fixture in the media firmament. For two terms, he and I were good friends, but his ambition and my hedonistic tendencies took us in different directions. Then he was "sent down" for failing his first year exams and, in those pre-internet days, we lost touch until, carrying the NALGO union banner at an anti-Thatcher demo in 1979, I spotted him covering the event as a journalist. We exchanged a few words but I was clearly not the story and he had a job to do, and, it has to be said, his memories of Oxford were probably less than positive, having been regularly denounced as a CP "Stalinist" by all and sundry. So he went off in search of someone more important, and we have never spoken since. Although every time I hear his voice on the radio I am transported back to 1973.