1968

Big Lil

Mary Denness had grown up among seafarers. Since childhood, the backdrop to her existence had been the North Sea, whose stormy, icy waters stretched from Hull’s familiar docks and estuary to the rich cod-fishing grounds of Iceland and Scandinavia. In 1959 Mary married skipper Barry Denness. But by 1967 she felt utterly trapped, constrained by two young children and a husband who oppressed her with his obsessive fear that she was cheating on him.

Trawler families were not renowned for their harmony, and in the mid-twentieth century the character of Hull’s trawling community set it apart from other industries and other tribes. The men employed in it were away for three weeks at a time. Once home, they often drank heavily, brawled and squandered their takings. Back on shore, their womenfolk were expected to await their return while keeping house and minding the family. But the industry itself was flawed by lack of regulation.fn1 From galley boy to skipper, every member of a trawler crew was taken on as casual labour. He had no rights, no work status, no job security. Men often spent weeks unemployed on the whim of a trawler owner. Safety laws were equally hit and miss. Working conditions on board could be unthinkably dangerous and frightening, as the vessel ploughed and dropped over the crest of mighty waves that threatened to send her to the bottom in seconds. In winter one of the worst hazards was ice build-up on the deck and rigging. Its very weight could topple a ship; the only way to defend against this peril was for all hands to hack it off physically with picks and axes. Meanwhile, trawler owners were notorious for cutting corners on working practices such as making regular ship-to-shore contact, ensuring fire drills and providing onboard medical care.

But the men’s wives had been taught never to worry. As Mary explains:

If you did, you’d have finished up a basket case.¹ Every time the wind blew, every time there was a gale, you’d be thinking, ‘Oh God, are they safe?’ You’d go scatty.

We all accepted it, because that’s how the men earned their living, and that’s what kept food on the table.

In the early hours of 10 January 1968 the trawler St Romanus blasted her foghorn and made her way down the Humber estuary with twenty crew on board destined for the Arctic waters off the north of Norway. There was no dedicated radio operator on board, and the transmitter was faulty. On the following tide, the Kingston Peridot set out, also with a crew of twenty, heading for Iceland. For all trawlers, there were protocols that required daily contact to be made by radio, but – where it happened to suit – those protocols were ignored. So, though conditions were terrible, with sub-zero temperatures and battling waves, nobody was unduly worried when the St Romanus lost all contact after just a day at sea. On 20 January a third trawler, the Ross Cleveland, put out to sea, only to be hit by the same freezing gales off north-west Iceland.

It was not until sixteen days into the voyage that the St Romanus was assumed to be missing, by which time the Kingston Peridot was no longer responding to radio messages. On 30 January the families of the crew of St Romanus were told there was no hope; it was also announced that the Kingston Peridot was missing.

Mrs Lillian Bilocca now enters the story.fn2 Like her comrade-in-arms Mary Denness, ‘Big Lil’ – so named because of her seventeen-stone frame – came from a fishing family; her husband Charlie Bilocca was Maltese and worked in the Merchant Navy. Their son, Ernie, lived by seafaring, and their daughter, Virginia, was an office junior. For twenty years Lil herself had worked as a cod skinner in a fish house: it was arduous, cold and treacherous employment, in which the slip of a knife could do you out of wages for weeks. By the end of January she, like the rest of the fishing community in Hull, could think of little else but the looming tragedy. But something inside Lil could no longer accept it with silent fatalism. Her action would change a city’s history. Lil left the fish house one evening never to return, picked up a Biro, and started to lay out her concerns. ‘Right, Virginia,’ she told her daughter …

‘Enough’s enough.² Something has to get done. I’m starting a petition to get the gaffers to make them trawlers safer. That could be our Ernie or your dad out there, God forbid.’

‘A petition … is that a good idea?’ said the girl.

‘I am goin’ to do it, our Virginia. I have got nowt to lose, have I?’

‘Folk might get upset, Mam.’

‘To hell with what they bloody think. I’m goin’ to do what’s right.’

Next day Virginia sneaked into the office early to copy the forms on her boss’s duplicating machine; Lil rallied her friends and started to gather signatures. In the space of a few days 2,000 had added their names to the petition; under ‘occupation’ the majority had written ‘housewife’. Its rapid growth encouraged support; vocal and energetic women in the community were spurred to her side, bringing with them skills and contacts. The National Transport and General Workers’ Union, who were already in a fight for trawler safety, could see that these angry headscarved wives would bring their cause much-needed publicity. With union cooperation, a public meeting was organised at the ramshackle Victoria Hall in Hessle Road, for the women to air their grievances. By the time of the meeting on 2 February Lil’s petition had grown to 6,000 signatures. Television cameras and reporters crammed into the hall alongside a huge jostling mob of fishwives and well-wishers. Lil took the platform and spoke from the heart.

We need to take action … I’ll board any unsafe trawler in the country to stop an unsafe ship sailing.³ I pledge my life to get better and safer conditions … I’ll hitchhike to London if I have to, to make my case in front of Parliament.

John Prescott (later to become Tony Blair’s deputy prime minister) stood up to represent the National Union of Seamen in support of the campaign. An impromptu march led by Lil set out to confront the Hull Fishing Vessel Owners’ Association in their offices, but was stonewalled. Undefeated, the marchers returned to Victoria Hall, where Lil summoned two of her most committed supporters, Yvonne Blenkinsop and Chrissie Smallbone, to her side. Lil then called for one more volunteer to carry the fishing wives’ petition to London.

Mary Denness takes up the tale:

I was in the audience, with my brother’s wife.⁴ ‘Go on, Mary,’ she said, ‘you’re a nice talker …’ But I said I would only go if the majority were for me being elected. So I stayed back. But Chrissie Smallbone said, ‘Yes, come up, you’ve as much right up here as anybody else.’

So then I started to move towards the stairs onto the stage. And one woman’s dissenting voice came from the audience saying, ‘We don’t want a load of bloody skippers’ wives up there representing us!’

Lil, however, had no time for divisions in her ranks. ‘Look,’ she shouted into the microphone, ‘two ships have gone down with all hands.⁵ Have the skippers come back? No, they haven’t! So since they have gone down with their ships, they’ve a right to be represented.’ There was applause. Mary took her turn on the platform, calling for unity in the campaign, and with solidarity established the meeting disbanded. Already, Mary knew that her bold stand could cost her dear. Skipper Barry Denness was not the type to accept his wife playing an interfering role in men’s affairs. But Mary was brave, and she was outspoken. If this was going to turn into a marital battle, she was determined to win it.

Early next morning Lil Bilocca and a team of women protesters broke every seafaring taboo in the book by appearing on the dockside at dawn, braving the media scrum and police, to ensure that the departing ships were properly equipped. As the St Keverne drew away from the dock a crew member shouted to the protesters onshore, ‘We ant got no radio man, Lily!’ Lillian struggled with police, swearing like a trooper as they tried to prevent her jumping aboard, and the press photographers went wild trying to capture a spectacle that they knew would make all the front pages.

On 4 February the people of Hull heard with shocked disbelief that the third trawler, the Ross Cleveland, skippered by Chrissie Smallbone’s brother, was missing in a gale off Iceland. If the ship had indeed gone down, fifty-eight men would have lost their lives in the space of three weeks.

The media revelled in the spectacle of high-heeled and headscarved fishermen’s wives heading for the docks – a no-go area for women.

Chrissie wept uncontrollably as she and the three other lead women confronted the trawler bosses in their boardroom. This time around they got a hearing, and an understanding that there would be concessions, which remained to be secured through the minister in London. There was work to be done. But that day there were prayers and heartbreak the length of Hessle Road.

Tuesday 6 February was a bitterly cold day with snow in the air. Mary’s best coat was thin navy-blue silk shantung, but she took good care to wear a wool suit underneath for warmth. Her Hessle Road hairdresser had backcombed and lacquered her red hair into a bouffant pompadour. As they boarded the 7.55 a.m. train to London, Lil Bilocca, Chrissie Smallbone, Yvonne Blenkinsop and Mary Denness were crowded out by journalists and television crews jostling for their stories. They had become a media sensation.

But – when we pulled into King’s Cross station, there wasn’t a soul.⁶ I spoke to the guard as we came onto the platform, and I said, ‘Where is everybody?’

And he said, ‘We’ve had to pull them back off the platform, because it became dangerously overcrowded,’ he said. ‘So we’ve pushed them all back onto the concourse, and put barriers up there to hold them back. We only do that for the Queen!’

And I said, ‘You’re joking …!’

The women got a pop-star welcome – and the headline ‘BIG LIL HITS TOWN’ was plastered across the Evening Standard’s billboard. Then, with John Prescott and the union bosses, they were driven to the Houses of Parliament where their MP was waiting for them.

Though I’d lived in London I’d never been to the Houses of Parliament before …

remembered Mary.

We were treated royally. The MPs we met were all Labourites, all very nice … And yes, we felt they treated us right – that they were not simply giving in to us because we were a bit of a novelty.

You know, I really did feel then that I’d come a long way.

Because it was, honestly, quite extraordinary. I mean, if anybody’d said to us, before we’d done this, do you know who Lillian Bilocca and Mary Denness met? We were just ordinary, insignificant, working-class northern women …

Harold Wilson was away. ‘Look after the girls,’ he’d told Fred Peart, Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries. ‘Try and see things from their point of view.’ After an hour and a half going through the women’s demands, Peart made them a promise. Fishing fleets would be grounded until the safety measures had been enacted and the weather improved. ‘You’ve got it, ladies,’ he told them. ‘You have got it all.’ Afterwards, Mary told the press, ‘Three women have achieved more in one day than anything that has ever been done in the trawler industry in sixty years.’

Bringing the entire Hull trawler operation to a standstill was an imperative while the authorities made sure safety was implemented. But though it made her and her team front-page news, it wasn’t an action that was going to make Lil Bilocca popular. On the night that she returned from London, Lil found three death threats among the stack of post on her doormat. While top columnists and TV hosts lionised Lil, the restriction was having an immediate economic effect, as skippers watched Icelandic vessels bringing in prime catches to sell for high prices on the British market. The tide was turning against Lil and her campaign. Poison-pen letters started to pile up –

Madam, Why don’t the people of Hull kidnap you, tie some bricks round your neck and drop you in the Humber, you big, fat, greasy Maltese whore …⁷

– and much more of the same.

The local secretary of the Trawler Officers’ Guild was more restrained, but equally damning:

The idea of forming a women’s committee to fight battles for the men is, to my mind, completely ludicrous.

The flak in the local paper was flying too, much of it drawing attention to Lil’s plebeian accent and appearance.

Mary Denness, better read and more worldly than the others, could understand why many of the men whose interests they believed themselves to be serving were far from grateful, her husband being one:

Well, Barry hated it!⁸ He thought that the men should fight their own battles. Let them be men. And there were plenty of old-fashioned men that still thought that way.

But with Barry, well, mostly he hated it because of his possessiveness of me. He saw the campaign as a threat – that I was going to see a wider world. He just thought, ‘That’s my wife, I don’t want her roaming around all over the place. I want her at home.’

And I think that’s when I started to see things in the marriage from a very different angle. And that’s when the rot set in.

The euphoria was dissolving. Lil, inexperienced, naive and tactless, was out of her depth, battling abuse and press distortion. Her employers took advantage of the situation to hand her her cards. Mary was fire fighting, trying to rescue a situation that had rebounded on the four women.

It was impossible to really win, without getting the men’s full support, and indeed the women’s as well, the wives. But how CAN you fight casual labour? You’ve got to destroy the casual part of it. And the trawler owners weren’t going to have that. No way, they’d have had to regulate the industry for a start. No, it was a bridge too far. It couldn’t be achieved by four women.

Nevertheless, their campaign was taking effect. A Committee of Inquiry was briefed to find ways to make the fishing industry safer. Even before it reported, a converted vessel, Orsino, was equipped with state-of-the-art medical and meteorological technology and designated as a ‘mother ship’ to accompany trawlers to the most dangerous Arctic waters. Lil Bilocca stood on the dock as Orsino sailed and told reporters, ‘I am chuffed. Never mind them calling us silly women, this is what we have fought for.’

Many years later, Mary Denness would reflect on that fight, and on how Lil, Chrissie, Yvonne and herself – four ‘ordinary, insignificant, working-class northern women’ – had the courage to invade one of the most segregated of Britain’s industries and start making demands:

All we were promoting was safety at sea.

Somebody had to speak up for the men, because they had no time for campaigning – they were only at home for two days in every three weeks.

But it was more than that. I do think my generation was influenced by a modern way of thinking. We felt significant all of a sudden. Did it come from the women’s rights campaign in America? It might have … But somehow, the thought of all those students and protesters and so forth was sustaining to the women’s campaign for better conditions for trawlermen.

All of us ladies felt the same. We felt unstoppable. Like we couldn’t turn back, or let go.

You know, as a little girl I’d been forever put down by my mother, and now finally I’d found something inside myself that I could accomplish.

But you got so far – and then everything went pear-shaped for you in your private life. Because from then on, it was constant rows in my household. Barry would be at me saying, you know, ‘You’ve been interfering again, haven’t you?’

And I’d say, ‘No. I’m not interfering. I’m involved. I’ve got a mind. I can think! Can’t you accept that?’

‘No, I bloody well can’t.’

‘Right.’

So then you knew, you were on opposite sides.

My husband never recognised any little bit of intelligence I might have. He seemed to regard me as his galley slave. And I think this hit a lot of the ladies the way it did me. We couldn’t accept that we should settle for the life that we’d had before, as housewives: just going home to our kitchen sinks, and looking after our kids, and taking no further interest in what we’d actually achieved. Not any more.

That would have been impossible. For me, it changed my life.

‘For We Were Young and Sure to Have Our Way …’

Half a century after women were first granted the vote, the feeling of having a mind, of being able to think and of reaching beyond the kitchen sink was something more working-class women were experiencing, along with the accompanying rows and tumult.

Rosie Boland and Lil O’Callaghan, shop stewards at Ford’s Dagenham plant, brought the factory to a halt when they called 187 women sewing-machinists out on strike that year in protest against sex discrimination in job grading. The women were defined as unskilled, and paid 85 per cent of the male rate. The dispute was resolved with the help of the fiery employment secretary, Barbara Castle, who sidestepped complex union processes and called a face-to-face meeting with the key women. They all gathered for the photocall round a cosy teapot, which Mrs Castle then had removed before settling down to talks over ‘a real drink’. Together, they reached an agreement by which the women strikers were promised near parity with the men (in reality, management didn’t go the final mile, and progress stalled). But Dagenham became a cause célèbre, unfairness to women in industry took hold in the public mind, and Mrs Castle gained sufficient support among women MPs to push for an Equal Pay Act.

At the same time, the slow-burning question of whether women bus conductors should be permitted to drive buses became crucial, as 77,000 London busmen threatened strike action in July 1968. The women conductors aired their grievances in front of the press, but they were up against entrenched attitudes. When would-be bus driver Brenda Armstrong from Yarmouth took on the male drivers she was defeated by their bigotry, with the branch secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union explaining that, although there was an acute shortage of drivers, it would be ‘humiliating for a man to have a woman driver’.⁹

Increasingly, the battle lines were forming between the sexes, as women from Dagenham to Hull discovered unsuspected wells of power and protest within themselves. Male authority was being challenged as never before; disobedience and demonstration were becoming the currency. Both for the women who participated in the 1968 upheavals, and for those who didn’t, a new, radical future – in which kitchen-sink subordination was consigned to history – seemed within reach. The days of sober columns of pram-pushing marchers respectfully wending their way from Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square to air their views were being superseded by the new tactics of angry confrontation. For women seeking to resist unfairness and authoritarianism in their own lives, the 1968 protests presented a new, far less passive model.

*

The first anti-Vietnam War demonstration was scheduled for Sunday 17 March. The night before, Sheila Rowbotham attended a VSC meeting to confer on tactics. She learnt how to form a human wedge to push through police lines, and how to lock arms while chanting ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’. ‘Its ethos contrasted with CND’s “We the good people bearing witness” style.¹⁰ We were more angry than good …’

On the day, Granada Television’s current affairs programme World in Action followed a coachload of student protesters travelling down the M1 from Manchester for the demonstration, and spoke to their leader. The unnamed young interviewee is moustachioed, sideburned, good-looking and terse. He was clearly expecting trouble:

I shan’t be at all surprised if there’s violence today.¹¹ And I shan’t – how shall I put this? I shan’t be condemnatory of it …

With that in mind, he and his comrades had a job to do, and it was a strictly traditional one:

We have to have someone who’s responsible for anybody who gets arrested, and we have to have someone to look after the girls …

Just like their fathers, these young men wanted to be good soldiers:

I think that the time has come for all of us … to unite and to try and bring about a radical social change – and if violence is a part of it, well, violence is a part of it.

People are starting to fight back. This demonstration is a strengthening of my muscles for the sort of society I want to see later …

It was as if men, in the post-war era, had for too long been deprived of their weaponry and their fists; now, they eagerly absorbed lessons from their American counterparts in the student movement, who taught them how to pull policemen off their horses, and how to use banners as lances and spears. The urge to assail and batter seemed ineradicable in the male psyche.

Back on the M1, the Manchester student leader solemnly instructed his fellow-travelling comrades how to repulse the aggressors:

The police are going to try and provoke us … If they start using the horses, charging into us, just link arms with the person next to you …

As Martin Luther King said, a riot is the voice of the unheard …

That Sunday, over 25,000 people set out from Trafalgar Square with actress Vanessa Redgrave at their head, heading for the American embassy in Grosvenor Square. The size and public impact of the demonstration would give feminists like Sheila Rowbotham a taste of what power and strength-in-numbers felt like. ‘It fizzled with defiance from the start …’ she wrote, while an LSE-based oral history respondent, Rachel Dyne, confirmed, ‘It was one of the happiest moments of my life … We took over the whole street as though we could do what we liked; it echoed to the chanting.^{12, 13} I felt we were a real force, part of an international movement that could change the course of events on a worldwide scale.’ It also gave radical women like this a lesson in what to expect from those they opposed.

‘The old manners didn’t apply,’ recalled Nina Fishman, an American student activist, then at Sussex University.¹⁴ ‘I was kicked by a policeman … I still have the scar.’ A photographer who witnessed the charge told how ‘there was one girl that was shouting and screaming … and about five police really laid into her and really kicked her about on the ground …’ One of the injured was heavily pregnant.¹⁵ The day after the protest, newspapers carried a picture of a young woman demonstrator being grappled by three helmeted policemen; her miniskirt had ridden up exposing pants and suspenders, and one of the officers had his arm raised over her semi-uncovered bottom. The headline was ‘Spanked’.

Sophie Jenkins was able to look back at the respectful Ban-the-Bomb campaign of her teenage days, and compare it at first hand with her introduction to the embattled activism of ’68:

Well, I was such a silly girl.¹⁶ I wore high heels, because even if you’re going on a demo you have to look nice, don’t you? So there I was tripping along in the bright sunshine wearing high heels, and chanting and shouting. But then – I was pushed by the crowd, and I can remember being much closer to a hedge than I would ever like to be again.

It was absolutely terrifying.

Mick Jagger was spotted somewhere in the crowd.fn3 Though Redgrave was permitted to deliver a protest to the embassy, the police urged the demonstrators to back off. Stones and smoke bombs were thrown by the crowd. Famously, many of the police were mounted, and the cavalry charge that flattened long-haired protesters beneath its hooves didn’t differentiate between the sexes.

I remember the horses.¹⁷ I mean, seeing the policemen on their great big black horses, with their brute strength, kind of rushing at people, and people being carted off in police vans. It was really alarming …

Inevitably, the national media fed its readers with the desired fare – plaudits for the boys in blue and sympathy for the plight of the horses. Ann Leslie, by now working for the Daily Express as the highest-paid woman journalist in Fleet Street, took a wry view of the disturbances:

The 1968 ‘revolution’ was largely a male thing: girls were mainly there to paint the posters and provide R and R for their hairy young warriors, who readily concurred with the view of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver that ‘the position of women in the revolution is on their backs’.fn4, ¹⁸

In May 1968 the revolutionary rhetoric erupted again into violence and damage on the streets of Paris, soon spreading to other cities across France. Students were at the forefront of the ’68 ‘événements’, protesting against a raft of perceived evils from American imperialism to archaic university curriculums. But as ever, sexual freedom was central to the movement, with free access to women’s campus dormitories heading the list of students’ demands. Soon, industrial workers joined in, calling for better pay and conditions. The protests were on such a scale that the French economy was brought to a virtual standstill, nearly toppling the government. ‘Please don’t let them be defeated,’ prayed Sheila Rowbotham back in Hackney.¹⁹ There were strikes, and savage clashes on the streets involving barricades, torn-up paving stones, burning cars, fire bombs, police charges, tear gas and multiple arrests, making Grosvenor Square look like a picnic. The Guardian newspaper’s coverage of the riots was filed by their Paris correspondent, fifty-five-year-old Welshwoman Nesta Roberts, who dodged pavés and tear-gas canisters to tell the story of the movement. Roberts painted an expressive picture of Paris in extremis, sharing with her readers the chaos and the calm, the momentous and the trivial. Her eyes were still stinging with the gas as she listened to the platitudes of the French Minister for Education, while in the background ‘the mob was roaring like surf’.²⁰ Across the pavement, ‘the rubbish of five days is suppurating. Mingling with its stench was the acrid scent of burning lingering around four carcasses that had once been motor vehicles.’ And she met the students, in the Sorbonne and the Odéon:

Both are populated with girls and young men living on sandwiches and oranges, and looking as if they had not slept for months …

On the walls of the Odéon are written all the rude words that these mostly bourgeois young people have since the nursery been forbidden to use, but the boys still bow a visitor through the doors, and the girls have charmingly frivolous necklaces showing beneath the red scarves of revolution.

‘You know they killed several people last night, don’t you?’ says one of them.

Though British student bodies mounted solidarity demonstrations, few on the English side of the Channel had the appetite for Parisian-style lutte. Shortly after the événements subsided, Sophie Jenkins truanted from her waitress job in London and snuck off with her boyfriend to the Left Bank to see for herself. But by the time they arrived there had been a clean-up.

The roads looked a bit unmade, but apart from that all you could see was the slogans on the walls.²¹

I’d wanted to go because, well, it felt like – us. I thought, this is my time. This is my generation.

And I regretted not taking part.

*

Nevertheless, by 1968, a doorway of tempting choices and aspirations lay open to Sophie Jenkins and her generation. Many of the tiresome prohibitions had been jettisoned. You could study, sit in, take action, explore relationships, make love, take psychedelic drugs, join the Tribe of the Sacred Mushroom, embrace Sanskrit chants, auras and extra-planetary beings, greet the dawn on Glastonbury Tor. For some women, freedom and fulfilment felt within reach, and if you were lucky like Melissa North, everyday life felt like a party: happy drugs, happy clothes, happy sex, happy music. I’m sure I was one of thousands who spent a lazy summer in 1968 playing and replaying Paul McCartney’s upbeat, self-believing ballad ‘Hey Jude’ till it was imprinted into memory. (Better, better, better, better, better, better – OH!) The same applied as everyone sang along to ‘Those Were the Days’, Mary Hopkin’s bewitching, elegiac vocal produced by McCartney, which reached number 1 in August.

Those were the days my friend:

We thought they’d never end,

We’d sing and dance for ever and a day.

We’d live the life we choose,

We’d fight and never lose,

For we were young and sure to have our way …

Next up on the turntable that year were two nutty oom-pah classics, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band’s ‘I’m the Urban Spaceman’ and the Scaffold’s ‘Lily the Pink’. A leisurely vibe permeated The Small Faces’ ‘Lazy Sunday’ (Here we all are sittin’ in a rainbow …), the Kinks’ wonderful, dreamy song, ‘Days’ (Thank you for the days / Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me …), and Otis Redding’s languid ‘Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay’. As always, pop captured the cultural essentials: groovy, fantastical, laid-back, hedonistic and druggy. Even a clean-living short-hair like Cliff Richard managed to make his bubbly 1968 Eurovision Song Contest submission, ‘Congratulations’, sound ridiculously light-headed and effervescent – as if he’d had a reefer or two before the performance.

A sense of joyful release and stardust is palpable in many memories of that time, particularly among educated women. Optimistic and aware, they belonged to a sector of society that felt buoyed up by the zeitgeist, and they express the invulnerability of the young:

The sixties was one long Indian summer of shining brightness, long hair, short dresses, long legs.²² It was also an experience of metaphysical joy and utopian sharing.

Marsha Rowe

The relaxation of manners, the sense of intellectual excitement, even the way, oh, God, you didn’t have to shave your armpits …²³

Angela Carter

In The Young Meteors, his 1967 cyclorama of England’s sexual capital, Jonathan Aitken interviewed more than 200 young Londoners, and caught their mood of elated abandon:

[You can have] a man a night if you can find attractive ones. Why not have a ball? You’re only young once.

Boutique assistant, 20

I go to orgy parties once a fortnight for kicks …

Pool typist in an employment bureau, 17

The thing that’s great about this town is that the chicks are so cool about sex. At a party you can come up to someone and say within a couple of minutes of meeting her, ‘How about coming back to my place?’ …

When you get back, there’s no cock-teasing pantomime. It’s action all the way.

Actor, 24

‘If there is any moral virtue left in the youth of London, it has been brilliantly camouflaged,’ commented Aitken dryly. By 1968 cases of gonorrhoea in the UK were set to exceed the wartime peak of 50,000 a year; it was a common experience for such metropolitan action-lovers to find themselves at the VD clinic: ‘A quick jab, a course of antibiotics, a spell of abstinence and then … back to the fray.’ For Amanda Brooke-Dales, whom we last saw recovering from having an abortion in a private clinic in 1966, it wasn’t a question of virtue; she’d thrown that out along with her cocktail suits back in 1963. It was a question of having fun.

A feeling that we could do whatever we liked swept through some of us in the sixties – and that we were admired for it, you know, as these new, free creatures …²⁴

The abortion didn’t deter her from continuing with a freewheeling love life.

I had LOTS of boyfriends. I just went to bed with people if I felt like it.

I mean, it was simply in the air, for girls to behave with more sexual freedom than they had. For me it was part of this new loosening-up of everything …

I just let things happen really, and got away with it. I did what I liked.

And Amanda liked sex. By now she was on the Pill, and taking advantage of the liberty it offered:

Actually, it felt that I was more like a man – I had my ‘wild oats’ period. I was always treating men rather badly. Turning them down, going off with another one. I didn’t feel remotely guilty. I just had a good time …

Men have behaved in this manner since time immemorial – but in a post-HIV world blind irresponsibility is no longer an option. When, before or since, have women been able to take control of their own desires with such impunity and disregard for consequences? The permissive climate of the late sixties encouraged Amanda Brooke-Dales to turn the tables on her sexual partners with detachment and insouciance. Blessed with a happy and optimistic nature, from the age of nineteen Amanda spent the best part of ten years feeling that life had spread its bounty before her, to savour as she pleased. How glorious it was to be part of a generation that questioned everything. Hypocrisy, repression and unhappiness were being replaced by liberty and openness – ‘I had the sense of not needing to play by the rules any more, and of being free to do whatever I wanted, when I wanted it …’ Hadn’t men felt this for centuries? Now women too could feel what it was like to pick and choose, to try without buying, to love and to leave. There would be no more pretending, and no promises.

The Rule Book

People who think anything goes – people who want to indulge their every whim, their every desire, immediately: they have a philosophy that is entirely self-centred, entirely self-indulgent.²⁵

And self-indulgence stems from fallen human nature. Fallen human nature is in need of redemption. And that is the nub of the Christian faith.

The speaker is vicar’s wife Anthea Millican.fn5 Anthea never had any urge to sow wild oats, nor did she ever so much as come near a barricade, a demo or an événement. Her joys were different. In 1966 Anthea left Reading University and, with a sense of absolute rightness, joined her heart and her hand to her first love, Anthony Millican, on World Cup Final Day at St Giles-in-the-Fields in London’s West End, where Anthony was curate.

The couple started their married life in a small flat just off Shaftesbury Avenue, on the borders of London’s ‘vice’ district, Soho. As a young newlywed Anthea would often venture out to Soho’s produce markets and grocery stores, braving the excesses of Carnaby Street, the explicit imagery of the sleaze-merchants, and the gaudy flashing lights advertising sex in all its incarnations. As dusk approached the neon shone brighter; now was the time for respectable solo females to retreat to safety. In the morning, heading downstairs on his way to work, Anthony often found used syringes on the doorstep. The world that Anthea had grown up in – a world of Christian belief, of respect for family, of discretion and dignity – seemed to her to be slipping away.

It all made me feel very sad and very sorry. There was a wholesale rejection of everything else, except what was pertinent to the sixties.

But of course, that was nonsense. How can we completely ignore our wellsprings, and our history? Break up our family lives and snub our parents …?

It wasn’t just sex. Anything that wasn’t Carnaby Street was ‘square’. It was rebellion against the older generation. It was drugs, and philosophy, and fashion, and music.

But much of the pop scene seemed to her aggressively sexual and gross, self-indulgence gone mad.

Anthea’s unease with sixties culture is partly hindsight. Today, she sees it as the time the rot set in, and the beginning of a descent towards the far worse tendencies of the 1970s. But she was and is too intelligent to condemn without trying to comprehend. And she was no puritan. Life’s comforts and rewards – an appetising meal, a glass of wine – are, in Anthea’s book, good. ‘Jesus said, “I come to give you life more abundantly.” We need to look after ourselves.’ But the rejection of rules, and the greedy quest for self-gratification seemed to her to be at odds with the nature of the cosmos as she understood it.

The Christian faith puts God, and his wisdom, and his provision for mankind at the centre of everything. Self-indulgence is completely humanist. And I would contend that you can’t be a Christian humanist, because humanism is, in the last analysis, human-centred not God-centred.

Anthea’s own sense of well-being grew around her faith, her family and her marriage: ‘My darling Anthony, father of my children … He held the central tenets of the Christian faith very sincerely: he was a wonderful clergyman and a wonderful father.’ And she sees their marriage as an unequivocal partnership; they were companions, collaborators, a team.

I loved being married.

You know, waking up in the morning, and just being able to say, ‘Shall I get the tea, dear? Is it hot enough?’

*

For the old values were slow to release their grip. When Mary Ingham tracked her personal path through the 1960s, 1968 was the year at which she shuddered to a halt. On degree day, it dawned on Mary that, though she was carrying away a scroll of paper endorsing three years of intellectual effort and the passport to the world of work, she was not taking with her that which, deep down, she had hoped for: a husband.

Pinning down a man was getting harder. Under the new morality, men were less motivated to tie the knot. With metropolitan, no-strings, living-in-sin appearing to be more fun and fashionable than provincial married life, the late sixties were no time for educated women to be competing in the marriage stakes.

‘Oh God,’ wrote Mary in her diary, ‘why am I not married and happy with two kids?’²⁶ For many like her, the sexual revolution was skin deep. ‘Emotionally and sexually, we were still looking for the awe-inspiring Mr Right – a man you could put on a pedestal.’ When Mary looked around at her peer group, it was not the computer scientists and medics she envied – it was the wives. Gillian had had a marvellous white wedding, and had given up her job to have babies. Glenda, Liz and Kath had all three landed teaching jobs and husbands. Janet was a high-flyer who had traded work for wedlock. Why could she not be like them?

Fiancé-less, and released from the comforting confines of the lecture hall, Mary gazed at her own future with terror. ‘I was at last facing adult life, free and on my own – and I longed to be rescued from that awful responsibility.’

But there was no guarantee that marriages that started out with high hopes would stay the course. In 1968 10 per cent of marriages ended in divorce, an increase of more than 50 per cent from 1962. Living fashionably in sin in Chelsea was one thing. But living under a stigma was still, for many, tough. Middle England wasn’t yet ready for the threat posed by the divorcée, who was still seen as an offender against Christian ethics – like Kathleen Christiansen, whose son, the critic Rupert Christiansen, wrote a precise and poignant memoir of his beloved mother’s life in a leafy backwater of south London where time stood still. Christiansen’s parents had married in 1948. In 1959 his father left his mother. Rupert was four; his little sister just seven months. All through the 1960s Kathleen shouldered the burdens of single motherhood in this rigid suburban bastion of entrenched ‘breeding’, where a fortress mentality prevailed. In Petts Wood Kathleen’s divorced status was, for her, a source of subtle, awful angst. She wasn’t so much shunned, as quietly sneered at and pitied. The neighbourhood kept its distance. When the Church of England vicar paid her a call soon after the divorce to offer his commiserations, he dropped into the conversation the hint that she would no longer be welcome to take communion ‘or – ahem! – belong to the Mothers’ Union’. There was the persistent intimation that as a divorcée she was a threat to the sacred institution of marriage, and also somehow deficient, having failed to keep her man. Kathleen, isolated, kept a stiff upper lip and barely complained. Only twice did the young Rupert see her weeping, silently and without explanation. This was a breeding ground for narrow-mindedness and conformism; a 1950s world of fish knives, matching accessories and female dependence:

I don’t think that the sixties – that glibly packaged but leaky concept – meant anything much here beyond racier pop music, tighter trousers and shorter skirts …²⁷

writes Christiansen.

But the Mothers’ Union mindset applied beyond Petts Wood. Five years after it had exploded onto Britain’s streets, the puritans were still policing young women who liked wearing the mini. In January 1968 staff at Birmingham law courts were threatened with the sack. The clerk to the justices told the Daily Telegraph: ‘I expect a reasonable standard of dress in the office and skirts have now become so short that comment is being made …’ Trousers were still controversial.²⁸ In March 1969 a college principal in Macclesfield provoked a walk-out by banning female students from wearing them, while Mr John Hewlett from Earls Court wrote to the Daily Mail to denounce trousered women: ‘Am I the only man in Britain who actively hates them?’²⁹ he asked, explaining that he had twice refused to escort girls on dates until they changed into a dress. Indeed you didn’t have to look beyond the columns of the Daily Telegraph to find a deluge of correspondence from the likes of retired schoolmaster Mr Thomas Peacocke:

Britain is sinking into a state of decadence never before reached in her history … The Britain of today is just drifting.³⁰ We have lost belief in ourselves and are fast losing all sense of moral values. Something needs to be done …

*

Mr Peacocke, a confirmed bachelor of sixty-five who had taught chemistry at a boys’ school in Leatherhead, probably felt left behind by the speed of change in the era of self-gratification. What to do, other than pour out one’s frustration to the editor of a national newspaper? But the loss of a rule book could be just as hard to handle for these distressed young problem-page correspondents (writing to the Woman’s Own and Woman’s Weekly agony aunts in 1967/68):

I have been going out with a member of a ‘beat group’ for a month and I like him a lot, but he’s always asking me if I would go to bed with him and I really don’t want to.³¹

Now he says I’m old-fashioned and that virgins are thought little of today. He’s got me confused …

Deborah

I am almost 17 … My question is, should I tell my parents that my boyfriend used to smoke ‘hash’?³²

Bridget

I am sixteen and I know girls of my age who have had intercourse with different boys.³³ To hear them talk makes me feel sick, but they still egg me on to try it. Of course I know all the reasons against it, but I will admit I have sometimes been tempted to copy them …

Sally

A few weeks ago my boyfriend begged me to let him make love to me and I agreed …³⁴

Do you think he still loves me after what happened? I am worried sick in case he gives me up …

‘Worried’

Three months ago I met a very nice young man from London and we went out together a few times … He told me he had a comfortable sofa in his flat and, if I ever came to London, he would be glad to put me up.³⁵ Would it be immoral to go and stay with this boy? Do you think it might end by sleeping with him?

I can’t tell my mother, as she would be very shocked …

Lucy

Recently my boyfriend has been very passionate when we are alone together and a few days ago he asked me if I believed in sex before marriage.³⁶ I did not answer but he told me he did.

He seems as though he wants to have intercourse with me and I do not know what to do about this.

Anne

Here, and in thousands of other cris de coeur sent to the magazine agony aunts, we hear the unheard voices, and catch glimpses of a lesser-known 1968 – one inhabited by reticent, unhappy and fearful young women who feel that the sexual revolution is leaving them behind. Their stories, or what they hint at, are the time-immemorial tales of the betrayed virgin, the abandoned maiden, the deceived, dependent female forever prey to the desires and duplicity of the inviolable male.

‘Wait until you are husband and wife …’; ‘Sex is an important and sacred thing …’; ‘Enjoy London – but go to bed – alone!’ urged Woman’s Weekly’s Mary Marryat in her auntly way. It was no good. You only have to look at Mrs Marryat’s by-line photograph – showing a poised, elderly woman with a nicely permed helmet of white hair and a print blouse with a polite sash neckline – to see that she was hopelessly behind the times. ‘Ignore this boy’s taunt about being “old-fashioned”, it’s just nonsense …’ she advises Deborah. But in 1968 Deborah’s sense of virginal value is ebbing, and we can be pretty certain that the beat-group boyfriend is unlikely to stick around waiting to lead her to the altar. What was to be gained by old-fashioned commitment, if you could have all the sex you wanted with nothing to lose except the good opinion of some moralising auntie? Why wait on Deborah’s scruples when the beat groups had Sally’s sixteen-year-old friends – girls willing and ready ‘to have intercourse with different boys’ – queuing at the stage door?

Honky Tonk Women

1960s rock sexism is a complex topic. Its themes are lust, misogyny, contempt, irresponsibility, objectification, male supremacism – and raw power. Ruth Padel, the author of an insightful study of maleness in rock’n’roll,fn6 quotes Eric Clapton:

You get into a group and you’ve got thousands of chicks there. There you are with thousands of girls screaming their heads off at you. Man, it’s power … phew!

Or enter into the fantasy world of this rock fan:

I went to every Dylan concert.³⁷ I made a vow that if I ever got to lay him I’d have myself sewn up …

or this one, writing to Lennon:

Dear John,

… I am lying here in my bed naked, just waiting for you to make love to my beautiful body.³⁸ I’m hungry for your mouth. My measurements are: 38–22–36, my hair is blonde and it reaches my waist. My friends say I’m beautiful. If you want me any time my address is –

The music itself was electrifying. Had there ever before been songs as sexy as ‘Light My Fire’, ‘Sunshine of Your Love’, ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘Foxy Lady’ or ‘Born to be Wild’? – whose earthy lyrics, humping beat and slipping, sliding, spurting riffs made the older generation’s stars (Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett …) sound spineless and sugary. Then there was penis worship. Rock stars like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards not only prodded their erectile guitars at the audience, they also put their own virility on blatant display, thinly concealed in skin-tight and spotlight-catching velvet and satin. There was no escaping the vanity of those pelvic bulges, as aspirational for teenage male fans as for the bad girls who’d screamed and gone haywire at Beatles concerts a few years earlier. But by 1968 the fan-fantasy directed at the cheeky mop tops in their button-up party suits had changed its character. And sexism was becoming sexy.

Take groupies. Jenny Fabian’s sensational Groupie (co-written with her friend Johnny Byrne), a thinly fictionalised account of the author’s rock’n’roll adventures, is eye-wateringly explicit. Much later, Fabian would freely allow that her ‘novel’ was autobiographical. And the authors capture London’s underground rock culture as few other books have done, using hippie-speak that dates the book to 1968 (it was published in 1969). This is the language of breadheads and spliffs, aggro and downers, platingfn7 and pads. The clothes are embroidered, the trousers crotch-crushingly tight. People talk Zodiac signs and take large quantities of drugs. Her characters have easy-to-decipher pseudonyms. The Jacklin H. Event is the Jimi Hendrix Experience; Satin Odyssey is Pink Floyd, with ‘Ben’ masquerading as the band’s ill-fated singer and lead guitarist, Syd Barrett. Celebrity and one-upmanship are the turn-ons. In the novel, nineteen-year-old journalist ‘Katie’ (Jenny Fabian) has got into the groupie scene after pulling Nigel, the manager of Satin Odyssey, whom she sees as a route to the star himself. ‘Although I dug the status I got from being Nigel’s chick there was even more prestige in being Ben’s.’ But soon after they have sex, Ben falls apart mentally from an overindulgence in psychedelic drugs.

Katie moves on, finds a job in the music world and a groupie mentor in gorgeous Roxanna, who explains the hierarchy. A groupie who slept with a Group Member (GM) was expected to stay at that level, and not slip down the ranking to PM or RM (Personal Manager or Road Manager). At times the content is painfully squalid and scary, with unsparing descriptions of VD clinics, drug busts, sadistic sex and overdoses. Trailing after the leader of the band inevitably led to jealous recriminations; a rock star who wanted to please his fans had to look available, so it was no good his girl getting too attached. But attending to the man’s needs was generally expected too, whether that meant rolling his joints, getting his tea, giving him blow-jobs, or ensuring he took his allergy pills. Rather than have a row when a prestigious rock guitarist tells her he has a venereal disease, Katie gives in and masturbates him – ‘There wasn’t much else I could do …’ The room is far from fresh, and the mattress sags, but she stays over. In the morning, she masturbates him some more, washes her hands, makes toast and coffee. ‘When I’d finished [he] made me sew and press some trousers for him.’

The groupie needs to feel useful. She wants to prove to her rock star that she can not only give him great sex but also rustle up a sausage sarnie and wash up afterwards. But though the groupie might play house, she was far from being a wife. She might well be under the age of consent. Other members of the band might expect her to give them pleasure. Where fidelity was concerned, there were no rules. The only rules there were, were ordained by the guys – ‘It’s what I decide that counts,’ says authoritarian rock manager Grant. The primary relationships in the book are ones in which Katie is used, and Grant has a hold over her that scarcely lets up:

He … hadn’t changed at all. He was still aggressive and bossy, but if he had treated me like dirt before, he was treating me like nice dirt now.

As ‘nice dirt’, she is expected to wash and mend his socks, as well as find women for him – ‘birds with big tits, because he liked big tits and mine were too small’.

However, for all her cool, Katie is clingy and possessive: this is Katie struggling to anchor her intimacy with Joe (based on Ric Grech, bass guitar player with the rock group Family):

[Joe] started grumbling that chicks shouldn’t come on gigs anyway, it’s a drag having someone sitting in a corner watching you with a possessive glint in her eye.

‘OK, I’ll wait at home,’ I said, desperate to please.

But it’s a no-win. Joe can’t handle the wife-type.

‘What do you feel for me?’ [she asks]

‘You’re a groove in bed.’ What an answer, I thought.

‘Do you like screwing all that much?’

‘I’m easy,’ said Joe. ‘I make out with you all right.’

‘… That’s only because I work so hard at it.’

‘That’s what you’re here for.’

Many years after Groupie had become a cult bestseller, Jenny Fabian told an interviewer, ‘I felt I still had something to prove. Like I had the right to fuck around just like the guys did. I suppose all this is leading up to the fact that as often as not my day would start with some strange guy in the bed beside me whom I’d pulled the night before in the Speak.’

At the end of Groupie, the reader is left with unanswered questions about sex, fame, free love, equality and power – and wondering who has won. ‘Sam’ (based on Mitch Mitchell, drummer of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, aka the Jacklin H. Event) is her last conquest – or is she his? After the gig, Katie makes the first move. Back at the band’s luxury flat she realises this one’s so stoned it’s scarcely worth bothering, and he’ll have forgotten her by tomorrow. She weighs up the options. What would it be like to have sex with a drummer? But morality is starting to mess with her targets; she is through with ‘anonymous fucking’, or so she believes. To Sam’s bewilderment, she puts her coat on to leave; he pleads with her to stay:

‘I’m not going to sleep with you,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Why not?’

‘Because I’m not an easy pull.’

Sam frowned. ‘Then why did you come back with me?’

‘Well, you are one of the Event,’ I said, matter-of-factly.

So is Katie leaving because she has bought out of the groupie ethos? Is she moving beyond her ‘wild oats period’? Maybe this female rake will conform to the traditional morality tale, mend her ways, renounce promiscuity and find the true love of a good man. But there’s a final twist. Katie walks out on Sam, but we know she’s not setting out to tread the path of virtue. She has unfinished business. And she’s hardly out of the door before her mind summons up an image of a leg in velvet trousers and groovy boots, faceless, with long dark hair and agile fingers coaxing lustrous chords from a keyboard. ‘There’s that organist from The Shadow Cabinet to be pulled. Yes.’

Groupie is about the unadorned essentials of the sex transaction, stripped of consequences, and were it not for the suspicion that Jenny Fabian’s heroine has both a streak of masochism as well as a remnant of morality, the book would be little more than an observational guidebook to extreme sex circa 1968: ‘a social document of our times …’ as Desmond Morris described it in The Observer. But Katie’s complex needs and desires give Groupie depth. In reality, our intrepid free love champion is not free from inherited baggage. Emotional connections, even love, accompany her encounters, and her partners’ infidelities rankle. And when Hunter Davies lifted the lid on Jenny Fabian for the Sunday Times, he revealed, not so much an incorrigible adventuress, more a sulky, confused, battle-scarred young woman, stubbornly trying to navigate a pathway through the anarchic sexual minefield of the late sixties, and retreating, defeated, to the safety zone of monogamy:

Me, I’m just waiting for the right geezer to come along, like every other chick.³⁹ I’m very persistent when I want a man. I’ve no pride. It takes a lot of courage to have no pride.

That’s how I see it anyway.

*

In the episode with Sam, the Event drummer, the author alludes to ‘Jacklin’ himself with awe. As we know, he’s Jimi Hendrix, here seen with a ‘chick he’s had for some time now …’, doubtless Kathy Etchingham. Kathy didn’t describe herself as a groupie – she’d got involved with Jimi in 1966 shortly before he became a rock phenomenon in Britain – but the relationship was as no-strings as any one-nighter. All the same, it is revealing just how uncommitted they both were to the principle of non-commitment. Jimi was massively promiscuous – he was reputed to have ‘balled seven chicks in three hours’ – and when Kathy discovered him entwined with some girl in a state of semi-undress a screaming shouting row ensued, after which she refused to speak to him for twenty-four hours. For Jimi it was normal to flirt with anyone in the room, while protesting bemused innocence when Kathy levelled accusations at him. But he himself was consumed with jealousy and distrust, unable to stand her talking to other men. Both were serially unfaithful. When the relationship inevitably fell apart Jimi was uncomprehending. ‘He expected me to behave like a saint [but] he wanted to be totally free himself.’⁴⁰ Once more, 1960s freedoms were highlighting the massive gulf between male and female expectations. The world’s greatest guitarist felt more than entitled to call the tune, on stage and off.

*

By 1968, macho rock-star culture was starting to get to Beryl Marsden.

Liverpudlian Beryl had started her singing career in 1961 at the amazingly young age of fourteen, becoming a girl in a man’s world. Her preference for a casual, low-key look, jeans and sweaters, came from the desire to blend in, to be ‘one of the guys’. But though the singing never let her down, the guy stuff could get irksome.

When you’re in vans up and down the motorway, it’s not wondrous, is it?⁴¹ I think people sometimes think it’s very glam – and it’s not.

’Cos, being mostly with guys all the time, they were a bit, duh … Though you did get used to it, you know, the burping and the farting.

And I’d tell them, ‘If you want to talk about what you do with girls, just leave it till I’m asleep. I don’t want to know; it’s too much information.’

She was all too familiar with the groupie scene.

Yeah … I mean, some of them were hilarious, don’t get me wrong, and they would sleep with anyone. They would say, ‘I’ve slept with him, ’cos he’s in that band, or this band …’

Trophy hunting had no meaning for Beryl. Bands were her everyday reality, and why anyone would want to go to bed with some malodorous bloke in a trance state just because he played a guitar was beyond her. But she wasn’t immune to the free-love argument.

Everyone was doing it – and I got caught up in it. You just thought, huh, it’s free now – no need to hold back. You met someone, you had a few drinks, you’d go back and chat, chat, chat – and you’d end up sleeping with them … I mean, you think you’re invincible when you’re young …

But you’d wake up next day, and you’d think, duh, what did I do that for?

So, why did she do it? Now over seventy, Beryl has done a lot of thinking about human psychology and motivation. With hindsight, she thinks that performers, male as well as female, have a particular vulnerability and need for attention that transfers to sex relationships, as in ‘if you sleep with me, it proves you think I’m a good person’. She recognises that artists of any kind are needy people. ‘I’m sure part of it was wanting some gratification about who you are and what you’re doing …’ In her own case, she believes having one-night stands was a way of seeking a substitute for the parental affection she’d lacked as a child. But women had few weapons in their armoury, and Beryl also suspects that, in the match between the sexes, women were playing for a draw:

I think it was this equality thing going on. I think women wanted to feel empowered – like, if men can do it, then I can do it too.

But evening the score didn’t bring any sense of triumph.

These one-night stands didn’t make you feel nice, or good. I didn’t even enjoy sex then! I thought it was horrible really. Mad, isn’t it?

I mean, it was like somebody should have said, ‘Are you actually enjoying this? Because I’m not, so shall we just stop doing it then?’

And I don’t think it was a very healthy thing at all. But I think for women it was a lot more damaging.

’Cos obviously, you don’t really get to have great sex, unless you really love somebody. And then it’s a really beautiful thing, an emotional, loving caring thing. But that wasn’t happening.

Beryl had always had a rebellious streak. But this time, her contrariness carried her away from the prevailing current. At just twenty, the drinking, the clubs, and life on the road were wearing her down. The promiscuity felt increasingly destructive, a Russian roulette of risk. She was an onlooker as increasing numbers of rock musicians she knew fell prey to drugs – ‘the heroin thing scared the shit out of me …’ – wantonly abusing their bodies. In 1968 she baled out of the London music scene, got on a train and went back to her mum in Liverpool.

Say It Loud

Scalp-collecting, drugs, alcohol, the counterculture and one-night stands represent everything that Floella Benjamin had been brought up to deplore. From an early age Marmie and Dardie encouraged their clever daughter to study hard and work hard, and expected her to observe the three Cs: ‘Consideration, Contentment with your lot, and Confidence’.⁴² The family were good Christians. Marmie was strict about who her daughters socialised with, though she gave her blessing to their visits to the West Indian Students’ Centre in Earls Court, which she saw as being frequented by ‘decent, intelligent young people’. Floella and her sister Sandra also observed their mother’s ruling that they must have nothing to do with boys, at the risk of ending up as teenage mothers. So, where sexual contact was concerned, Floella had no time for random approaches. When a groper tried to touch her up on the Underground, she shamed him with a resoundingly public rebuke: ‘Excuse me, I don’t remember giving you permission to touch my bottom.⁴³ So stop it!’ In other words, the world of this sporty, punctual, good-as-gold, teetotal, white-collar worker in a City bank was in every way different from that of the hippie minority, whose mind-bending acid reality suffused daily life with psychedelic colour. Floella ‘never needed to drink alcohol to feel good or to dance the night away’. Nor drugs either. Which may explain how this dauntless, moral and ambitious young woman came to take a step that she knew would dismay and disappoint her loving mother, and would associate her indelibly with the very culture that Marmie had so firmly spurned. At the age of twenty, Floella Benjamin joined the cast of the racially integrated musical Hair.

We have already seen, through Floella’s eyes (and those of her contemporary Theresa Tyrell), some examples of the way in which racism’s toxic stain had spread and infected British society in the 1960s. Both young women were subjected to gratuitous attentions, partly owing to the colour of their skin. Through the decade, Britain was accepting around 75,000 Commonwealth immigrants a year, and the News of the World cited a statistic predicting three million ‘coloured people’ living in Britain by the turn of the century. In April 1968 (a fortnight after the assassination of Martin Luther King), Enoch Powell, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West and Opposition spokesman on Defence, spoke out. Native-born Britons were becoming ‘strangers in their own country’, he said. Powell looked on with foreboding and imagined, in the words of Virgil, ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’. Powell’s speech heated existing tensions to boiling point. But though he was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet, for weeks his postbag swelled with letters of support. Barbara Castle was one who saw his influence as irreparably destructive. ‘I believe he has helped to make a race war, not only in Britain but perhaps in the world, inevitable.’⁴⁴

Illustration to a News of the World investigation into ‘Our Coloured Neighbours’ (1965). ‘There is a very strong hidden colour bar in Britain,’ wrote the journalist – ‘a cold, stand-offish determination to have nothing to do with “those blacks”.’

Race was the hottest of topics. From the late 1950s, the ripples from across the pond – in the form of the marches, movements and riots of the Civil Rights movement – had been spreading and gathering hurricane force. For, if women in the white community felt misused, marginalised and treated as an oppressed minority, then how much more did our genuine minorities suffer under brutal abuse, both racist and sexist? Assaults on black women were all too common; prejudice and hatred damaged their lives and those of their children. The 1960s emergence of left-wing protest – anti-nuclear, anti-Vietnam, anti-apartheid – was paralleled among immigrant women’s groups which saw the various movements of Black Power as giving them a voice. From 1968, Altheia Jones-LeCointe from Trinidad deployed her skills in oratory to become a leading figure in the British Black Panther movement, energetically championing women’s involvement; fellow recruits included Olive Morris (who later helped set up the Brixton Black Women’s Group) and Beverley Bryan, both from Jamaica, who had joined the Black Arts Workshop in 1966. There were many more.fn8 Beverley’s strong sense of black pride grew from her community, and from a justifiable immodesty:

It was the time, the only period when to be a black-skinned girl was the most powerful and the most beautiful thing.⁴⁵

You could hold your head, you felt – you know – you were a Queen. People used to call me Empress …

When male disputes threatened to capsize the movement, she and her female comrades kept things afloat. She believed, too, that women were less egotistic, and better at working together than men.

For Beverley, Olive, Altheia and others like Floella Benjamin, the sense of black female pride – accompanied by dignity, power, gifts and potential – was tangible. At the Earls Court West Indian Students’ Centre Floella and Sandra sang along to soul singer James Brown’s 1968 funk civil rights hit, ‘Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud’. Since Elvis, imported black music had already stamped its white counterpart with indelible rhythms – but by ’68 record buyers and concert goers were in love with Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin, the Miracles, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Wonder and too many other great black artists to mention. Black was minority, black was underprivileged; but black was dangerously, indisputably cool.

For this traffic across the Atlantic brought with it more than great music; it brought a look, a glamour and an attitude. Fringing, embroidery, beading, batik and ethnic motifs broke away from their roots and appeared on the clothes and cushions of fashion-conscious hippies. Black women groups like the Supremes who had assimilated white styling by straightening their hair, now unstraightened it and re-embraced African-ness. Their springy, curled hair, which until now had been the despair of many a hairdresser, suddenly became enviable. Black model Marsha Hunt had arrived in England in 1966 and was quickly adopted in alternative circles. ‘Black is beautiful’ was the slogan on innumerable lips. It perfectly described Marsha’s sultry loveliness, lithe limbs and Afro halo; at Christmas 1968 her black face was blazoned across the cover of Queen magazine. It was cool to be a ‘Spade chick’.⁴⁶ But it worked both ways – and white women who slept with black men reaped the associated glamour. For Kathy Etchingham – a white working-class girl from Derby – Jimi Hendrix’s ‘otherness’ (as it was then perceived) was undoubtedly part of the allure:

I had never seen such an exotic man before.⁴⁷ To my naive and unsophisticated eyes he seemed dangerous and exciting … His hair was standing up from his head in his own version of the Afro style, [a] new concept in London.

Though Kathy doesn’t go into detail, it’s clear that – compared with her white lovers – Jimi’s sexual technique was on a different, mythic plane. We are left to imagine whether or not the crushed velvet skin-tight red loons concealed unusual prowess, but the implication is that they did.

All of these themes and many more, from illegal drugs to astrology, from environmentalism to the anti-Vietnam protest movement, collided in Hair. The musical starred Marsha Hunt, and was notorious for its profanity, for bringing black actors onto the stage in leading roles and, above all, for a blink-and-you-miss-it scene at the end of Act 1 in which cast members stripped naked. However, unwary audience members might well have taken more offence at the candid lyrics of such songs as ‘Black Boys’ and ‘Sodomy’. For the finale, the audience was invited onto the stage to groove with the cast and join in with ‘Let the Sunshine In’.

The first night at the Shaftesbury Theatre was 27 September 1968. In the event, few critics objected to the show’s morality, though some were bored. The majority applauded its spirit, charm and energy. The Times’ critic gave it the ultimate Establishment accolade, writing – ‘Its honesty and passion give it the quality of a true theatrical celebration – the joyous sound of a group of people telling the world exactly what they feel.’⁴⁸ Unsurprisingly, card-carrying hippies regarded the musical as execrable, its commercialism and huge success (it would run in the West End for five years, with a total of 1,997 performances) utterly damning it. The chronicler of the underground, Jonathon Green, dismissed it as ‘middle-of-the-road pap’.⁴⁹ Personally, I remember being taken to the show as a treat by a broad-minded relative when I was about fourteen – it must have been 1969 – and being bewildered by its highly coloured, exuberant but incoherent razzmatazz. Yet even then something jarred for me, in seeing the alternative society boiled down to a sensational, shouty chorus, all fine feathers, caftans and fringes: hippies reconfigured as spectator sport for the coach-party market. I had little contact with the hippie universe, but had imagined something more numinous, gentle and profound. Surely hippies didn’t need to show off?

No hippie herself, Floella Benjamin was untroubled by the thought of prostituting principles for the sake of entertainment. It was soon after her twentieth birthday that Floella spotted the casting-call advert in an evening newspaper. ‘Singers and Dancers wanted. No experience necessary.’ All her secret ambitions, her self-belief, her drive, her itch to dance and her craving to perform crystallised as she read the words. ‘I got the feeling it was a personal message to me.’⁵⁰ To proclaim before an audience her beauty, her power, her talent, her femininity and her skin colour would be the summit of her dreams. On the day, Floella took time out in her lunch hour to head for the West End theatre where the hopefuls were waiting in line. At last it was her turn to demonstrate her audition piece, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. She gave it her all, following it up with a bopping, fizzing, free-style demonstration of her dancing skills, and finishing with a reading from the part of ‘Abie Baby’ in her best American accent.

As she waited for the reaction, Floella reached in her mind for what she now sensed would be her future. Somehow, this was going to happen. But how would Marmie deal with her daughter’s change of course? Hair was everything Mrs Benjamin considered indecent, a blasphemous show that had almost been banned for celebrating free love, drug-taking and nudity. Floella was undeterred. There could be no going back to the bank. But how could she persuade her mother to agree to such a step, or give her blessing to a showbusiness career that she had always opposed?

For her to share the vision I had of my future, I would have to reassure her that I would keep intact the principles, integrity, beliefs and values she had instilled in me …

There was one way this could be achieved. Marmie had taught her daughter fearless confidence and a sense of her own value. She was beautiful and she was black. As she stood impatiently, staring into the darkened auditorium, hanging on the verdict on her performance, Floella Benjamin decided that the show’s producers could take her or leave her. It was Hair, or a desk job. She was still on her lunch hour, but time was running short. They needed to make up their minds:

So with a smile on my face, joy in my voice and happiness in my soul, I announced to the listener in the darkness, ‘… so if you do want me to be in your show, you had better tell me right now. Oh and by the way, I want thirty pounds a week – and I’m not taking my clothes off!’

*

Hair pulled in the coach parties. It even – to the disgust of many genuine hippies, but to the delight of the press – appealed to the embodiment of ‘square’: royalty. Eighteen-year-old Princess Anne was seen shaking a hip on stage alongside the stars, Marsha Hunt and Jamaican-born Peter Straker. For many, Hair spelled the death of flower power. Peace and love had become irretrievably vulgarised. The advertisement for the original production at the Shaftesbury Theatre – mirror images in posterised fluorescent colours, of a blissed-out woman’s head surrounded by a halo of Afro hair – drew from the art of the counterculture. Easy to copy as it was, the groovy, psychedelic, Beardsley-inspired hippie aesthetic was becoming degraded and popularised. One very noticeable aspect of this iconography is its appropriation of a kind of comic-book eroticism. Record sleeves, textiles, and posters exhorting ‘Make Love Not War’ brandished glamorised, gaudy imagery of leggy women with perky breasts in various states of overheated ecstasy: psychedelic beauty queens. Reproduced on everything from magazines to merchandise, the visual shorthand for revolution was fast becoming an empty-headed, glassy-eyed, available naked woman.

The straight press were early adopters of the graphic design style pioneered by the underground. But salesmen too were getting in on the act, pirating the concepts, imagery, deliquescent typography and vocabulary of youthful trendsetters to peddle slimming aids, sportswear, lipstick, canned soup, spare parts for cars, Pepsi Cola and the Yellow Pages. ‘Join the cola dropouts,’ urged the marketing men behind a highly coloured flower-filled advert for a Canada Dry product called Wink. ‘You don’t just drink Wink. You feel it. A million liquid diamonds turn on all at once … Wink is where it’s at!’ ‘Hippy?’ challenged the makers of a low-calorie snack, over a picture of a woman struggling with her skirt zip – ‘Get into shape with Limmits Chocolate Wafer’. Meanwhile, as censorship eased, film-makers cashed in with movies like Barbarella, Candy and If …, which broke barriers with their airbrushed portrayal of female nudity and semi-obscured scenes of love-making.

The Beatles too seemed to be selling out. They had created a tax-efficient company, Apple, and opened a well-intentioned store staffed by beautiful dolly birds. But exorbitant prices and a permissive attitude to shoplifting brought the Apple boutique to its knees within months. Nevertheless, the Beatles’ creativity continued to be astounding. This was the year of the double (‘White’) album, and of the animated film Yellow Submarine, an innovative hippie-lite fairy tale with a tum-ti-tum-ti, all-together-now signature tune. The making of the film employed a huge team of young animation artists to colour in the verdant underwater landscapes of Pepperland, the Sea of Green and the Blue Meanies (evildoers who plot to drain the country of colour). Theresa Tyrell was one of many art-school graduates who applied to work on it. For months she didn’t hear back.

Then, when she was on the point of accepting a promotion at Heal’s furniture and design store, the call came.

I got home to a telegram, saying, you can start work on A Yellow Submarine in a week’s time …⁵¹

It was too good to turn down. The pay was excellent; her wages went from £9 to £15 a week; if she did overtime she could earn up to £50.fn9 And the animation studio, based in an imposing pillared building in Soho Square, was a crucible of art-school talent.

Animation used to be done by technicians, but at this time the colleges were spewing out people, so for the first time there was this whole work force, about a hundred of us, who were all from art school.

The surreal, polychrome, poster-art style of the film was inspired by contemporary pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein and Alan Aldridge. ‘I had friends there, and it was like being back at college but getting paid.’ Theresa came in during the final six months of the process, by which time most of the creative basics had been laid down; she was now needed to colour in outlines by hand.

In those days it was very labour intensive – done frame by frame. It was painting by numbers, absolutely – filling in the colours on the reverse of individual cels that had an ink drawing in line on the front.fn10

The money was good, but wasn’t there an irony inherent in working like an automaton to deliver the impression of colourful, trippy spontaneity? Was this the 1960s vision of freedom, individualism and ‘doing your own thing’?

Nevertheless, Theresa’s days were filled with art students, the Beatles and psychedelia. Working on Yellow Submarine ticked a lot of trendy boxes in the late 1960s. ‘I guess it was a hoot really – there was such a lot of dope and acid going around …’ she remembers. LSD wasn’t really her scene, though she’d share the odd joint. And being mixed race herself gave her credibility in an environment where, these days, it was cool to have an Afro – even if her cloud of insuperably fine and curly hair more resembled a powder puff than Marsha Hunt’s black halo. The team would work late and afterwards head on to parties at the Decca recording studio, where they would smoke dope and hang out with guitarists and DJs. But for Theresa, the atmosphere was often sour and brittle.

The people were quite hippie and druggy. Also, for a gauche girl from Leeds like me, they were all quite sharp, and, you know, ‘London’ … Once I found myself feeling very unwell after smoking dope at some party – and I was begging to be put in a taxi. And the guys were saying, ‘Ah, we can’t man, ’cos the taxi driver will see that she’s been on drugs, and it’ll bring the fuzz …’ And that was that for me.

When completed, the censors gave Yellow Submarine a family-friendly ‘U’ certificate, and on opening the critical reception was positive. Hippie style was losing its power to shock.

Chick Work

But a kernel of dedicated men remained committed to the cause. Revolution hadn’t gone away just because the hippies had lost faith in daffodils to deflect the guns. Though its leaders professed anti-violence, there was a war still to be fought: against the Establishment, against institutions, against the fuzz, the straights, capitalists, imperialists, repressed monogamists and the older generation. Politicians, bishops, matrons, walrus-moustached colonels and Mrs Whitehouse still had the upper hand. The counterculture was worth a war with the bourgeoisie. Women were just collateral damage.

That war had been declared in 1967, and it was a war of words, printed beneath swirling, neon-hued, geometric, acid-induced graphics. Its name was Oz, a monthly magazine that – for 2s 6dfn11 – offered its readers a phantasmagoria of views on trips, the Vietnam war, Cuba, abortion, flying saucers, the Paris événements, the Rolling Stones, communes, cohabitation and breasts, alongside poetry, and a plethora of voyeuristic, sexually sadistic imagery of nubile women. The Classified sections listed pregnancy tests, kooky badges, VD clinics and an excess of advertisements for products that claimed to enlarge the male member (‘Magnaphall’). Much of Oz was pornography masquerading as sexual liberation.

Its editor, the charismatic Richard Neville, had arrived in London from Australia that year, and had quickly recruited a raft of talent, including Robert Hughes, Clive James and Germaine Greer, to staff and write for his new publication.fn12 ‘This town needs a bomb under it,’ he declared. Felix Dennis (who later became a colossally successful publisher) was his advertising manager. On launch day Dennis used a simple but tried-and-tested sales technique:

I set myself up in the King’s Road with three chicks in short skirts and [rammed] it in the punters’ faces.⁵²

The rapacious pair described in the last chapter, Haynes and Marowitz, had much in common with Richard Neville and his merry men. ‘I loved women and I loved making love to them,’ Neville told Jonathon Green.⁵³ ‘I loved fucking and there were lots of people around who felt the same.’ Playpower (1971) would be Neville’s manifesto: a bumptious, cocky, testosterone-fuelled assault on traditional values and virtues. In it he described all the fun, for example, the jollity of gang bangs on the beach –

On festive occasions … a generous girl will ‘put on a queue’ behind the sand dunes for a seemingly unlimited line-up of young men …

or the lightheartedly casual exploitation of an underage schoolgirl –

I meet a moderately attractive, intelligent, cherubic fourteen-year-old … I ask her home, she rolls a joint and we begin to watch the mid-week TV movie … Comes the Heinz Souperday commercial, a hurricane fuck, another joint. No feigned love or hollow promises …

As editor of Oz, Neville professed unfettered, broadminded views. He felt it was time to shake off the ‘joyless morality’ of the past. ‘Open marriage’ was the face of the future. The sexual revolution was for everyone. But mainly men.

Having taken full advantage of the liberty this offered him, Richard Neville then went on to give his girlfriend, Louise Ferrier, a lecture on sexual freedom: ‘Monogamy and marriage were bywords for “bourgeois”.⁵⁴ I said it would be fine if she had a bit on the side …’

Needless to say, when she took him at his word, such protestations didn’t hold up. Richard discovered that Louise had had several flings, and was cut to the quick; he was also tormented by the knowledge that feigned love, jealousy and possessiveness were supposed to be outmoded emotions.

To be fair, it appears that Richard Neville genuinely did wish to run things on progressive lines, and he sincerely wanted people’s lives, including his own, to be more pleasure-filled. In his memoir Hippie Hippie Shake, Richard Neville portrays himself as a fun-loving, warm-hearted guy always ready for a ‘hurricane fuck’, but conscientious in toiling away at his writing and editorial work. He paints a joyful picture of a lighthearted three-way relationship that he conducted with Louise and her beautiful friend Jenny Kee (who sold second-hand clothes to a hippie clientele in Chelsea Antique Market):

Spontaneous joy!⁵⁵ No premeditation, no set fantasy, just an entwining of fleshly desires and long-held affection. The three of us tossed about on the sheets until dawn. For me, it was a sensation of wholeness, as if my dislocated yearnings – for a wife, for a mistress – united for once in sweaty tumult, without tears or deceit.

Jenny herself, however, remembers things differently. At that time she was prostrated with guilt and grief following the suicide of a close friend. Aghast with misery, she stumbled over to the flat where Louise and Richard lived. Richard was working on his book, but Louise rallied round like the best of friends; she looked after Jenny, made strong tea for her, rolled a joint, sat with her and hugged her while she cried and cried. Then she tucked her up in bed, cuddled her and told her she could stay.

Richard … saw us in bed and thought all his dreams had come true at once.⁵⁶ Needless to say the Great Work was temporarily forgotten while he joined us. It was an intimate time between two women with great feeling for each other, and he was lucky to be there.

The affectionate threesome then take off for a week’s idyll in rural Suffolk. Richard spends most of this time thinking deeply about his ‘Book’, while the girls do girl-stuff – ‘Louise and Jenny took amphetamines and made a cake.’⁵⁷ There is much nattering and dithering over the ingredients; as Jenny Kee puts it, ‘a perfect sixties scene: girls barefoot in the kitchen while the boys changed the world’.fn13 As ‘The Book’ progresses there are more country weekends, shared with Richard’s theatre director friend Tony Palmer. Again, Louise makes herself useful: ‘[She] would cycle three miles to the village to buy supplies, and prepare meals. In her spare time she sat picturesquely under the spring blossoms, making her way through Gone With the Wind.’

They didn’t wear corsets or curlers, and they were promiscuous, but apart from that Louise and her ilk were as much housewives as their mothers. In female terms, this was what being a good hippie was all about. ‘Chick work’ meant looking decorative, cooking well, scouring the toilet, rolling joints, and above all fucking freely.

Nobody describes the predicament of the hippie women better than the artist Nicola Lane. In 1968 Nicola was living ‘in run-down Notting Hill – then the throbbing nerve centre of bohemian and “alternative” life’. She had always wanted to be an artist; after a peripatetic and cosmopolitan childhood she came to art school in London in 1967 and spent the following decade immersed in the underground art scene. Jonathon Green, who interviewed Nicola twenty years later for his book Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–1971, puts her in context as an art student and ‘hippie chick’. But Nicola was far from as mindless as that makes her sound. Her interview is worth quoting at some length:

The important thing to remember about the sixties is that it was totally male-dominated. You had to be an awful lot of things: you had to be sexy, you had to be game for anything, there was pressure for taking drugs, and you had to be an ‘old lady’ and have the brown rice ready. A lot of girls just rolled joints – it was what you did while you sat quietly in the corner, nodding your head … People would say, ‘Wow, she’s so far out, she’s so cool, she never makes any waves …’ And she never speaks.

You were not really encouraged to be a thinker. You were there really for fucks and domesticity. The old lady syndrome. ‘My lady’: so Guinevere-y. You had to fill so many roles: you had to be pretty and you had to be ‘a good fuck’, that seemed to be very important. I think it meant mostly that a) you would do it with a lot of people, and also b) that you’d give people blow-jobs. It was paradise for men in their late twenties, all these willing girls. But the trouble with the willing girls was that a lot of the time they were willing not because they particularly fancied the people concerned but because they felt they ought to …

[There were] endless nights sitting in rooms with the men smoking joints and talking about mighty things … There was a lot of misery. Relationship miseries: ghastly, ghastly jealousy, although there was supposed to be no jealousy, no possessiveness. What it meant was that men fucked around. You’d cry a lot, and you would scream sometimes, and the man would say, ‘Don’t bring me down, don’t lay your bummers on me … don’t hassle me, don’t crowd my space …’

And in all the underground newspapers and magazines there was the first stirrings of what is now a full-blown business: pornography …

*

Nobody burned a bra on 7 September 1968, nor was it ever part of the plan.

But on that historic day Robin Morgan and several hundred women co-protesters in Atlantic City were on fire with excitement.fn14 The demonstration against the Miss America beauty contest, held in the Atlantic City Convention Hall, had been weeks in the planning. Posters and leaflets had been printed, banners painted, buses chartered, a megaphone hired. The women were aiming at the perfect target. The contest was manifestly degrading to women. Its winner (a white woman, always) would be packaged by the sponsors as a dolly mascot and passively bundled off to Vietnam to entertain the troops. Here was capitalism, militarism, racism and sexism all rolled into one artificially curvaceous, high-heeled, swimsuited female prototype. Outside the Convention Hall, Morgan and the sisters gathered around their chief prop, a Freedom Trash Can, into which they flung the symbols of their oppression: body-crushing girdles, bras that warped and contorted, shorthand notebooks that imprisoned, mops and scouring pads that enslaved, stiletto shoes that crippled, treacherous hair curlers and false eyelashes. Inside, as the glitz and pageantry unrolled, twenty intrepid women let rip with a wild cry of ‘Freedom for Women!’ while unfurling a huge WOMEN’S LIBERATION banner from the upper balcony rail.

And so it began.

*

The malaise, first identified in America by Betty Friedan in 1963, and fostered by her with the creation of NOW, had generated a movement.

I heard about a course run by Juliet Mitchell, called something like ‘The Role of Women in Society’ …⁵⁸

We always used to sit round the bar afterwards. An American woman came to talk to us about the women’s movement in the United States, and said, ‘Why haven’t you got a women’s movement here?’ We just gaped at her.

Audrey Battersby

I can date to that time and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968 my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman.⁵⁹

Angela Carter

The student revolution of 1968 opened up the quest for yet new freedoms … At the same time Women’s Liberation was becoming known in this country, proclaiming the fact, which I found even more extraordinary, that women were an oppressed class, both domestically and in the marketplace.⁶⁰

Patricia Vereker

My son … was born [in 1968] … I reacted to it very badly … I loved him, but I hated the way of life.⁶¹ I was isolated [and] I thought I was going insane. So I was very typical, I think, of people who were ripe for the women’s movement.

Val Charlton

In the twelve months since she had begun to feel the first conscious stirrings of feminist awareness and had found a name for them, Sheila Rowbotham had barely paused for breath. 1968 was a year of feverish activism. At marches, at demonstrations, and at student sit-ins, Sheila was there. She organised festivals, sold magazines, painted banners, travelled, wrote, and stood on platforms. She spoke at the founding meeting of the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation. Agit Prop taught her that propaganda could take on new forms, while during the Paris revolution she had glimpsed the exhilarating reality that institutions can totter. During the May événements Sheila’s New Left comrade Tariq Ali started Black Dwarf, a radical anti-capitalist broadsheet, and in the autumn he invited her to contribute to it. ‘It had never occurred to me to actually write in it.⁶² The unstated assumption was that political writing was something men did.’ Meanwhile, the incessant feminist refrain in her head was never quiet – just as a seemingly endless stream of laddish banter and machismo issued forth from the political men she associated with. One day Sheila flipped. Did they realise, she demanded to know, that in America an organisation had recently been formed called The Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM)? If not, it was time they did. Burning with annoyance, she stomped out to the ladies’ toilet, taking with her three other indignant women. ‘[We] began talking. This was really my first-ever women’s meeting – a crucial glimpse of how connection to other women makes it much easier to express disgruntlement.’

Nevertheless, Sheila’s male colleagues invited her on to Black Dwarf’s editorial board, and in December she began commissioning articles for a special women’s issue. There would be pieces about contraception, equal pay, the family, and a first-person piece by a single mother. Sheila too would have a go at writing something a bit different, something that came from the inside about how it felt to be a woman in the late sixties.

The gas fire hissed in Dwarf’s basement office in Hackney. Sheila Rowbotham hunched beside it, her unruly red hair falling over her eyes. First, she made a list:

Me

Hairdressing girl

Brentford nylons

Birth control

Unmarried mothers

Ford’s women

Striptease girl …

Then she started to write, and words – charged with the accumulated intensity of twenty-five years of anger, passion, dreams and discoveries – started to overflow. Sheila felt that she was writing not just for herself, but for her generation.

She headed it WOMEN: A CALL TO REVOLT.