A Dream Disintegrates
On the afternoon of May Day 1971 John Evans, the manager of the hugely popular Kensington boutique Biba, walked nervously downstairs into the basement. There had been a series of outlandish phone warnings about some kind of bomb, which to start with had simply been ignored by the girl on the till. Outside on the street were some 500 women and children who had by now been hurriedly evacuated. When Evans pushed open the door of the stock-room, there was an almighty bang, a flash of flame and a billow of smoke. The Angry Brigade, middle Britain’s very own terror group, had struck again. In their communiqué explaining the attack, they misquoted Bob Dylan – ‘if you’re not busy being born, you’re busy buying’ – and went on: ‘All the sales girls in all the flash boutiques are made to dress the same and have the same make-up…Life is so boring there’s nothing to do except spend all our wages on the latest skirt, or shirt. Brothers and Sisters, what are your real desires? Sit in the drugstore, look distant, empty, bored, drinking some tasteless coffee?…The only thing you can do with modern slavehouses – called boutiques – is WRECK THEM.’ What they did not seem to realize was that its customers found Biba not oppressive but liberating.
There are hundreds of dates and events you could pick to date the end of the sixties dream, but the Biba bombing has a piquancy all of its own. Two of the main forces behind the flowering of youth culture were at war. On the one side is the fantasy of revolution, anarchist or Leninist according to taste, the world of Che Guevara on the wall and obscure leftist handbooks by the bed promising a world in which Starbucks would never have got started. On the other side is the fantasy of benign, hippy business as part of the consumer culture, the world of eyeliner, cool clothes and gentle people making money. The two organizations, Biba and the Angries, sum up much of the underlying argument of sixties youth culture.
The small group of university dropouts who made up the grandly titled Angry Brigade would go to prison for ten years after 123 attacks and are little remembered now. But they were the nearest Britain came to an anarchist threat. They took their philosophy from two counter-culture theorists, the Frenchman Guy Debord and the Belgian poet and teacher, Raoul Vaneigem, who argued that capitalism and Soviet Communism were equally repressive. All organizations were eventually taken over by capitalism which turned everything into a commodity for sale. Even attacks on capitalism could be marketed and sold – witness all those commercially produced Che Guevara badges and posters of Mao. Debord in particular extended his attack from old-style Communists, Western politics, the media and other familiar targets, to the drug-taking hippy culture, modern architecture, even tourism. Once people had so many things they were bored of simply possessing, then capitalism would sell them experiences too, such as foreign travel and nostalgia.
So the ‘Situationists’, as they called themselves, resolved to attack targets such as shopping centres, museums, and the media, where ‘scandalous activity’ might provoke repression, and therefore help the scales to drop from people’s eyes. They staged a little revolution at Strasbourg University, where they took control of the student union and mocked their contemporaries for merely pretending to be radical, while actually being seduced by ‘clothes, discs, scooters, transistors, purple hearts’, proving them to be merely conventional consumers. It was a shrewd assessment of what would happen to most radical students.
Debord himself was almost a caricature French intellectual. He was disdainful of Anglo-Saxon culture, committed to fine food, drink, free love and philosophical conversation. His work had been badly translated and spread among students in Britain. At Croydon Art School it had influenced a group calling itself King Mob (after graffiti used by the mob in a London riot in 1790). A belief in anarchy and disorder was spread by this and other groups in magazines and handbills whose scrawled writing and cut-out letters look remarkably like the punk fanzines of the seventies. This is not coincidental. Among the British admirers of the ‘Situationists’ was the young art student Malcolm McLaren, later the creator of the Sex Pistols. Notes for a film he wrote in 1971, insisting ‘the middle classes invented the commodity. It defines our ambitious, our aspirations, our quality of life. Its effects are repression – loneliness – boredom’ could have come from an Angry Brigade communiqué of the same time. When McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened their clothes-to-shock shop in Kings Road, they were producing just the rebel imagery dreamed of by political rebels a few years earlier. Punk in England in the seventies had roots in what happened in Paris in 1968.
Nothing might have followed Debord’s calls to revolution in London, had it not been for another European influence, this time dating back to the Spanish Civil War. Anarchists who continued small-scale guerrilla attacks on the Franco regime had developed the key techniques which would later be copied by terrorist groups from the IRA to the Baader Meinhoff group, indeed to al Qaeda – the use of a cell structure to make the group harder to break, and public communiqués, issued to the mainstream media with code-words, to explain their actions. They were a little more serious.
From 1966 the First of May group was carrying out machine-gun attacks and small-scale bombings across Western Europe. Within a few years they were in contact with British admirers, in particular former students from Cambridge and Essex Universities. At Essex, a new and bleak place then, Anna Mendelson, from a girls’ high school in Stockport, and Hilary Creek, from a private school in Bristol, had been eagerly watching the 1968 revolt. So over at Cambridge had John Barker, from the posh Haberdashers’ Aske’s School, a journalist’s son, and Jim Greenfield, a lorry driver’s son from Widnes in Cheshire, studying medicine. They had studied the ‘Situationists’ and joined the ‘Kim Philby Dining Club’ in honour of the University’s most famous traitor. All of them committed radicals, they got to know each other through communes and the squatting movement in London, then threw themselves into the Claimants Union, an organization set up to try to extract maximum welfare payments for as many people as possible – and successful enough to have eighty branches across the UK by 1971. Through a young Scottish anarchist called Stuart Christie, who had spent three years in a Spanish prison for his part in a bungled plot to blow up General Franco, the university quartet – a strikingly handsome group – made contact with the First of May group. With others, including a petty criminal and heroin addict called Jake Prescott and a Vietnam Solidarity Campaign activist called Ian Purdie, they began to make and use bombs.
As well as Biba their targets included the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall, a Spanish airline plane at Heathrow, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir John Waldron, the site of the new Paddington Green police station (where IRA and al Qaeda suspects would later be held), the police computer, a Territorial Army centre in Holloway, the home of the chairman of Ford in Britain, a Rolls-Royce showroom in Paris, and two Conservative cabinet ministers – the trade minister, John Davies, and the employment secretary, Robert Carr, who was struggling to get Heath’s trade union legislation through Parliament, and whose white stuccoed home was hit by two bombs, one at the front door and one at the back. In all these attacks, no one was actually killed and just one person, a bystander, was hurt. The Angry Brigade issued regular communiqués under names from films such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Wild Bunch and announced that their targets had been selected for execution. They would take on ‘High Pigs, Judges, Embassies, Spectacles, Property’ they said, and attack ‘the shoddy alienating culture pushed out by TV films and magazines…the ugly sterility of urban life’. After nine months the Angry Brigade were picked up by the police after a trip to Paris to collect gelignite. Raiding their squats, guns and bomb-making equipment were discovered and all the key players were given long prison sentences. The judge blamed their actions on ‘a warped misunderstanding of sociology’ and the English revolution was again postponed for lack of interest. The violent fringe of protest would continue, but always over secondary issues, such as Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the Irish ‘troubles’.
Though in many ways the Angry Brigade were a non-event they represent the only direct confrontation between revolutionary protest, supposed to be one of the key ingredients of the sixties, and the evolving economy of pleasure which was the sixties’ real story. Other left-wing groups, mainly Trotskyists, would argue with each other and march, protest and publish about employment and foreign affairs. Revolutionary protest was only felt in its full force in Ireland.