I remember the streamers – the great multi-coloured tangle of ribbon which encased ocean liners as the voyage began. The Rhodes scholarship paid only for a sea passage, which is why I found myself, in August 1970, on a castellated tub which would take me to Durban, so I could see a little of Africa en route to England. The ship stopped for an afternoon in Melbourne, where I went to the Arbitration Commission to observe the currently ‘hot’ ex-Rhodes scholar, trade union advocate Bob Hawke, in action. His tactics were to call for regular adjournments, whereupon he would repair with his clients to the next-door pub and quickly down a schooner or two. As the afternoon wore on, his advocacy improved although his clients became too sozzled to notice. By the time we reached Perth the ship had lost a stabiliser, but that did not deter the shipping company from sending us, wallowing and listing, across the Indian Ocean. Never again have I been able to contemplate a sea voyage longer than, say, the ferry ride from Piraeus to Mykonos.
South Africa was exactly as described by my rugby interviewees. Petty apartheid was everywhere, in segregated buses, park benches and urinals, although in Durban the facilities were triply segregated – for ‘coloureds’ as well as for blacks and whites. I’d had a debate on television, a few weeks before departing, with Dr Christiaan Barnard, the smooth-talking South African playboy surgeon who had done the world’s first heart transplant. He denied my allegation that his country segregated not only hospitals but also ambulances. Of course it did, and I took photographs proving (if only to myself) that he had lied. I was invited to dinner by some wealthy liberal contacts: the hostess and her friends were clever and cutting about the stupidity of the Afrikaners and their apartheid policies, but I couldn’t help noticing the absence of black faces – until she tinkled a little silver bell, whereupon black waiters and maids emerged to clear the plates and serve the next course. Apartheid seemed a congenial system for white liberals, offering endless opportunity to laugh at the Boer while enjoying the benefits of cheap labour. In time I would return to South Africa to meet liberals risking their lives to dismantle a system that brought benefits they could no longer accept. But I had little time before my first Oxford term and had to crack on, overland to Nairobi.
My first stop was in the Matopo Hills, to contemplate the grave of Cecil Rhodes, invariably known to his beneficiaries as ‘the Founder’. It was a serene beauty spot, where his ghost could survey hundreds of miles of colonised country that then bore his name – Rhodesia. I did not actually pay my respects – I knew enough about the Founder to realise that he was too devious ever to qualify for one of his own scholarships (he had written home to his mum about the joys of having ‘land of your own, shooting when you like and a lot of black niggers to do what you like with, apart from the fact of making money’). I might, however, have had a sneaking suspicion that the trip could earn a few brownie points at Rhodes House. Who knows? A photo beside the Founder’s remains might induce the Warden to extend my scholarship for a coveted third year.
Then I drove to Great Zimbabwe, a magnificent and mysterious ruin, evidence of a highly intelligent civilisation as early as the eleventh century. Rhodes had looted it, of course: one of the noble ‘Zimbabwe bird’ statues was installed at his house (Groote Schuur) in Cape Town and another stands atop Rhodes House in Oxford. When I passed through Rhodesia in 1970, Ian Smith’s racist government had banned archaeologists from suggesting that Great Zimbabwe had been built by Africans, lest people might get the idea that they could be clever: they were ordered to speculate that it was the work of wandering Jewish or Arab architects. Actually, it was almost certainly built by ancestors of the Shona people with the profits from trade in gold and ivory.
After a tedious three-day drive through the monotonous countryside of Zambia came the thrills of the Serengeti, a World Heritage environment second only to the Great Barrier Reef. Revhead that I am, the experience of racing a cheetah travelling at 60 mph against the backdrop of Mount Kilimanjaro stays with me still. So does the experience of being charged by a short-sighted rhinoceros, who pulled up a few paces from our jeep when he realised that we were not, after all, a love rival. Going over the top of the Ngorongoro Crater and descrying hundreds of thousands of flamingos on the lake in the centre of the extinct volcano surrounded by trees full of monkeys and clearings full of elephants and zebras was another never-to-be-forgotten experience. But this was Tanzania, and despite the Christian socialism of its leader, Julius Nyerere – the gentlest man ever to preside over an African country – there were human rights abuses from which animals could not distract me for long.
They were taking place offshore, in Zanzibar – the ‘zan’ in Tanzania (the old British colony of Tanganyika). Dr Nyerere, who had translated two Shakespeare plays and the Bible into Swahili, was by 1970 regretting the amalgamation which made the island’s ruler, Sheikh Abeid Amani Karume, his vice-president. The sheikh was the caricature black despot to whom South Africans liked to point their attempts to justify apartheid: he announced that there would be no elections on the island for the next sixty years, since democracy was a Western luxury that impoverished Africans could not afford. Then he took it into his head to require local Arab virgins to marry black Africans. He decreed that any unmarried Zanzibar girl must accept a marriage proposal from a ‘physically sound male citizen’ – and shortly before I arrived, a number of unwilling Persian women were forcibly married to his party officials. When the parents objected, they were jailed. Then, to emphasise his point, he himself married a nineteen-year-old Persian virgin, said to be unwilling (although it was a criminal offence to speculate). I ignored the beaches and the picturesque Arab dhows on the placid emerald waters and wrote a story intended for publication when I was safely in London. My suggested headline was ‘Democratic Marriage on Zanzibar’, although it was retitled ‘The Sheik and the Single Girl’. Nyerere was applauded by the international left; I admired him, but did not think it right to cover up a scandal for which he had democratic responsibility.
Nyerere’s promise of ‘democratic socialism’ would soon be betrayed, not only in Tanzania but also in Kenya, Malawi, the Seychelles and elsewhere on the continent, by new constitutions drawn up by Marxist lawyers establishing one-party states. Much later, I would be involved in the task of trying to unravel them. For the present, my problem was how to parachute into England in time for Michaelmas term – the arcane description of the first of three eight-week sessions that make up the Oxford University year. Air travel in 1970 was prohibitively expensive, unless you joined a ‘club’ that was entitled under some obscure rule to organise cheap charter flights. For this reason only I joined a sports organisation – the sport in question being the hunting of big game – which entitled me to fly in an old jumbo from Nairobi to Benghazi (refuelling while surrounded by soldiers of the newly empowered Colonel Gaddafi, pointing their guns at our plane) and thence to Stansted, in the Essex countryside, where I was vouchsafed my first sight, on coming in to land, of the green fields of England.
As a naïve Australian, I headed for Earls Court (my knowledge of London was limited to this ‘Kangaroo Valley’ and the places that appeared on the Monopoly board) and spent a week feeding unfamiliar coins into spluttering gas meters – although it was still summer, the temperature reminded me that in England, summer’s lease had all too short a date. But there was no time to be disappointed – the West End beckoned. First stop was a play that would be banned in Sydney for its blasphemy, although Abelard and Heloise (starring Keith Michell and a briefly, if memorably, naked Diana Rigg) deserved to be banned for its banality. Next I hammered a hire car around little England – I drove to Penzance, in honour of Gilbert & Sullivan’s pirates, and thence in the same day up several motorways to watch the late sunset ripples on Loch Ness. The places in the postcards sent by my father seemed less impressive close up: Stonehenge, for example, was just an array of rocks compared to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.
Finally, the entrance to Oxford. It still provokes a warm tingle of wonder whenever I reach the roundabout at Magdalen Bridge and drive up the long, question-mark curve of the High Street, to see the jutting façade of University College leaning towards Queen’s and All Souls on the other side of this yellow brick road. Oxford, like Cambridge, is a collection of colleges with centuries-old reputations (most were there during the English Civil War) with which students are expected to bond more closely than with the department teaching their subject or with the university itself. Whenever you mention that you studied at Oxford to anyone who also attended the university, their invariable response is ‘Which college?’ – a question much more significant than the identification of your subject or your supervisor. It evokes an old-boy network unlike any other, epitomised years later when I came face to face with Lord Diplock, the brilliant but reactionary judge who delighted in tearing my arguments to pieces in the House of Lords judicial committee. We were at a BBC seminar on terrorism (I was there to represent the terrorists) and afterwards, to our mutual horror, found ourselves face to face at the bar. Thinking quickly, I recalled seeing his name on some books that had been donated to the college library, so I ventured to thank him. His death’s-head face creased into a wide smile. ‘Ahh,’ he said, making an appreciative noise. ‘You’re a Univ man, are you?’ It was open sesame – he bought me a drink – several, indeed – and told me all about his secret work (he was commissioner for national security) until very late in the evening. This is how Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt came to infiltrate the security services on behalf of the KGB – they were hired and advanced by chaps who had attended their colleges.
My alma mater was University College (invariably known as ‘Univ’), which had been founded at some point in the thirteenth century. That made it the oldest, but not the richest, college. Australians generally made the mistake of choosing Balliol (where, in the unlikely event that they were admitted, they would be housed in small, newly built rooms alongside American postgraduates) or Magdalen (beautiful, certainly in the rooms that overlooked the deer park, but noisy during the rutting season). I had chosen Univ not so much for its celebrated socialists (William Beveridge, architect of British post-war social reconstruction, had been a master, Harold Wilson a don, and Bob Hawke a student) but because it was currently the college of two liberal legal philosophers I greatly admired – H. L. A. (‘Herbert’) Hart and his successor as Professor of Jurisprudence, Ronald Dworkin. These men were intellectual lodestars, providing principles against the law tangling with moral standards which chimed with my Sydney criminologists and their practical reasons for abolishing laws against abortion, homosexuality and obscenity.
Hart in particular had been the proponent in a celebrated debate with Lord Devlin about the continued existence of the common-law offence of ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’, a law so vague that it permitted judges (as one had declared) ‘to guard the moral welfare of the state against attacks which may be more insidious because they are novel and unprepared for’. That the job of preparing for and punishing new forms of misbehaviour belonged in a democracy to Parliament, and not to judges, was precisely Hart’s point.
Dworkin, a former Rhodes scholar from America, agreed but took up the further argument that judges had a power, and indeed a duty, to interpret legislation according to certain fundamental principles which could be derived from the very concept of law, including respect for human rights. It required no personal propinquity to agree with these ideas, but it was certainly a privilege to dine and discourse with these famous jurisprudes. Ronnie supervised my thesis, which in due course became a book (Obscenity), and his philosophy was to be a lifelong inspiration. We sat together at a seminar organised by the Times Educational Supplement shortly before his death in 2013, where I opined that the UK would never achieve equality until Oxford and Cambridge Universities were abolished. He was less shocked than everyone else.
I meant it, although the thought would not have crossed my mind while I was at Oxford: the university had cast its spell over the thinking world. Here I sat a few feet from the pitted moonface of W. H. Auden and the noble if ruined visage of Robert Graves, listening to them declaim their verse. I heard Mikis Theodorakis bemoaning the Greek junta, John Kenneth Galbraith and Ralph Nader expanding on the arguments in their books – all, I think, in my first term. It was a time when the most famous people would go out of their way to speak at the Oxford Union, although this was really a juvenile debating society where students with political pretentions honed their blunt wits. Self-important politicians graced its benches so that they could report the fact in their autobiographies.
It is ironic that the union gained its historical significance from a vote in 1933 that it ‘would no longer fight for King and Country’ – a support for appeasement that doubtless reflected the refined apathy that privilege engenders. Certainly, its law faculty lacked all initiative and imagination – I had actually been better off at Sydney, where by the time I left we had finally begun to think about law as a tool to achieving social justice. Oxford was a city with a car industry, and increasing numbers of its employees were being thrown out of work by the policies of Ted Heath’s new Conservative government. It had problems of homelessness, drunkenness and delinquency. Yet no one in the faculty was interested: the dons flowed quietly, teaching property law. Of human rights law, they had not heard. When a young don, Bryan Gould – a former New Zealand Rhodes scholar and later a Labour shadow minister – called a meeting to set up a legal advice centre for unemployed car workers, I was the only person who attended and we had to abandon the project. The lack of interest might have been defensible if traditional subjects had been taught with any creativity – as they were at Harvard, for example, lectures there having long been abandoned in favour of the case-study technique. At Oxford, the most celebrated professor in the faculty, who had written the textbook on private international law, turned up to read it, line by line, for sixty minutes. He wore a long black gown and announced at his first lecture that students would not be admitted in future unless they wore gowns as well. I read his book but refused to gown-up to attend his lectures.
There were other unattractive aspects of the Oxford experience. On my first morning in my ‘rooms’ (we had two, unlike redbrick students with a single room), I was roused by an elderly retainer: ‘I am your scout, sir. I shall wake you with a cup of tea every morning, make your bed and do your washing…’
‘You shall do no such thing,’ was my immediate response, as I explained that I did not want to see him again until I gave him the traditional tip at the end of term. I should like to think that this was an Australian’s rejection of upper-class privilege – it was absurd that young men should be cosseted by a superannuated slave – but it might have been more to do with the fact that his early arrival would interfere with my John Donne-induced fantasy of having bountiful English undergraduettes soundly sleeping with me until lunchtime.
My friend Julian Disney, the South Australian Rhodes scholar, was at Univ as well, occupying rooms recently vacated by Bill Clinton (we later joked about the stains still visible on the sheets). It was not thought, by the Univ Middle Common Room, that Clinton would amount to much. The American we voted ‘most likely to succeed’ was Paul Gambaccini. For a reason we could not initially fathom, we were both called ‘Bruce’ by undergraduates. Then we noticed how on Tuesday nights they all decamped to the television room (there was only one TV in the college) and we followed, to enjoy the lumberjack song in one of the early episodes of Monty Python. It had featured the sketch about the fictitious Woolamaloo University Department of Philosophy, where everyone bears the name of ‘Bruce’, so we laughed along with our would-be sledgers. The show was hilarious – at least it was in 1970, before all the repeats.
I did my bit for the college, at rowing (Rhodes scholars, heavier and heartier than weedy English undergrads, were good for ballast) and at tennis, in which the team did well in a competition called ‘Cuppers’ (for a cup, presumably), although rain usually stopped play. In order to indulge my interest in journalism I sought out the offices of Cherwell, the university newspaper, named after the slim stream that serves for summer punting and evokes memories of the riverbank in The Wind in the Willows. They immediately appointed me features editor. From this portentous position I was able to arrange meetings with those of the university’s philosopher-kings who were prepared to submit to my interviews. Stuart Hampshire, the Warden of Wadham, pointed out the importance to the Oxford college system of the physical architecture – how the beauty of the buildings, their shape and disposition, provided an intimate environment for learning and reflection.17 I conceded the point – the gardens at Univ were great places to sit and think, surrounded by buildings that had cast shadows over scholars for centuries – but I was not sure (at least not in my case) of the quality or worth of the thoughts that came to mind. I have always had more inspiration when looking at a brick wall – beauty is a distraction, as I found a few years later when I took a flat with a magnificent view of Sydney Harbour in order to write a book. Words did not come, just the yachts and ocean liners followed by my mind’s eye.
Another editorial initiative of mine was to expose the scourge of alcoholism in Oxford and, I suspected, in other towns in Britain, where so many jobs were lost in this austerity period of a Conservative government. We demanded that the town ‘spare a thought for Oxford’s shambling brigade of alcohol-poisoned beggars whose request for “a couple of bob for a sandwich and a cuppa” regularly touch student hearts and purse strings’. My reaction, at twenty-four, was puritanical: ‘The only truly charitable response to a beggar’s plea for food money is to take him to the nearest shop and to buy him the food he so obviously needs – NOT to give him money, which is invariably spent on alcohol.’ These days I’m less judgemental and hope my grateful beggars buy – and enjoy – a good whisky.
It was a time when the popular press was headlining the horrors of drug addiction (when are they not?), so with the help of Oxford’s scientists I compiled comparative tables to prove that alcohol and cigarettes were more harmful than marijuana. My own experience of drugs was limited, and still is. I became drunk once at a teenage picnic and hurled my heart out beneath a gum tree, and have never imbibed alcohol immoderately since. (As for British beer, I have never imbibed it at all since the first sip of that insipid room-temperature brown water.) Nicotine has never held me in its thrall (remembering my mother, who fell for my father because he was the only fighter pilot she met who did not smoke). LSD I have never touched – my brain is difficult enough to unscramble without chemical complications. Cannabis, of course, should be legalised, at least if they develop a ‘potalyser’ that can catch those who ingest the weed and then drive. Bill Clinton was unusually truthful when, in answer to the question of whether he had ever taken marijuana at Oxford, he replied, ‘Yes, but I did not inhale.’ The mode of ingestion at the time was via hash cookies.
As for cocaine (which, let’s face it, has had some terrible consequences), I have sampled it on three occasions. The first, with Oz magazine editor Richard Neville, was in New York, in the approved way – through rolled-up hundred-dollar bills provided by one of his millionaire friends. It did produce a portentous feeling of invincibility, so I immediately went walking at nightfall in Central Park, then the mugging capital of the world. After forty-five minutes the effect wore off: I had lost my way and felt incredibly stupid and quite frightened. I resolved not to yield again to this temptation, but on the second occasion it was impossible to resist. I was at the house of a wealthy lawyer at Palm Beach, on the occasion of the legendary ‘gonzo journalist’ Hunter S. Thompson’s visit to Sydney. The legend and I were ushered into a room where white lines of powder had been generously laid out on the table. Snorting them seemed to be the right thing to do, under the tutelage of this drug-promoting ne’er-do-well, who looked and sounded like an accountant both before and after he snorted what appeared, at least, to be cocaine: it had no effect on me at all. Perhaps it was washing powder, provided by a host who hadn’t the connections to indulge his famous visitor. The third occasion was in a London hospital after I’d had a wisdom tooth extracted, and a grinning Australian anaesthetist said he would pack the cavity with coke. The effect was to make me want to talk volubly, so I rang my wife at a dinner party to chat to our friends. She reported that they all thought me uncharacteristically charming.
Back at Oxford, there was still no interest in human rights, in the law faculty or anywhere else. In Londonderry, ‘civil liberties’ had started to matter as the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland began to chafe under Protestant repression, but the major reforms of the Wilson government in legalising abortion and homosexuality and abolishing theatre censorship had lulled people in England into thinking that they lived in the best of all liberal worlds. A small book by Harry Street, Freedom, the Individual and the Law, which I was later to rewrite, said otherwise, identifying the failures, for example, to hold over-powerful policemen to account, but there was a popular television cop – Dixon of Dock Green – who was so utterly benign that his public charisma covered up the deep and dark corruption at Scotland Yard.
Internationally, of course, concern about Vietnam abounded, and there was hostility to racism in Ian Smith’s breakaway Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. But human rights were being abused throughout the world, and the only organisation doing anything about it was Amnesty International. I joined its group in Oxford, only to discover that all its members could do was write polite – indeed, grovelling – letters to dictators, begging them to desist from torture and mass murder and to set free those whom Amnesty considered to be ‘political prisoners’. From this class it excepted those political prisoners, like Nelson Mandela, who refused to renounce violence. There were endless terminological disputes: I felt we should support prisoners who advocated violence only as a means of overthrowing a violent dictatorship rather than the sort of violence which would take civilian lives, but the distinction was still not clear. At least we could concentrate on dictators who killed dissidents irrespective of their views about overthrowing the state. So I took up my pen – so pathetically less mighty than the sword – and began to write.
To his Excellency Idi Amin Dada, VC and Bar,
Amnesty (Oxford) respectfully requests that you might graciously be pleased to hold an inquest into the deaths of the three judges of your Court of Appeal, whose bodies (headless) were found floating in the river outside Kampala after they had delivered a judgment to which, perhaps on reasonable grounds, you took exception…
Later I would write:
Dear General Pinochet,
Amnesty is very concerned at reports of torture chambers in Santiago…
This would have pleased the general, had he read it, because he wanted to encourage reports about his torture chambers in order to deter those who might otherwise have to be placed in them. But of course those letters were never opened, as I discovered years later when bored bureaucrats in apartheid South Africa showed me their drawers of unopened letters from Amnesty members, including one of my own. It proved my instinct that the human rights movement would never get very far by begging tyrants to be less tyrannical. But just twenty-five years after I had written the letter to General Pinochet, he was placed under arrest in London for torture and I acted for Human Rights Watch in the case against him. In the 1970s this turn of events would have seemed fantastical: talk of actually holding heads of state accountable for their crimes was the most far-fetched of pipe dreams.
* * *
A colossus first struck by time’s arrow in 1970 was Cecil Rhodes. The problem that arose when I arrived at Oxford, and which should have been appreciated long before, was that the nine scholarships allocated annually to South Africa had been subject to the most outrageous race discrimination: of all the hundreds of scholars sent to Oxford since the scheme had begun in 1903, not a single one of them had been a black student or even a ‘Cape Coloured’. Not a single member of any selection committee for South African Rhodes scholars had been non-white. This was truly a scandal, uncovered by American scholars in our year, who issued a fact sheet setting out the statistics and pointing out that four of the nine scholarships were tied to schools that did not accept black students anyway, and the South African selectors had kept the other five scholarships confined to whites.
Julian Disney and I tramped angrily through the rain to furious meetings in smoky Balliol common rooms, and eighty-five of us – the majority of Rhodes scholars in residence – signed a petition threatening to give back our scholarships unless the trustees took immediate action to ensure the appointment of black scholars. Bill Williams, the rather slippery Warden of Rhodes House, pretended to be sympathetic, although in private apparently he snidely remarked that ‘the present generation of students have found South Africa the cushiest “demo” available’.18 There was nothing cushy about this demo – we were appalled that complacent men like Williams, the Rhodes trustees and the selectors in South Africa had let our scholarships fall into such disrepute, and we were sincerely prepared to give them up. I remember some agonising, with Julian and others, over the decision – we did not want to make a futile gesture like John Lennon, who had returned his MBE in protest against the war in Vietnam. But if only a few of us sacrificed our scholarships it would be big news and a public blow to the trust, and the trustees knew it, so they made a public statement promising reform.
It is fair to say that change did not come easily. Rhodes had provided in his will that ‘No student shall be qualified or disqualified for election to a scholarship on account of his race…’, which seemed clear enough, although by ‘race’ he probably meant to include Jewish scholars and members of European races rather than black South Africans, whom he had worked as a legislator to exclude from voting rights.19 He had anchored four of his scholarships to all-white schools in South Africa, and in 1971 the trust asked the UK Minister for Education to alter this provision of the will. Mrs Thatcher (for it was she) refused. Education throughout South Africa was in the grip of the Bantu Education Act of 1953, which legalised several forms of segregation. Its architect, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, had explained that this act aimed to stop black South Africans from harbouring ‘unhealthy white-collar ideals’.
‘There is no place for the Bantu’, he announced, ‘in the European community above the level of certain forms of labour … it is of no avail for him to receive a training which has as its aim absorption in the European community … and mislead him by showing him the green pastures of European society in which he is not allowed to graze.’
This was the pernicious thinking which the Rhodes trustees knew about and had played along with for so many years. They would have done better to suspend the South African scholarships on the basis that apartheid made fair competition for them impossible. How could you demonstrate ‘ability at manly sports’ when you were denied the right to play in South African teams, or demonstrate ‘qualities of leadership’ when membership of the African National Congress was banned?
We expended a lot of emotional energy in protesting against the exclusion of black men, but without giving much thought to the fact that black and white women were ineligible for selection. Rhodes himself probably gave no thought to it either. The sexist clause in his will was abrogated by the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act and needed no Rhodes scholar revolt to speed its passage. I am proud nonetheless of my small part in that revolt and surprised now, looking back, by my willingness, as a matter of conscience, to walk away from Oxford if necessary after only a year, without taking a degree. In due course I obtained one – a postgraduate Bachelor of Civil Laws – although it may be a measure of Oxford’s irrelevance to my future that I have never bothered, to this day, actually to ‘take’ it by turning up with gown and mortarboard and rusty Latin to a degree ceremony.
As for Cecil Rhodes, the evil that he did lived after him: his statues have recently been taken down at universities in South Africa and Zimbabwe, and in 2016 the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign demanded the removal of his effigy which stands in the wall of his old college, Oriel, his head sheltered by gauze to stop pigeons getting a toehold for their toilet. The campaign was widely ridiculed – the first publicity-seeking ‘scholar’ (I use the term loosely) to condemn it was Tony Abbott (who had gone on to become, briefly, an Australian Prime Minister), who thought it had something to do with rewriting history. It did not: it had much to do with a university where very few black students are selected to study, where very few dons are black, where black history is not taught, where the prime object of the education on offer is to produce a white professional elite and where black students are routinely stopped and refused entry to their colleges until they produce identification.20 The 2016 campaign was led by black Rhodes scholars from South Africa – the very people we sought to bring into existence by our revolt in 1970. Unlike Abbott, I welcomed their iconoclasm – pulling down statues, whether of Stalin or of Saddam, can be cathartic as well as symbolic.
The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ question reflects debates throughout the world about how to preserve the memory of those whose historical claims to greatness require revision. In 2017, the US was in uproar over Donald Trump’s apparent sympathy for neo-Nazi protests against tearing down a statue of the Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville – erected a century ago by racists as part of the push for ‘Jim Crow’ laws, a fact that now justifies having such statues torn down or moved to a museum where the racism behind them (although Lee himself was against slavery) can be fully explained. People are entitled to change their view of historical heroes: in 2015, Ukrainians cut to pieces a Soviet-era statue of Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels to protest against Russian aggression; the following year it was retrieved and reassembled in the city of Manchester to celebrate his contribution to the socialism newly popularised by Jeremy Corbyn. Both actions were fair enough.
This question came to mind on holiday recently, while swimming off Villefranche-sur-Mer, arguably the most beautiful environ on the French Riviera. From the warm and shark-free waters of the bay, I looked back at a majestic villa, its walls luminously white, its tropical vegetation lush green with crimson foliage (for movie buffs, it was the setting for the shenanigans of Michael Caine and Steve Martin in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels). It happened to be the summer home of one of history’s dirtiest rotten scoundrels, namely King Leopold II of Belgium, who built it on the proceeds of his rape of the Congo, which cost ten million (that’s right, ten million) lives. Knowing that fact did not spoil the beauty of the view, but I would not have been sorry to see, scribbled in red paint on the white walls, some reminder (‘génocidaire’, ‘assassin’ or such like) of the character of the mansion’s former owner. The monument to Leopold, just up the road, makes no mention of the wickedness of a life that did no good at all, other than for property prices on the Riviera.
The test for tearing down a statue should be whether it has been erected merely as a reminder of the former presence of the bad person on its plinth, or whether it is intended to celebrate that bad person. In the latter case, it deserves destruction, unless the statue itself has architectural interest, in which case it can be permitted to stand so long as some reference to his or her (invariably ‘his’) crimes is inscribed on its plinth. As for mausoleums, I have no strong views: they engage a certain ghoulish fascination – Lenin’s body shows the inadequacy of Soviet taxidermy, while a visit to Mao’s resting place enables you to meet in the hours-long queue the children of those he liquidated by execution or starvation but who nonetheless revere his remains. All very primitive – and yet it is a nice surprise to pass, on visits to UCL, the body of Jeremy Bentham – his mind, I hope, will be with students as long as his mummified corpse. As for names – on schools and hospitals and civic centres – they can always be changed, if enough people care.
As for the Rhodes statue (I must have walked the cobbled street hundreds of times without noticing its niche in the wall), there is nothing celebratory about the impression it gives. It is there because Rhodes was there, and he gave the college a lot of money – a charitable action to which no objection could be taken. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaigners would do better to climb the north face of Rhodes House to hack off the Zimbabwe bird that nests on top, and return it to the mysterious site in former Rhodesia from which it was plundered. That would make a point about colonialism robbing civilisations of their legacy, and about the return of cultural property, as well as about Rhodes’s imperialist mentality. So I would leave Cecil in his niche, but remove the gauze that protects his head from the bird droppings of history. I can claim in support of that position no better race warrior than Robert Mugabe. When faced with demands that Rhodes himself should be dug up from the scenic grave that I visited in the Matopo Hills, he ordered instead that the grave should be protected and kept as a tourist attraction. ‘The bones do no harm, but we want to make them pay taxes.’21
The Rhodes Trust had a remarkable eightieth anniversary in 1983, by which point the Trustees calculated that they had more money than the university itself. So they spent it, not (as they should have) on endowing more scholarships, but on a lavish celebration in which we were invited back to our Oxford colleges for a weekend of festivities, to be capped by an audience with the Queen herself. For this purpose the ancient wall between Wadham College and Rhodes House was dismantled for a day, at vast expense, to accommodate the conga-line of ex-scholars who would pay respects to Her Majesty, as if they were medieval knights subject to her command, and afterwards the wall was reassembled and re-cemented. It was an outrageous waste of money, and the more republican scholars among us decided to disdain the opportunity to bow and chat with the monarch. We had to book for the event a year in advance, and I was asked whether my wife would accompany me – I said yes (I was single, but you never know what might happen in a year) and took Jeananne Crowley, an Irish actress of republican sympathies who joined me with the other refuseniks – Ronnie and Betsy Dworkin and a dozen or so self-styled republicans, on a mound that overlooked the royal queue. But the majesty of Majesty worked its spell, and as the Queen neared the end of the line (giving every few paces that trademark shoulder shrug that hitched up her smile), they started to defect, eventually leaving only the Dworkins and the make-believe Robertsons in lonely but principled splendour.
Otherwise, it was an enjoyable event: Harold Macmillan had been lured out of retirement to make the best after-dinner speech I have ever heard – a reminder of just how super ‘Supermac’ must have been in his heyday. Back at college there was a reunion with Bill Clinton, then Governor of Arkansas, who was trying out his handshake – he would stretch out his hand as if it were a tentacle from his heart, and hold yours long enough to drain away any resistance to whatever he was selling – invariably, himself. After he had stepped down from the White House we did have another reunion at Univ, on some pretext (I think it was Chelsea’s graduation – she had studied there without any of the usual difficulties of getting admitted). Bob Hawke was invited back, for good measure – the measure being the yard of ale he had once drunk in eleven seconds in college to enter the Guinness Book of Records. He repeated the feat, because that night the ale was even more watered down than is usual for English beer.
* * *
The Rhodes scholarship, at the time I held one, was most accommodating: it provided a reasonable stipend and there was no immediate need to settle on any particular course of study. I had a year to make up my mind, which could be spent getting to know Oxford, or England, or indeed the Continent. I decided that the best thing about Britain was its proximity to France, and was soon venturing to behold Paris and the splendours that survived through collaboration with the Nazis, who did not, in consequence, subject it to a blitzkrieg. At the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop, I was offered a bed for as many nights as I liked, although it had fallen on hard times and the rat droppings under the proffered palliasse disinclined me to spend any night in this literary shrine. Further afield lay the Côte d’Azur, where I first experienced a shark-free ocean swim and found a small fishing village – Bouzigues – with oysters that rivalled in taste my favourite Sydney Rocks.
University holidays were long, which left plenty of time to explore Europe. Winter meant skiing in Austria (only once: I never got past snow-ploughing) and in summer the inevitable charter flight to the glory that was a Greek island. At Easter, Julian Disney and I explored Spain at a rapid speed, observing with pleasure the economic cost of fascism – the peseta had hit rock bottom in the last stultifying years of Franco’s reign, and we stayed in great style for peanuts at paradores, castles from the days of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Some years ago I wrote rudely of American Rhodes scholars that they ‘regarded the university as little more than a five-star refuge from the draft: a place for post-coital punting and a base for touring Europe’. I can’t imagine now why I was disparaging – everyone can benefit from a gap year or two, and Oxford has stood for many centuries without requiring input from anyone until after they leave, when it is avidly sought in the form of donations. I did the right – or at least the expected – thing by my college for many years, in the form of an annual tax-deductible charitable bequest, but then, on principle, I stopped. Oxford is a phenomenally wealthy citadel of privilege, which even in the twenty-first century helps mainly the children of the upper and middle classes to take those privileges into adulthood. I became a trustee of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of London University, and redirected to it what time or money I had to spare. On its students, not Oxford’s, the world’s fight will depend.
My own efforts to fight the world’s fight had not proceeded far during my first term at Oxford: my letter to Idi Amin had not been answered and the only fight that looked like being a success was against the Rhodes Trust itself. The Conservative government had started to make life difficult for Australians in order to make it impossible for black students from former colonies: those of us from the Commonwealth who could not boast a British grandparent would be out on our ears once our course had finished, so my hopes of appearing at the Old Bailey would be dashed. I had an English girlfriend – Jane Turnbull, from St Hilda’s – and wondered whether marriage might be a way out – or, at least, a way to stay in. Academically, I was still toying with the idea of doing a doctorate on blue-sky tax havens, but then along came a small bear with a large penis to decide my career trajectory. It was Rupert Bear, in ‘Schoolkids’ Oz, whose head had been placed on a body in a state of high erection drawn by underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. This had shocked the authorities, and Oz editor Richard Neville had been charged with ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’.
One evening, Richard came to Balliol to talk about his impending prosecution and, having raised money for his first trial in Sydney seven years before, I offered to defend him, and his fellow editors Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, in this new ordeal, promising to make the Oz trial an obscenity trial to end all obscenity trials. The defence team had a vacancy – in fact, it had a yawning gap, with hundreds of supporters and hangers-on and no full-time lawyer to prepare the defence. I took the role, armed with my free-speech philosophy, and threw myself into constructing arguments that depictions of sexual conduct neither depraved, corrupted nor debauched the morals of young persons within the realm, and in any event, even if they did, the magazine had enough literary and artistic merit to justify its publication. This last defence would be difficult, but I persuaded Marty Feldman, David Hockney and Feliks Topolski to testify, and visited London’s leading psychologists and psychiatrists – Hans Eysenck, Edward de Bono and others – who were prepared to say that reading mischievous rudery does no real harm.
I was installed in a solicitor’s office in Bond Street (which featured, in that era of the miniskirt, more flesh than I had seen since leaving Bondi Beach) and provided with a ‘crash pad’ – Richard’s basement in Notting Hill Gate – under 24-hour surveillance, it later emerged, by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. They must have been surprised to see this clean-cut Australian in an unfashionable brown suit and tie, but no doubt recorded the degeneration in my dress sense as my hair lengthened and I acquired the mandatory velvet suit. In a fast Fiat I would thrash up the motorway in the early hours of the morning to make a 9 a.m. tax lecture or play inter-college tennis or edit my sections in Cherwell, before thrashing back down at night to Notting Hill. I ran up, I am told, more parking tickets than any other Rhodes scholar in history.
The Oz trial, held at the Old Bailey over the summer of 1971, was a trial like no other.22 The police had been gunning for Oz since it first started in Britain in the mid-1960s, as part of an ‘underground press’ devoted to personal liberation. They pounced on Oz 28: The Schoolkids Edition, put together by guest editors – a dozen or so bright but bored teenagers from north London comprehensives (some grew up to work for the Sunday Times before moving in middle age to The Independent). They were alleged to be co-conspirators in a plot to undermine the nation’s morals, and the three editors – Richard, Jim and Felix – were to be made scapegoats for the permissive society of the ’60s, charged with ‘conspiracy to corrupt public morals’, which carried a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
Eventually, another explanation emerged for why Scotland Yard had chosen to prosecute. The police force at the time was riddled with corruption: its drug squad dealt in confiscated drugs, its serious crimes squad arranged serious crimes and the ‘dirty squad’ – eighteen constables charged with policing Soho – ran what the judge who later jailed them described as ‘a vast protection racket’, taking bribes to facilitate the sale of pornography of the hardest core. As a pretence that the police really were concerned with the nation’s morals, the much-publicised raids on the underground press served as a decoy. Our defence evidence was directed to show that porn did not deprave and corrupt its readers, but it certainly did corrupt those charged with enforcing the laws against it.
To understand the Oz trial, you have to understand Rupert Bear’s beloved place in the British nursery, and the horror when one of Richard Neville’s youthful guest editors gave him an erection. To my astonishment, several of Britain’s leading barristers were so shocked they refused the defence brief. There was no ‘Je suis Rupert’ in those days – these self-regarding silks made their excuses and left. One, who had notably defended the German radical Rudi Dutschke, initially accepted the Oz brief, but after a two-hour conference called our solicitor, David Offenbach, and said he ‘could not take the risk’. He became a Liberal peer, and doubtless feared that representing Rupert would put such a bauble in danger.
This was my first experience of the British Bar. Promoted as an independent and courageous profession, here it was quailing at the prospect of defending the editors of a rude magazine. We had only four days to find another QC: the next morning someone mentioned that John Mortimer was defending an axe murderer at the Old Bailey. He had successfully argued the appeal for the publishers of Last Exit to Brooklyn, and was our only and last hope. Richard and I tracked him down, lunching with two young women of my own age. ‘What exactly is the case all about?’ he enquired. Nervously, and somewhat shamefacedly, Richard unfurled Rupert the Bare, shielding him self-consciously from the ladies. To our enormous relief, John giggled – and showed it to them. Penny (later Mrs Mortimer) and her sister laughed too. I produced the brief, crossed out the names of the QCs who had become mysteriously unavailable and inserted his. ‘Goody,’ he said, ‘when do we start?’ On Tuesday. ‘I must just finish my poor axe murderer,’ he cautioned. ‘The blood stains are not running our way.’ He left us to his dessert and his companions, and he shuffled over the road to cross-examine a forensic scientist on a subject he – and years later his fictional character Horace Rumpole – knew everything about: how to deduce a reasonable doubt from the pattern made by splashes of blood.
We clung to John like a plank in a shipwreck, as for six weeks of the summer the majestic engine of British criminal law was rolled over these unruly Australians. It was driven by Michael Argyle, an excruciatingly polite and excruciatingly savage Old Bailey judge who took out on defendants his frustrations at being repeatedly rejected for preselection as a Tory MP (notwithstanding his urgent calls to bring back the death penalty). The cultural incomprehension was apparent from the start, as Detective Inspector Luff gave evidence of interviewing Felix Dennis:
LUFF: When the interview ended, my Lord, the defendant said loudly, ‘Right on.’
JUDGE: ‘Write on’ – but you had already finished the interview?
LUFF: Not ‘write on – W-R-I-T-E-on’, my Lord, but ‘R-I-G-H-T on’. This is a revolutionary expression.
Most of the trial concerned the Rupert Bear cartoon, a collage from Robert Crumb and the Rupert annual, by a Hampstead teenager who explained to John Mortimer that ‘Subconsciously, I wanted to shock your generation.’ When Jim Anderson, a gay Australian who had left the Bar to write novels, took the stand, we were treated to a vintage example of Old Bailey cross-examination by Brian Leary, the Treasury Counsel, who prosecuted:
LEARY (reading from Anderson’s editorial): ‘Oz was hit with its biggest dose of creative energy for a long time. Have a look at the Rupert Bear strip. Youthful genius.’ Did you write this, Mr Anderson?
ANDERSON: Yes, I did.
LEARY: Is it still your opinion that Vivian Berger’s cartoon of Rupert Bear is the work of ‘youthful genius’?
ANDERSON: Yes, I think it was an extremely clever and funny idea.
LEARY: Did it amount to youthful genius?
ANDERSON: Well… maybe I was a little bit generous in my praise, but…
LEARY: The youthful genius set to work by snipping out of the Rupert Bear annual the head of the bear. That’s right?
ANDERSON: Yes… er… I suppose that’s what he did.
LEARY: And then if we were keen to watch a genius at work, we would see him sticking it on the cartoon already drawn for him?
ANDERSON: Yes.
LEARY: Wherein lies the genius?
ANDERSON: I think it’s in the juxtaposition of the two ideas, the childhood symbol of innocence…
LEARY (shouting): MAKING RUPERT BEAR FUCK?
ANDERSON (after a long pause): … Er… Yes.
LEARY: Is that what you consider youthful genius?
ANDERSON: Yes, I thought it was extraordinary, even brilliant.
LEARY: Extraordinary it may be, but whatever it is, it’s not genius, is it?
This is how you demolish overstatement: have the witness endorse it and then pull it apart with a dramatic climax. Leary produced an electric shock by shouting the unthinkable. The trial became even more surreal when the lateral-thinking Professor Edward de Bono took the stand:
LEARY: What do you suppose the effect is intended to be of equipping Rupert Bear with such a large-sized organ?
DE BONO: I don’t know enough about bears to know their exact proportions; I imagine their organs are hidden in their fur. But if you had a realistic drawing I think you would miss the point of the drawing entirely.
LEARY: Mr de Bono, why is Rupert Bear equipped with a large organ?
DE BONO: What size do you think would be natural?
JUDGE ARGYLE: Well, forgive me, but you mustn’t ask counsel questions.
LEARY (another tack): A success, do you think, this lavatory drawing?
DE BONO: If one considers it a success to have it published in Oz then I dare say it would be a certain measure of success.
LEARY: The success being this. That the lavatory wall is only available to those people who use the lavatory for the purposes of nature and this particular magazine has, as we are told, a circulation of up to 40,000.
DE BONO: I find that question difficult to answer, Mr Leary, unless I knew the turnover of a normal lavatory wall, which I would expect to be in the region of 30,000.
JUDGE ARGYLE: What, one lavatory, 30,000?
DE BONO: If you stop to calculate it, I expect so.
You may not believe it, but while this was going on, the judge was taking out his magnifying glass to stare at the small bear with the big erection. It was difficult – sometimes impossible – to keep a straight face, despite the awesome and oppressive surroundings of the Old Bailey’s oldest courtroom. There had been some mention of oral sex in Oz – a taboo subject, before the movie Deep Throat – and to explain it I had to call a great British character – formerly an able seaman, then a jazz singer, then a sociologist. His name was George Melly, and he started to talk about the harmlessness of cunnilingus. The judge was genuinely puzzled. ‘For those of us without a classical education, what do you mean by this word “cunnilinctus?”’ (pronouncing it as though it were a cough medicine). Melly beamed at the judge: ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my Lord. I’ve been a bit inhibited by the architecture. “Sucking” or “blowing”, your Lordship. Or “going down” or “gobbling”. Another expression used in my naval days, your Lordship, was “yodelling in the canyon”.’
That brought the house down, and there were shouts of ‘Silence!’ ‘This is a courtroom, not a theatre,’ bellowed the judge for the umpteenth time.
To my great relief, after six weeks of this farce (the longest obscenity trial in British legal history), the jury acquitted Neville, Dennis and Anderson of conspiring to corrupt public morals, but convicted them – on the judge’s misdirection – of obscenity. He remanded them in prison for psychiatric reports, which was an outrage – they were stark-staring sane. This misuse of psychiatry to demonise dissidents was what was happening in Russia. And as soon as they entered the prison gates, they were given a haircut. The atavistic revenge of the state, the short back and sides. This shearing of their long locks was front-page news – mothers and fathers throughout the land may have exulted, but their sons and daughters were furious. There were more letters to The Times about the Oz trial than there had been about the Suez crisis. As if enraged by the controversy, when they returned to court Argyle sentenced Richard to eighteen months’ imprisonment and deportation (back to Botany Bay!) and Anderson to one year. Felix Dennis received only nine months ‘because you are very much less intelligent’ – a comment that inspired Felix to become, in time, one of Britain’s wealthiest philanthropists.
With Marcel Berlins, a friend working at The Times, I stood on the court steps to watch as hundreds of demonstrators, encircled by as many policemen, lit a bonfire: an effigy of the judge was going up in flames. British justice (Marcel studied law in South Africa) had been a lodestar for us both: it now seemed there might be more justice on offer back in the colonies than at the Old Bailey. In search of some kind of sanity, I took a taxi to the offices of Private Eye, where Paul Foot was foaming at the mouth and comparing the infamy of the day to that on which Shelley was sent down from Univ for blasphemy. He ushered me into the presence of an ashen-faced Lord Gnome – at least that was how the proprietor, Peter Cook, introduced himself. ‘I always believed they would get me, that I would be the one they would put inside. Now it’s happened to Richard Neville. I feel I should be in his shoes.’ I left the licensed jesters at work on their Oz trial edition (the cover was a savage caricature of the judge by Gerald Scarfe, captioned: ‘This Justice must be seen to be done’) and went off to consider whether I really wanted to stay in Britain. I had been here for less than a year, but this was certainly not the land of liberty I had fondly imagined back in Sydney, from reading Penguin Specials and the New Statesman.
It was a moment of real doubt – but a resolution to stay and fight was not long in taking hold. A sensible High Court judge granted bail, a group of MPs led by Michael Foot and Tony Wedgwood-Benn deplored the judge’s behaviour, and Bernard Levin produced a magnificent polemic in our defence in The Times. Richard was accorded a deferential interview by David Dimbleby on BBC2 and given a regular column, by-lined ‘The Alternative Voice’, in the Evening Standard (the inspiration for Private Eye’s long-running column of the same name, by ‘Dave Spart’). To prevent his dispatch to Botany Bay, the young Anna Wintour (in the days when she wore Primark, not Prada) offered to marry him. Fortunately for Vogue, the conviction and the deportation order were quashed on appeal.
It was such an astonishing case that I wrote a play about it, which was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company (Ben Kingsley played Richard) and later remade for television as a BBC/ABC co-production. Leslie Phillips was the judge, Nigel Hawthorne the prosecutor and Simon Callow was John Mortimer. The ABC wanted Jason Donovan to play Richard, but the BBC insisted on using a completely unknown English actor named Hugh Grant. My stage direction called for the judge to bring out his magnifying glass and peer at Rupert’s erection, as he had in the courtroom. The RSC director, Buzz Goodbody, wouldn’t have it. ‘But he did – I was there,’ I insisted. ‘Of course it happened,’ said the director, ‘in court. In a theatre, however, the audience won’t believe it happened in court.’
I had prepared the grounds of appeal, identifying seventy-eight legal errors in the judge’s summing up, although only two were necessary (a lesson: concentrate on your best points). It felt good to play a small part in changing the law: the Old Bailey acquittal meant that ‘conspiracy to corrupt’ would not be used against publishers again, and the Court of Appeal decided that they should not be prosecuted for obscenity if their publications were merely offensive or indecent. The Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 won freedom for great literature and the Oz appeal in 1971 won freedom for bad literature, or at least for writing and cartooning that was amateurish and provocative but was being used in the ‘underground press’ of the day to lampoon reactionary opponents of progress. The immediate beneficiary of the successful Oz appeal, however, was Rupert. Not Rupert the Bear, but Rupert Murdoch, fortified in his launch of page 3 of The Sun.
* * *
The very least of the trial’s consequences was to provide me with a career path, by confirming my earlier ambition to practise law as a barrister at the Old Bailey. Although much about criminal justice in London had appalled me – the bent coppers and savage judges, for a start – they could be challenged and exposed, and there was always a jury to appeal to, and then a Court of Appeal. It was not exactly ‘the world’s fight’, but jury verdicts at the Old Bailey could have an impact around the common-law world – they could reject political prosecutions, official censorship, discriminatory persecutions of minorities. And the ‘justice game’ itself was full of stratagems and tactics based on rules of evidence which I knew all too well. It had been my arguments, filtered through John Mortimer’s silver tongue, which had persuaded the Oz judge to allow our expert evidence – years later the Law Lords said he had been wrong to do so, but there were other imaginative arguments where that one came from, and I was anxious to make them. I wanted to expose dishonesty through cross-examination, to stand up to judges and appeal to jurors to follow their consciences and acquit. I wanted a career in which my success or failure would hinge on my own ability, and no one else’s – the independence of the Bar was its greatest attraction.
There was just one problem: money. The British Bar was so insular that it did not accept Australian qualifications: I would have to do a year’s study of the same subjects I had passed with honours at law school in Sydney. The Rhodes Trust would extend its stipend to pay for a third year if you were doing a doctorate, but not, hitherto, if you wanted to do a law course in London. I had to blaze a trail, and it took me to the office of the Warden of Rhodes House. Bill Williams was no fool, at least in his own estimation (he was forever boasting that, as Montgomery’s intelligence officer, he had won the battle of El Alamein), but he was kindness itself. He did not seem to mind that I had been a publicity officer for the Rhodes revolt, or had upset the establishment by staging the Oz trial. ‘Your destiny is obviously to be a consigliere for causes that may or may not succeed: I think the Founder would not object to you obtaining a professional qualification at his expense.’
Perhaps I had misjudged the Warden – he did have a twinkle in his eye which can betray an inner anarchist beneath an ultra-conservative exterior. I did not need to boast of my pilgrimage to the Founder’s grave in the Matopo Hills; Williams awarded me a not-inconsiderable sum of money to enjoy a year in London and obtain the requisite professional qualification. I did not have the heart to tell him that I had already arranged to spend part of it defending my next troublemaker, Peter Hain, the anti-apartheid demo supremo.
Peter had been charged with ‘conspiracy to trespass’ on sporting arenas, thus disrupting games against racially selected South African rugby and cricket teams. He was a youth of about my own age, then head of the headstrong Young Liberals and architect of their ‘direct action’ tactics of running on the field during play and being carried off without a struggle – this was ‘peaceful-ish protest’ (peaceful until the police arrived). The Conservative government did not have the gumption to ban these racist tours, and some sports-loving South Africans were so angry when ‘Hain stopped play’ that they invested in a private prosecution, brought by a company called ‘Freedom Under Law Limited’. The offence of ‘conspiracy to trespass’ was controversial: it was being used against striking miners to turn what was essentially a civil matter (trespass on someone’s property) into a crime carrying up to life imprisonment, merely because the trespass was the result of an agreement (the ‘conspiracy’) between two or more people. Peter’s QCs advised him that under this draconian law he was guilty – he had made no secret of his agreements with other Young Liberals to invade cricket and football pitches – and so they could not defend him. He did not feel guilty, of course, and defended himself, with the help of an NCCL (National Council for Civil Liberties) solicitor and myself. I helped to write his speeches (‘It’s your parts that infuriate the judge,’ he complained) and rehearsed his witnesses, who said they were so outraged by apartheid that they acted on their own initiative. My own leanings towards British liberals were not advanced by one well-known MP, who promised me in the court’s coffee shop that he would say that his conscience would have impelled him to run on the pitch, but when in the witness box five minutes later he reneged and said he would never break the law – he would merely have held up a banner in the stands. My best witness was our last – a Church of England bishop, no less, in velvet vestments and shiny cross. He stuck to his script:
HAIN: Did you conspire with me to stop the rugby tour?
BISHOP WINTER: Yes, I must confess that I did.
(Shock in court)
HAIN: And how did you do that?
WINTER: I prayed to God, as a fellow conspirator and accomplice, to help you disrupt the tour.
The judge ordered him out of the witness box, but the whiff of sanctity left its impact on the jury, which acquitted Peter of all the serious charges and convicted him only of organising a brief trespass at Wimbledon, for which he received a small fine. Freedom Under Law Limited went into liquidation without achieving its stated objective of ‘Pain for Hain’, and a new Labour government abolished ‘conspiracy to trespass’ – a judge-made law used to chill political protest. It was a good result, which helped to prevent the rule of law being misinterpreted to mean the rule of lawyers.
Notes
17 ‘Interview with the Warden of Wadham’ (Cherwell, 1971)
18 Philip Ziegler, Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust and Rhodes Scholarships (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 252.
19 Starr Jameson (of ‘Jameson Raid’ infamy) was closest to Rhodes, and thought ‘he would turn in his grave’ at the prospect of a black beneficiary: see Ziegler, p. 64.
20 This is a current scandal, encapsulated in the Guardian headline in October 2017: ‘Oxford accused of “social apartheid” over admissions – one in three colleges failed to admit black British A-Level students in 2015’ (Guardian Weekly, 27 October 2017, p. 25).
21 Ziegler, op. cit., p. 299.
22 My detailed account of the Oz trial can be found in Chapter 2 of The Justice Game (London: Vintage, 1998).