Shooting History: A Personal Journey

‘Have you anything to say?’

‘Not guilty, sir!’

It was six in the evening when I was taken down to the cells. The police wanted £100 bail for me, and I had no money to get back to Liverpool. I counted eleven others in my cell, and one bucket in the corner. There must have been ten cells, which meant maybe over a hundred arrested in this police station alone. Despite our numbers, I felt daunted by the charge hanging over me, and by the thought of what my father and the university authorities would say.

My turn for the solitary pay phone came at 4.30 a.m., by which time, having spent the night slumped on a concrete floor, I was in far from the best of spirits. In those days I lived in a flat on Liverpool’s Mount Street next door to the poet Adrian Henri, a sweet place opposite the old College of Art where John Lennon had studied. My flatmate Simon Polito was a charming but completely apolitical character. He proved utterly dependable in a storm, however. He leapt out of bed in response to my plaintive call, summoned legal assistance in the inebriated student form of John Aspinall, later a judge, and hurtled down the East Lancs in his VW to our assistance. Simon fixed the bail and was not in the least judgemental, and John set to with how we would run the defence. I was remanded to appear before a stipendiary magistrate in a week’s time.

The Liverpool law faculty had the decency to accept the basic tenet of English law, ‘innocent until proved guilty’. My father hadn’t found out. So for the moment I was in the clear, but it was a serious charge, and if found guilty I knew everything would change.

I decided to defend myself, and to go for the old chestnut of appealing to the magistrate’s sense of social justice. In other words, to leave him in no doubt that we were of the same social class. I appeared with my shoulder-length hair neatly kempt, and my body in a suit borrowed from Simon, who fortunately was as tall as me.

PC Wilson was a small man for a policeman, perhaps five foot eight. I was six foot four.

‘Officer, is it possible that your knee came into contact with my groin?’ I asked straight off.

I had thought he would deny it, but no. ‘Yes, sir, quite possible, in the act of perambulation, on the move, quite possible,’ he said.

‘Officer, could you please walk between the witness box and the dock?’

For a moment it looked as if the magistrate might refuse my request, but PC Wilson walked.

‘Officer,’ I asked, ‘I wonder if we could estimate the height to which your knee rises in this act of perambulation?’

‘Two foot I should say, sir.’

I addressed the magistrate. ‘I think the court should know that my inside leg measures thirty-six inches. For twenty-four inches to collide with thirty-six inches would require a deliberate upward thrust. I would submit that it was I who was assaulted.’

I felt a pang of remorse for PC Wilson as the magistrate intoned, ‘Case dismissed. You may leave the court.’ I knew that if I’d been a working-class lad he’d have got me – after all, I most certainly had booted PC Wilson back. My legal career survived another day, but not for many more.

The university had been carrying on regardless in the meantime, refusing to discuss anything with its revolting students. The authorities were more concerned with the opening of the new Senate Block, an administrative preserve reserved for themselves. Princess Alexandra had been tapped to come and do the opening. Fired with renewed zeal by the Hain campaign, we had turned our attention to this event and to the impending arrival of the university Chancellor to officiate.

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, fifth Marquess of Salisbury, had been Chancellor of Liverpool University since 1951. He was no friend to South Africa’s black majority, and perhaps too much of a friend to Ian Smith’s illegal seizure of power on behalf of the white minority in neighbouring Rhodesia. His speeches in the House of Lords were positively inflammatory. As the date for the Senate Block opening approached, hundreds of students gathered on a daily basis in Mountford Hall. The campus was alive with debate. Several thousand students marched to protest against the Chancellor continuing in office, particularly given that there were now some forty students from southern Africa on the university roll. Still the university refused to entertain even a meeting with the elected student body. So it was proposed that one of us be deputed to go to Lord Salisbury and tell him that his presence on campus could cause serious trouble during Princess Alexandra’s visit. We also wrote to her to request a meeting when she came.

‘You’d be the best to do it, Jon,’ opined Richard Davies, who as President of the Students’ Union might have been expected to talk to Salisbury. ‘He’ll understand you better, with yer public-school accent. Anyway, yer dad’s a Bishop, that’ll appeal to him.’

So it was that on the afternoon before the opening I found myself standing on a platform at Lime Street station in the best clothes I could muster, awaiting the London train. The Marquess stumbled out of his first-class carriage with a straggling retinue.

‘My Lord,’ I said, ‘may I have a word?’

He was charm itself. ‘Now, young man, who are you?’

Where now the rabid racist? In his place I had found a stooped old aristocrat. Could I bring myself to do it? It all came blurting out in one run: ‘My Lord, my name is Jon Snow, and I’ve come to tell you on behalf of the Students’ Union that if you venture onto the campus, your presence could ignite a riot.’

‘Now,’ he said, ‘why don’t you come and take tea with me at my hotel, and we can talk about it.’ So the Marquess, his travelling staff and the long-haired boy from the Students’ Union made their way in a curious-looking crocodile to the neighbouring Adelphi Hotel. There amongst the marble pillars we were served Earl Grey tea and cucumber sandwiches. We talked for what seemed like an age. I was afraid one of the other members of the student executive might be lurking somewhere, and would spot me so conspicuously supping with the devil.

‘Very well,’ said Lord Salisbury at the end of it all. ‘I shall not come to the university. Indeed, I shall never come here again. I shall resign. I tell you frankly, Mr Snow, I’ve never much liked coming to Liverpool anyway. It’s an awfully long way from home. I am relieved to think that when I board the London train in a few minutes’ time, I shall never have to do it again.’ And with that he and his retinue paid the bill and departed.

I walked back up Brownlow Hill towards the university, both depressed and elated. Depressed that I’d abused my roots, and been rude to one of those I’d been brought up to believe were my elders and betters. Elated because I’d scored a hole in one. Not just sent him home, but persuaded the old rogue to resign altogether – although I couldn’t pretend it had been hard. Here writ large were the conflicting loyalties of my old and new worlds.

The university authorities were enraged. They only heard that the Chancellor had resigned through us. They knew it had been our doing. They had lost the one nob the place had been able to sport for all these years, and they felt reduced by his going. Thousands turned out to demonstrate when Princess Alexandra came the next day. She was grace incarnate, waving regally and smiling. We thought none the worse of her. We knew we had messed the entire event up already.

The Vice Chancellor continued to refuse to speak to us, the Registrar likewise. These days we’d probably discover that they were of the finest, but then they had fangs. ‘Loathsome apartheid supporters’, ‘anti-democrats’, ‘fascists’ – there was no limit to the abuse we were prepared to heap upon them. They in turn had marked us down. They would get their revenge soon enough. But now we were on a roll. Having got rid of the Chancellor, we prepared to force the rest of our demands upon the Vice Chancellor and his cohorts. ‘Representation on university bodies’, ‘no secret files’, ‘a say in who the next Chancellor will be’, and, more important than anything, ‘disinvestment of all the university’s holdings in South Africa’ – and of course ‘no victimisation of those who had pressed for these changes’.

The demands were carried over to the Vice Chancellor’s office in the new Senate Block the day after Princess Alexandra had opened the building. They were dispatched by a mass meeting attended by more than two thousand students. The emissary returned, having been refused entry. I got up on the stage and bellowed, ‘Occupy!’ We all streamed out across the quad and stormed into the Senate building. The staff within were terrified, and fled. Suddenly, against all expectation and with no planning, we found ourselves in possession of the seat of the university’s power. Fifteen hundred students had begun what in those days was termed a ‘sit-in’.

The sense outside was that dangerous revolutionaries had seized the place. This was only exacerbated by the action of some of the more committed leftists in raising a red flag on the pole on the roof of the building. The truth below was more complex. The vast majority of the students had never been involved in direct action before. The formally ideological represented less than a hundred of our number.

‘What the hell do we do now?’ I asked the President of the Union, Richard Davies.

‘Keep meeting, keep talking, and organise,’ he replied. So while he summoned the first of many mass meetings in the sumptuous new Senate meeting room, I set about organising the practicalities. The logistical problems were massive, from food to lavatories. Apart from anything else, we had to raise funds fast. Students came up with what cash they could, and the Liverpool Trades Union Council sent in more. Food runs were organised. Others started to devise an ‘alternative university’ that would run in parallel with our proper studies. The far left did their best to hijack the proceedings, but while Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn from the LSE came up to lecture, there were simply too many occupiers for any single sect to prevail.

The occupation lasted several weeks. The numbers gradually dwindled to under a thousand, still sizeable in a university which in those days held seven thousand students. Negotiations with the authorities were sparse and unproductive. In the end the approaching Easter holidays called a halt to our small revolution. I was determined that we should leave the building exactly as we had found it, as to do so would rob the authorities of a propaganda coup that we had in some way defiled the place. An epic clean-up lasting two days and a night preceded our exit. In the end, a single cracked lavatory window was all the damage the authorities could find. As we filed out, we were all filmed and photographed.

Three days later ten of us, mostly elected officers of the Students’ Union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Robert Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign. In the middle of the holidays a kangaroo court of seven professorial staff was summoned to ‘try’ us. Naturally there was no legal representation for any of us. The university’s case was prepared and prosecuted by a local QC named Stannard. We looked in vain for anyone who would defend us, scouring the empty campus for witnesses, not least for Kilroy, but alas he must already have been ‘tanning up’ for his TV career.

Pete Creswell, a committed member of the Socialist Society, drew a water-pistol during the proceedings, and at least had the pleasure of seeing the kangaroos dive for cover. All ten of us were naturally found guilty of the charge of ‘bringing the good name of the university into disrepute’. Creswell and an anarchist called Ian Williams were expelled, the rest of us were rusticated, or sent down, for one year or two. In my case it was for a year, on the grounds that my tireless efforts to sustain the fabric of the Senate building counted in my favour. The whole charade was so blatant a denial of natural justice, and the expulsion so large even in those rebellious days, that the national press picked up on it. Even the Telegraph led its front page with it.

Buoyed up, we decided to appeal. Suddenly the offers of legal help came forth. John Griffith, the celebrated Professor of Law at the LSE, came up at his own expense and slept on one of our floors. E. Rex Makin, a controversial local solicitor, nicknamed ‘Sexy Rex/, offered his help to me. Even my dear father unexpectedly weighed in, writing a top-of-column letter to The Times, signed ‘Bishop of Whitby’. It was somewhat undermined by his omission of the detail that he was the father of one of the students. Despite apparently sharing no common ground with any of our demands, he remained steadfastly supportive.

On the day of the appeal, the local unions called a one-day strike and demonstration on our behalf at the pier head. It had been called for 3 p.m., which we thought would be safely after the appeals had ended, so that we could join the protest. But Professor Griffith and Sexy Rexy entered so spirited a defence that it was five to three by the time the last four of us had presented our appeals.

‘Never mind,’ said Makin, Til get you to the pier head. My car’s round the back here.’

We had not bargained for a gold Rolls-Royce. ‘We can’t possibly travel in that load of capitalist trash,’ said Ian Williams. ‘I’m walking.’

‘You’ll miss the whole thing,’ I said. ‘It’s a demo in aid of the Liverpool Ten. We can’t leave them with just six of us.’

So we all piled in. As we neared the demonstration, the projectiles began to hit the Roller. Poor old Rexy: no fee, and damaged bodywork to boot.

The next day I left Liverpool with a very heavy heart. I did not know it then, but I was never to return to the university. My vast ambition, built on slender academic achievement, to secure a degree, and choices, and eventual return to Uganda, had crashed. I wasn’t even a member of any political party. I had no ideology that might provide answers to what I perceived to be the unjust and archaic actions of a supposedly liberal seat of learning.

Things couldn’t have looked worse. I felt that what I had done had come from my heart, had sprung from the African bush, from an innate sense of justice. At just twenty-two years old I felt very wronged, and very broken.

THREE (#ulink_b42949f4-9b37-5ff1-b183-4bfc7b5bcc3d)

Of Drugs and Spooks (#ulink_b42949f4-9b37-5ff1-b183-4bfc7b5bcc3d)

I DID NOT SEE HIM AT FIRST, it was so dark. The seventh Earl of Longford sat in one of the little cubicles that lined the walls of the New Horizon Youth Centre in London’s Soho. It was early May 1970, in a dingy room in which it was impossible to tell the staff from the young drug addicts who had dropped by. But even in a room full of odd people, Frank Longford stood out, with his erect rim of wiry hair around his famously bald, bright, but eccentric head.

Recovering from the ashes of my enforced Liverpool departure, I had sought another overseas volunteering experience, but no one would have me because of my student past. So I set about trying to do something like VSO inside Britain. I had heard through the grapevine that Lord Longford was looking for a new director for his drop-in centre for homeless teenagers in London’s West End. The previous incumbent had suffered a nervous breakdown. His main qualification for the job, in Longford’s eyes, seemed to have been that he had been thrown out of Hornsey College of Art following a riot. Longford had intended to run the centre himself following his resignation from Harold Wilson’s Cabinet over the government’s failure to raise the school leaving age to sixteen in 1967, but unfortunately his combination of age and eccentricity had rendered him the daily victim of robbery and battery at the hands of those he sought to aid.

‘Lord Longford,’ I said, ‘it’s me. I’m here about the job.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I think your father must have taught me at Eton.’

Even in this godforsaken place the old class connection chimed.

‘Yes, that’s probably true,’ I said half-heartedly. Here was I, I teased myself, gone to the very barricades for the black majority in South Africa, and yet still apparently trying to secure a job in the scruffiest of day centres simply by dint of birth.