May Days at Cowley
Christopher Hitchens
My first attempt at bringing socialist politics to the workers of Cowley was made shortly before May Day in the magic year 1968. A group of trade union scholar- ship students from Ruskin College, Oxford, arrived at an emergency meeting of the University Labour Club. The occasion for the emergency was Enoch Powell's speech comparing immigration statistics to the heaping up of a national funeral pyre. In response to this, a group of London dockers had tramped to the House of Com- mons and made loud noises about black people (1 shall never forget them bellowing at the Indian High Commissioner to `go back to Africa'). At Cowley, we learned from our Ruskin friends, black workers on the assembly line had come off shift to find threatening and cloacal leaflets in their lockers.
For the next few days, every effort was bent to countering Powell. A small group was sent to London to take part in a May Day demonstration, and got soundly kicked and trampled by Powell's dockland sup- porters and, perhaps ironically, told to 'get a job'. But our main effort was in Cowley itself. For the first time, I realised how early most people start their day. In order to dish out leaflets to the arriving workforce, one had to get up before first light — a salutary experience for me, who had until then often got into bed at about that time. Then the bicycle ride down past the Swan in Cowley Road, and the gradual discovery of which gate was which. Probably not more than one man in five actually took the proffered leaflet: a hasty cyclostyle produced in Balliol and full of warnings about the dangers posed by racialism to working-class unity. Fewer still attended our rally, which was very large but very middle-class. The high point was a speech from a real live Tilbury docker, who had been found and brought to Oxford as our chief draw. He was magnificent, but he was addressing the converted.
There was another group, the envy of us all, which actually had members in the British Leyland plant. These men had not infiltrated the working class: they had been born into it. They were authentic. They were also members of the Socialist Labour League, forerunner of the group now known as `Vanessa's Loonies'.
They were courageous in their opposition to racialist propaganda, but they boycotted our demo because, as one of them explain- ed to me in lugubrious tones, 'we are op- posed to mere humanitarianism'. There was a joke about this group, which held that new members had to listen to the ten fun- niest stories in the history of the world and, if they didn't smile once, were admitted.
Almost anybody would have laughed at what happened next. Apparently, by giving out our tracts to an ungrateful work force, we had broken an ancient statute of Oxford University. Express permission was re- quired from the proctors in order to distribute such material. We had violated this injunction and, if memory serves, the University Labour Club was going to have to pay a fine. Indignation: this had never been invoked in the case of any other undergraduate political club, nor yet in the case of the flourishing Evangelical Society, which pushed leaflets under one's door at the oddest times and issued invitation to sickly tea meetings. We would not pay the fine. More, we would repeat the offence.
Thirty people signed a letter to the proc- tors, giving the time and place when we would be giving out fresh appeals to the masses. The number rapidly grew to 90 and, inevitably as I now see, The Committee of
90 was announced. We wrote raltil duplicated a more advanced leaflet, with the help of some radical trade unionists' which laid bare the disadvantages of the management's new productivity scheme. It was duly handed out, one grey dawn, to the toilers. It evoked no response whatever, Cl' cept from the proctors. A special court was convened in the Clarendon building and we were heard, as I recall, three by three. Tile King's Arms was open over the road, and acted as antechamber and post-mortal' room. I have seldom seen anything Mate ridiculous in my life than the three syndics' gowned and mortar-boarded, sitting solemnly behind their desk. We all took the same 'line' which was that we were single(' out for fraternising with the workers' Something in the face of one particular Pro ctor, as I said this, convinced me that we„ were right. Anyway, after an infinity 0; pomposity and admonition, we were let of' No fine was levied, and the ban was Oa Town and gown could breath again.
This still left us with our greatest war'' — the ceaseless taunt that we were ills, bourgeois dilettantes on a spree. We begat; to take things more seriously. We tried t° interest the Cowley workers in the exaMPlet of their French counterparts, who later tha, summer rose against the Fifth Republic an occupied their factories. No luck. We ati tempted to get them to share our sense ° outrage about the murderous war in Viet1 nam. Not much better luck. Most of t("1 began to move from undergraduate groupsi (by then beginning to be known as student groups) into political organisations with' `roots' (a keyword of the day) in the towel' The International Socialists, who were the cleverest and the least dogmatic, were preferred. It must have been about then that I met Mr Roger Rosewell, industrial organiser Pd the group, who was a cocky proletarian all the apple of various eyes. Mr Rosewell has since become a roving exhibit for Aims of Industry, exposing infiltration on all side( and saying that he now realises the aim ° socialism is dictatorship. We all used 10 5 worry about that too, holding endlese seminars on the lessons of Stalinism and th martyrs of the left opposition. I must sal' and not with hindsight, that I used to No ,11)r about it the most when I was listening to Rosewell. He now says that we packed meetings, conned the workers and deceive,i them about our real ideas; but we didn't. was painful to see the attempts at fratce. nisation, but they were genuine enough in their way. In the end, it wasn't the management but the unions who showed us we were wasting our time. Activists who came w our meetings were told by their branch secretaries to lay off or face disciplinary a`ci tion. Most of us couldn't be in Oxford 3,, year round. Our esprit was no match for ." relentless mediocrity of the machine. fly', that time comes a strong dislike for certal; forms of closed shop agreement: the once where the loss of a union card means we loss of a job. In those days, it was only til
extreme Left who opposed such sweetheart deals: the companies and the unions found that it suited them very well. The whole thing proved too much for most people, and even Vanessa's lot split three ways.
This whole period is very well caught in David Edgar's new play May Days, which OPens at the Royal Shakespeare Company !It the autumn. What impresses me, follow- ing the latest comedy of errors at Cowley, is
how little things have changed. Britain, it seems, will always find something absurd or sinister in the idea of somebody with a university degree actually doing a manual job. All those jibes against us — 'Get your hair cut', 'You've never done an honest stroke in your life' — were not meant to be taken seriously. I say hats off to the battling moles of that bloody awful car factory. I hope they have better luck than we did.
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