1962-3: Go home queen Fred!

hil Hearse, a longtime leader of theIMG and successor organisations, is writing up his experience of 63 years of the militant left. We are publishing here part of the first chapter on the 1960s. This concerns the Cuban missile crtisisin 1962 and the 193 visits to Britain by Queen Frederika of Greece, events he says that brought the peace movement closer to the militant left.

Accounts of the Left in the 1960s often start with the Vietnam campaign and student occupations, but these things were preceded by the development of anti-NATO and anti-imperialist consciousness from the beginning of the decade. In particular the events of 1962 and 1963 brought sections of the the unilateralist movement - CND and its offshoot the Committee of 100 – closer and closer to the militant left.

Originally the CND movement had an overwhelmingly pacifist and ‘neutralist’ image. But the Cuban missile crisis of November 1962 deepened the movement’s anti-American tilt; while not therefore making it pro-Russian, although the Communist Party and the Young Communist League obviously were.

 In October 1962 US President Kennedy announced a naval blockade of Cuba, following the discovery of Russian nuclear missiles there. People worldwide felt the prospect of nuclear war to be a real and present danger, especially when  Russian soldiers shot down a U-2 spy plane over the island. Kennedy threatened to interdict Russian ships in the seas outside Cuba with more rockets on board, and threatened to bomb the Cuban missile bases. Some form of military reply from Russia seemed likely. Since the First Declaration of Havana, the USSR regarded Cuba as a ‘sovereign part of socialist territory.’ But in reality any sort of Soviet nuclear response was extremely unlikely. Kruschev’s removal as Soviet leader in 1964 was in part caused by what Soviet ideologist Mikail Suslov described as Kruschev’s ‘adventurism.’ In October 1962 there were demonstrations outside the old American embassy in Grosvenor Square, in the heart of London’s West End. I don’t think these were particularly massive although they got a lot of publicity. I was just 13 and did not have the information orthe confidence to go on any of those demonstrations.

Things had changed by 1963. In April Queen Frederika of Greece, a cousin of Prince Philip, came to Britain for a private visit. Frederika was seen as a much more powerful and serious person than her husband King Paul. Originally German, she had been a member of the Hitler Youth in her teenage years. After the restoration of the monarchy, she was widely suspected of being close to the extreme right.

In the left however, Queen Frederika’s April visit was overshadowed by the 1963Aldermaston March, the largest so far, and the Spies for Peace affair.

Unbeknownst to the mass of the British population, the government had established Regional Seats of Government (RSGs) to take over running things if there was a nuclear attack. There were very precise plans about who would be admitted to these underground bunkers and who would not. Somebody inside the civil service or the military leaked the location and function of the RSGs to the Committee of 100. It had to be an inside job. On the eve of the Aldermaston March, unknown persons broke into an RSG at Warren Row, near Reading close to the route of the march.  The intruders photocopied reams of information from files stored at the facility, and mailed 3000 copies to journalists, politicians, trade unions, university teachers and others. It was terribly embarrassing for the government that preparations had been made to rescue the well-connected senior police, army and political elite, while zero preparations had been made for the mass of the population.

On the second day of the march, several thousand people shinnied off from the main march and held a demonstration outside the Warren Row RSG.

Although the chant of the day was ‘I’ve got a secret, a nice official secret’, it was never established who was responsible for the leak or mailing out the information. Anarchist leader Nicholas Walter later was identified in the press as the culprit, and he obviously enjoyed the notoriety. But the true authors of this mobilisation were obviously linked to the Committee of 100, widely seen as the radical wing of the unilateralist movement.

Intersecting these events were dramatic developments in Greece. In May the famous Greek MP Grigoris Lambrakis – an extraordinarily courageous campaigner for peace, social justice and civil rights, had been assassinated by extreme right wingers. It was widely suspected that the government might have been involved. While police and army personnel saw the assassination and did nothing, one of the culprits was run down and captured by an onlooker. Both the assassins were later tried, but remained tight-lipped about who had ordered the hit.

Two months later, both Queen Frederika and King Paul came to Britain on a state visit on12-16 July. Since this was an official visit, the couple stayed not at Claridges but at Buckingham Palace. On the evening of the 13 July Frederika was heckled at a gala performance at the Aldwych Theatre in Cambridge Circus, an embarrassing event for the government, but as Pathe News reassured cinema-goers, the couple understood that the demonstrators were reds who did not represent the views of the British people as a whole.

The assassination of Lambrakis was a catastrophe for the international image of the Greek Government. In addition, for more than a year a Greek woman, Betty Ambatelos, had been campaigning to seek British backing, from the peace movement, the Labour Party, trade unions and other progressive forces to support the freeing of her husband, a seafarers’ union leader, who had been held as a political prisoner for 16 years. And there were thousands of other political prisoners, and had been since British and American troops had intervened in the Greek Civil War, to ensure the defeat of the Communist-led movement that had led the Greek resistance in the Second World War.

By 1963 I had been in the Young Communist League for nine months, and thought that I knew the score well enough to go up to town to participate in the second day of demonstrations. I got off the tube at Leicester Square and walked down the bottom end of the Charing Cross Road to the north end of Trafalgar Square. From there it was just a quarter of a mile down the Mall to Buckingham Palace. By the time I got there the scene was extraordinary, a huge police mobilisation like nothing I’ve seen before, but very familiar in the years to come. Five thousand cops had been mobilised to defend Buckingham Palace, and while there were just a few hundred in Trafalgar Square, thousands more lurked in back streets and in Whitehall.

The gates at the top end of he Mall by Admiralty Arch had been closed. There was no way that demonstrators were going to go past this obstacle, especially as there were several hundred police officers in front of it. Nonetheless, the crowd surged towards the gates, and as they went forward, the only banners I saw were the Committee of 100 and Communist Party, although probably a much wider section of the labour and peace movements were present. Police anti-riot tactics were much less developed and sophisticated than today, so there were no territorial support groups, no riot helmets or riot shields. I only saw four police horses during the height of the fighting, but noticed others in side streets.  The mounted police used their short truncheons, not their sabre-length batons that were on display at the Orgreave Coke plant in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. I saw several people being helped away with blood streaming down their faces. (The short batons inflict nasty injuries. Two years after the death if student Kevin Gately in the 1974 Red Lion Square anti-fascist fight , a former member of the IM told me he had seen Gately being struck on the head twice in rapid succession by a mounted policeman).

The Trafalgar Square rioting only went on for about 15 minutes before the demonstrators gave up on the Mall and headed for Whitehall. They aimed to reach Parliament Square, and then go along Victoria Street, past Westminster Abbey to Victoria Station, which is directly behind Buckingham Palace.

One thing that amazed me was that there were no gates or permanent obstacles at the end of Downing Street; only a few dozen PCs. But there were two green police vans with scores of PCs in rows in front of it,blocking the road to Parliament Square. We were not going to get there without an enormous fight.

Gradually the march turned back towards Trafalgar Square, where small groups charged off towards Soho, where they played cat and mouse games with the police to get to the palace. Later on in the week, one group actually made it, and were allowed to stand in front of the palace long enough to be photographed.

After an hour or so I decided to go home. Although being involved in a demonstration that clashed with the police was for me as a young teenager exhilarating beyond excitement, at 14 it was not a good idea to be arrested. I was in enough trouble at school already. This was my first experience of the vast power of the British state and it was sobering.

The week’s demonstrations had a major corollary in a scandal involving the fabrication of evidence against demonstrators, especially by Detective Inspector Harold Challinor and other detectives from West End Central police station. The most famous case involved Donald Rooum, a pacifist and cartoonist for Peace News, an independent pacifist paper that had existed since 1908; the paper of course, was hugely supportive of CND and especially the Committee of 100. Roum was charged with having an offensive weapon - a half brick carried in his jacket. Roum’s lawyers however, managed to get an independent analysis of his jacket that showed there was no brick dust or tears in his jacket pocket, of the type that certainly would have been there if he had really been carrying a brick.

The Rooum and other cases from the demonstrations led to a re-examination of numerous cases where West End Central police had fabricated physical and witness evidence to ensure convictions. It was a major scandal, and one that convinced people in the anti-nuclear movement and the Left that – if they didn’t know it already – the state regarded them as subversive and would be used to undermine and crush leftist political advance. This of course carries on until today. The visit of Queen Frederika was a disaster for the Greek monarchy and highly embarrassing for the British government.

The only person I knew at the demo was Richard Dixon, from Ealing YCL. He had been in my class in primary school. I didn’t see any members or banners from the Socialist Labour League, the main organisation to the left of the Communists at that time. I found this absence somewhat puzzling. Gerry Healy, the SLL leader, was pleased if his members got involved in industrial struggles, but was not keen at all for them to get involved in campaigns with other left-wingers. This was a pattern that was continued into the mass Vietnam movement, where the SLL had stood at the sides of the giant October 1968Vietnam demonstration, with a leaflet saying ‘Why we are not marching.’