It’s hot, it’s noisy, it’s carnival-time in London’s Notting Hill. It all started in 1966 at the suggestion of a local teacher at a time when Notting Hill was not the fashionable enclave portrayed in the movie with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, but a clutter of half-wrecked grand houses converted into multi-occupancy, council-flats mostly in places bombed-out in WW2, and a street market along the Portobello Road, as now, selling fruit n veg to a clientelle mostly of West Indian and African descent, who continued to cook what they really liked to eat.
The Notting Hill of those days, however, was also a hot-bed of penniless young writers, poets, artists and political subversives with an appetite for upsetting social and political apple-carts, some of whom are now very respectable indeed. Diligent digging through yellowing files turned up four neatly-typed foolscap pages (Olivetti manual) recording the first (and possibly only) Meeting of Radical Writers. The event took place on Sunday February 21st, 1971. Place of gathering: a studio-apartment on the second floor of 43, Blenheim Crescent, the seedier end of Notting Hill as it then was, just along from the bookshop as featured in the movie.
Among those present, thirteen in all, were Michael Hastings (host, playwright, author), John McGrath (poet, playwright), John Arden (playwright, poet), Michael Horowitz (poet, artist), Piers Paul Read (writer), Melvyn Bragg (polymath, writer, tv presenter) and Nicholas Luard (novelist, travel-writer and sometime proprietor of Private Eye, where I typed up the magazine and, incidentally, we met).
Agreement as recorded in the Minutes (refreshments: £2.28, shorthand typist: £8) was reached on the need to fight for freedom of expression while rejecting: 1. censorship as practiced by the BBC, 2. prosecution of magazines, 2. complaints about obscenity, 3. expulsion of foreign students, 4. police harassment, 5. censorship from bookstalls and from all monopolies in the media world. This to be achieved through lobbying, phones, withdrawal of labour, demonstrations and, as a means of levelling playing-fields, all writers, artists etc should be paid no more than the national average wage without respect for dignity or status - all of which is entirely suited to the unruly rites of Carnival, a festival that traditionally falls at the beginning of Lent and is designed to upturn the existing order before a time of austerity. Sounds familiar?
p.s. paid subcribers (I do love you!) will shortly be receiving a recipe for jerk chicken.
p.p.s. more stories in my memoir, My Life as a Wife - Love, Liquor and What to do About the Other Women.
Fascinating, thank you
I note that no ladies were present at the historic meeting--except you the stenographer? Where were Germaine Greer, Rosie Boycott, and other lesser names? More radical than the boys, I think, but notably absent. And the fair--does it still go on? What fun!