Well Beings (eBook)

CHAPTER I

The Possibility of an Island

1970–1972

The town of Westport, in Ireland’s County Mayo, opens out into the buffeting waves of Clew Bay. Storms come easily here. With the force of the Atlantic feeding it, the bay can quickly turn into a cauldron of cloud and churning water. Fishermen setting out on a quiet Westport day can often be in for a rough ride once they reach the deeper waters. This was the case one morning in September 1970 when a loose group of friends gathered at the harbour. Not long out of summer, the weather was still warm and with blue skies, Westport looked its postcard best. A light breeze carried the sound of gulls as the water gently lapped against the sea wall. The friends were a curious lot: a gaggle of long hair, beards, flowing scarves and rucksacks. ‘Hippies’ the locals would have called them, with a fair amount of disdain and suspicion. Chatting and excited, they clambered into a few waiting oyster boats and set out to brave the waves. Through waters variously calm and turbulent, the small flotilla made for Dorinish, one of Clew Bay’s many rocky, exposed and uninhabited islands. Standing proudly at the fore of the leading boat, with a shock of flame-red hair, was Sid Rawle, a 25-year-old Englishman recently dubbed ‘King of the Hippies’ by the British press.1

Rawle was an enterprising visionary with a background in trade unionism. A passionate believer in the liberative promises of the 1960s counterculture, he had spent the last few years moving through England’s network of squats and communes in pursuit of a utopian or, more specifically, eutopian agenda. It was the English statesman Thomas More who coined the term ‘utopia’, a compound of the Greek ou for ‘not’ and topos for ‘place’. By this he meant a ‘no-place’ or ‘nowhere’, because the main hook of More’s political fiction Utopia (1516) was that his idealised island society does not exist. However, in one of the book’s prefatory poems, ‘On Utopia’, More gave his concept a small, but telling, tweak. He had his poet ‘Anemolius’ give voice to the book’s utopia, and it proceeds to compare itself to Kallipolis, the imagined city of Plato’s Republic. Where that city has been ‘depicted with words’, however, More’s utopia claims to be more than a fiction having been ‘produced / With men and resources and the best laws’. As such, it is keen to be known by another name, not ‘Utopia’ but ‘deservedly, by the name Eutopia’. Replacing ou with eu – meaning ‘happy’ – gives rise to ‘eutopia’, a happy or ‘good place’; a concept that is no less idealised than the ‘no-place’ but, in keeping with the suggestion of the poem, carries with it the teasing sense of a somewhere that does or could exist. It is this sense of possibility that would have chimed with Rawle’s worldview. He had no desire to hypothesise an impossible, idealised ‘no-place’. Instead, he wanted to actually build a ‘good place’, somewhere amenable to a better life, a place of happiness and fairness, where all would be well.2

For Rawle, getting a better life was contingent upon changing the world. If you were unhappy with your lot you had to alter, reorganise and in some cases dispense with the structures that govern how you live, where you live and why you live. For Rawle, the ambitious simplicity of this project ‘all [went] back to the land’. He was aghast at the iniquitous history of English land rights that had led to ‘some folk owning hundreds of thousands of acres and others owning none’. Determined to go beyond the ebb and flow of stoned conversation, Rawle wanted to realise his good place by revivifying the public claim to common land and establish upon these legal, political and physical grounds a viable alternative community. In the mid-1960s, Rawle had taken his cause to London’s Hyde Park, an iconic space that had long struck a delicate balance between private ownership and public use. There, Rawle convened a radical collective called the Hyde Park Diggers, and among the expansive grounds and the libertarian atmosphere of Speakers’ Corner he set about extolling the virtues of self-sufficiency. By growing your own food, by living on and with the land, by ‘gradually evolve[ing] a new society’, as the writer and ‘ardent digger’ Charlotte Yonge put it, you could break free; you could unshackle yourself from the ‘screwed-up’ ‘straight world’.

The Hyde Park Diggers, later known as Digger Action Movement, were directly inspired by one of Rawle’s spiritual forebears, the 17th-century Protestant, activist and land reformer Gerrard Winstanley. Winstanley and his group, the Diggers or ‘True Levellers’, moved through the uncertain atmosphere of Civil War-era England cultivating vacant tracts and reclaiming land which had been enclosed into private ownership. Anyone who worked with them had equal share in the food they produced. This political project – Winstanley’s intervention into the constitutional crisis following the execution of Charles I – came with the added force of mystical vision. It was God who made the earth, preached Winstanley in his pamphlet The New Law of Righteousness (1649), it does not belong to landowners whose titles had been ‘founded in conquest’, and it should thus remain ‘a common treasury’ for all. Rawle’s argument was no less impassioned and similarly infused with a sense of post-war mission as well as an incipient nationalism. If ‘[w]e can be ordered to fight and die for Queen and Country’, he wrote in a later essay, is it ‘in peace time […] too much to ask for just a few square yards of our green and pleasant land to rear our children on’?3

There was much talk among the Hyde Park Diggers of starting rural communes and co-operative farms; of spreading out to explore the common ground across the British Isles, but Rawle was also keen to agitate for the means and the right to embark upon this project in the heart of the metropolis itself. An opportunity came in the late summer of 1969 when Rawle and various Diggers joined in with another collective, the London Street Commune. The combined group, which initially numbered about 100 hippies and activists, took up residence at 144 Piccadilly, an empty five-storey mansion and former hotel a stone’s throw from Hyde Park’s manicured gardens.

After gaining entry in late August they secured water and electrical supplies, barricaded the doors and windows from the inside, installed a makeshift drawbridge to control access from the outside and, finally, with the perimeter secure, cheerfully announced themselves as outlaws by provocatively flying a Hells’ Angels flag from the roof. Once word of the squat travelled through the city’s alternative scene, the group quickly swelled to about 300 occupiers and attracted the attention of both the tabloid press and the Metropolitan Police. The People and The News of the World gleefully reported that the building had become a pit of depravity, teeming with such horrors as sex, squalor, drugs and, even worse, ‘foul language’. Meanwhile, Rawle’s announcement that he wanted the building to be ‘a permanent urban guerrilla base for underground activities’, got the authorities twitching. The response was inevitable: ‘Hippiedilly’, as it became known, was raided by the police in mid-September and the squatters were violently removed. There was no way it could have lasted. Aside from the establishmentarian anxiety regarding the so-called ‘counterculture’ – a wave of left-wing activism, intergenerational tension and social change that reached critical mass in 1969 – Rawle and the London Street Commune were guilty of that other great crime of British manners: the assumption of undue privilege. Staking a largely symbolic claim to public parkland was one thing but taking up residence in one of London’s most exclusive enclaves without the prior qualifiers of wealth, property and ‘good’ social standing was quite another. This was simply not the way things were done in England, particularly in the overheated economy of late-1960s London.4

The city was still dominated by the old guard, the English aristocracy. If you looked out from the top of a 1960s tower block then, as now, you would see a city largely in the possession of the Crown, the Church, and the remnants of the landed gentry. Of the latter, the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate remains one of the wealthiest. Dating back to 1677, shortly after Winstanley agitated against the injustices of landownership, this largely inherited estate has steadily grown, absorbing along the way the most expensive bits of the Monopoly board: around 200 acres of Belgravia and 100 acres of Mayfair. Ducking and diving alongside these empires other territorial claims were being made, based not on ancestral money but on London’s post-war enterprise opportunities. In the late 1960s and across the 1970s self-made businessmen like the British club owner and pornographer Paul Raymond, publisher of King magazine (1964), bought up large swathes of Soho, one sex shop or massage parlour at a time. The size of Raymond’s portfolio was nothing compared to the Grosvenor Estate, but the so-called ‘King of Soho’ nevertheless shared the Duke of Westminster’s...