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’.
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