‘What the hell do we do now?’ I asked the President of the Union, Richard Davies.
‘Keep meeting, keep talking, and organise,’ he replied. So while he summoned the first of many mass meetings in the sumptuous new Senate meeting room, I set about organising the practicalities. The logistical problems were massive, from food to lavatories. Apart from anything else, we had to raise funds fast. Students came up with what cash they could, and the Liverpool Trades Union Council sent in more. Food runs were organised. Others started to devise an ‘alternative university’ that would run in parallel with our proper studies. The far left did their best to hijack the proceedings, but while Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn from the LSE came up to lecture, there were simply too many occupiers for any single sect to prevail.
The occupation lasted several weeks. The numbers gradually dwindled to under a thousand, still sizeable in a university which in those days held seven thousand students. Negotiations with the authorities were sparse and unproductive. In the end the approaching Easter holidays called a halt to our small revolution. I was determined that we should leave the building exactly as we had found it, as to do so would rob the authorities of a propaganda coup that we had in some way defiled the place. An epic clean-up lasting two days and a night preceded our exit. In the end, a single cracked lavatory window was all the damage the authorities could find. As we filed out, we were all filmed and photographed.
Three days later ten of us, mostly elected officers of the Students’ Union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Robert Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign. In the middle of the holidays a kangaroo court of seven professorial staff was summoned to ‘try’ us. Naturally there was no legal representation for any of us. The university’s case was prepared and prosecuted by a local QC named Stannard. We looked in vain for anyone who would defend us, scouring the empty campus for witnesses, not least for Kilroy, but alas he must already have been ‘tanning up’ for his TV career.
Pete Creswell, a committed member of the Socialist Society, drew a water-pistol during the proceedings, and at least had the pleasure of seeing the kangaroos dive for cover. All ten of us were naturally found guilty of the charge of ‘bringing the good name of the university into disrepute’. Creswell and an anarchist called Ian Williams were expelled, the rest of us were rusticated, or sent down, for one year or two. In my case it was for a year, on the grounds that my tireless efforts to sustain the fabric of the Senate building counted in my favour. The whole charade was so blatant a denial of natural justice, and the expulsion so large even in those rebellious days, that the national press picked up on it. Even the Telegraph led its front page with it.
Buoyed up, we decided to appeal. Suddenly the offers of legal help came forth. John Griffith, the celebrated Professor of Law at the LSE, came up at his own expense and slept on one of our floors. E. Rex Makin, a controversial local solicitor, nicknamed ‘Sexy Rex/, offered his help to me. Even my dear father unexpectedly weighed in, writing a top-of-column letter to The Times, signed ‘Bishop of Whitby’. It was somewhat undermined by his omission of the detail that he was the father of one of the students. Despite apparently sharing no common ground with any of our demands, he remained steadfastly supportive.
On the day of the appeal, the local unions called a one-day strike and demonstration on our behalf at the pier head. It had been called for 3 p.m., which we thought would be safely after the appeals had ended, so that we could join the protest. But Professor Griffith and Sexy Rexy entered so spirited a defence that it was five to three by the time the last four of us had presented our appeals.
‘Never mind,’ said Makin, Til get you to the pier head. My car’s round the back here.’
We had not bargained for a gold Rolls-Royce. ‘We can’t possibly travel in that load of capitalist trash,’ said Ian Williams. ‘I’m walking.’
‘You’ll miss the whole thing,’ I said. ‘It’s a demo in aid of the Liverpool Ten. We can’t leave them with just six of us.’
So we all piled in. As we neared the demonstration, the projectiles began to hit the Roller. Poor old Rexy: no fee, and damaged bodywork to boot.
The next day I left Liverpool with a very heavy heart. I did not know it then, but I was never to return to the university. My vast ambition, built on slender academic achievement, to secure a degree, and choices, and eventual return to Uganda, had crashed. I wasn’t even a member of any political party. I had no ideology that might provide answers to what I perceived to be the unjust and archaic actions of a supposedly liberal seat of learning.
Things couldn’t have looked worse. I felt that what I had done had come from my heart, had sprung from the African bush, from an innate sense of justice. At just twenty-two years old I felt very wronged, and very broken.
I DID NOT SEE HIM AT FIRST, it was so dark. The seventh Earl of Longford sat in one of the little cubicles that lined the walls of the New Horizon Youth Centre in London’s Soho. It was early May 1970, in a dingy room in which it was impossible to tell the staff from the young drug addicts who had dropped by. But even in a room full of odd people, Frank Longford stood out, with his erect rim of wiry hair around his famously bald, bright, but eccentric head.
Recovering from the ashes of my enforced Liverpool departure, I had sought another overseas volunteering experience, but no one would have me because of my student past. So I set about trying to do something like VSO inside Britain. I had heard through the grapevine that Lord Longford was looking for a new director for his drop-in centre for homeless teenagers in London’s West End. The previous incumbent had suffered a nervous breakdown. His main qualification for the job, in Longford’s eyes, seemed to have been that he had been thrown out of Hornsey College of Art following a riot. Longford had intended to run the centre himself following his resignation from Harold Wilson’s Cabinet over the government’s failure to raise the school leaving age to sixteen in 1967, but unfortunately his combination of age and eccentricity had rendered him the daily victim of robbery and battery at the hands of those he sought to aid.
‘Lord Longford,’ I said, ‘it’s me. I’m here about the job.’
‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘I think your father must have taught me at Eton.’
Even in this godforsaken place the old class connection chimed.
‘Yes, that’s probably true,’ I said half-heartedly. Here was I, I teased myself, gone to the very barricades for the black majority in South Africa, and yet still apparently trying to secure a job in the scruffiest of day centres simply by dint of birth.
But it was as if old Longford could read my mind. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’m going to hire you anyway. Your predecessor was a success, so I’m going to appoint you. Your expulsion alone ensures you’ll be a success here. You’ll just have to see a couple of other members of the management committee first.’ It was agreed that I would return in a week to meet them. I was off the scrapheap.
The two men were waiting in a nearby Soho coffee bar. Both wore trilby hats, large greatcoats and suede shoes. Sir Matthew Slattery, tall and bespectacled, was chairman of BOAC, forerunner of British Airways. He was rather direct, and I was afraid he’d find me wanting, but I survived his scrutiny. He clearly saw my expulsion from Liverpool as very much a disqualification, only ameliorated by my social class, which was probably the same as his.
He clearly didn’t like my politics, and neither did the other man. Slattery didn’t introduce his colleague, who seemed vaguely familiar, seriously dapper and precise. He proved to be John Profumo, the disgraced ex-Minister for War, now working