18.02.2010

When the sweets were taken away

Craig Wilson reviews David Douglass's The wheel's still in spin : Read and Noir : 2009, pp466, £12.95

David Douglass has been around the block a bit. Also known as ‘Danny the Red’, Douglass is a Jarrow born political activist who has spent a large chunk of his life in the Yorkshire coalfield, and has variously been a member of International Workers of the World, South Yorkshire Class War and at one stage the Workers Revolutionary Party.

That is by the by. What is important to recognise is that Douglass is a class fighter, and one who has done the hard yards on the picket lines and in committee rooms over the years. He has worked as a miner in the coalfields of Durham and South Yorkshire and was National Union of Mineworkers branch delegate for Hatfield colliery from 1979 until the pit was privatised in 1994.

He then opened the Miners Community Advice Centre in Stainforth, a centre that acted as a political, sociological and trade union focus, looking after the social and political interests of the local mining community. He also served as NUM branch secretary until the pit closed for the fourth time in 2004 (it has since reopened yet again and is one of Yorkshire’s last three operating deep mines).

Douglass has written a number of books, and The wheel’s still in spin is the second in his autobiographical trilogy, Stardust and coaldust. It is an ambitious and exhausting undertaking, and the volume contains 466 pages of densely packed memoir, opinion, humour and anger. The book covers the extraordinary period from the struggles of 1968 to the rise of Thatcherism, via Chile, Doncaster, Cuba, Amsterdam and Cambodia, but always returning to the pits where Dave Douglass’s activism is rooted.

During the last period of his Yorkshire residence Dave described himself as “a revolutionary Marxist on the anarchist left”, and the book testifies to his struggle to find his place amidst the fragmented left of the 60s and 70s. This is where it is particularly interesting - and Douglass does not hesitate to delineate the shifting relationships between the ordinary workers, their organisations (unions, parties and pressure groups) and the fringe action groups such as the Angry Brigade, Red Army Faction and the Weathermen, the actions of whom caused debate and discussion throughout the period.

What Douglass does particularly well is give a sense of what was happening on the ground, in the pubs and social clubs, in the union meeting and universities, at the demonstrations and face to face with officialdom and bureaucracy. He includes letters and verbatim conversational snippets that add colour and are not to be found in dull political memoirs, especially on the revolutionary left.

Dave is no apparatchik and what is particularly enjoyable about The wheel’s still in spin is that he was certainly going to take no part in a revolution that had no place for sex, drugs and rock and roll. “If I can’t dance, it’s not my revolution,” said Emma Goldman, with which Douglass would no doubt agree. For our hero, the personal relationships are part of the struggle - as an anecdote about going to see Nic Roeg’s Performance, a revolutionary film student and an unresponsive penis demonstrates hilariously.

In another episode, Douglass and comrades are upbraided for getting pissed and singing revolutionary songs at a Marxist-Leninist weekend school, where their thirst for fun and frolics earn a dressing down. Their “petty bourgeois individualism” is “menacing, vulgar and lumpen”, and Douglass reflects on the depressing possibility that there is no room for the real working class in a revolution dominated by middle class intellectuals.

In a recent interview, Douglass talked about his feelings on the matter, unchanged (though undoubtedly enriched) in 40 years. Speaking of the authoritarian social-Taliban of the green movement, he says: “My problem is their arrogance. They have decided like the government what is good for us ... it’s us doing what they tell us we have to do because they think its right. Both the government and this wing of the anarchist ‘movement’ believe in enforced social engineering. The agenda of ‘appropriateness’, the enforced ‘politically correct language and expression’” (A layer of chips blog, July 17 2009). As someone who is equally at home talking about the struggle in Ireland as he is tits and beer, Douglass is unlikely to be cowed by the student sons and daughters of his former tormentors of the 1960s.

I hope Dave Douglass will forgive me for remarking that this is hardly the best-written book, and could have done with some fairly heavy editing and fact-checking. And at just under 500 pages, it could probably have done with an index too. However, I accept that this is hardly the point.

For researchers, historians and those who lived through the heady euphoria of the period, this book is a vital resource. It is not just about cabinet ministers and union chiefs arguing over social contracts. It is about what working class people, freed from the Victorian values of their parents, their bosses and their teachers, did with the freedom they were given and how they reacted when the party ended and the sweeties were taken away.

It is about what people felt, wore, said, smoked and listened to. It is about how they had sex and how they coped when it was not available.

The wheel’s still in spin should be optioned for a film, and it would be hilarious. But, like the book, it would also have to reflect the hero’s unending desire to shake off the shackles of his betters and to make up his own mind how to live his (revolutionary) life.

The wheel’s still in spin is available from Central Books, AK, Amazon, Housmans, and Waterstone’s.

Copies signed by the author from djdouglass@hotmail.co.uk: £12.95 (plus postage on mail orders)