Negotiating ungovernable spaces between the personal and the political: Oral history and the left in post-war Britain

Introduction

This article tells a story about personal encounters with Britain’s 1968 activist landscape. It is intended to reflect on the reflexivity of the oral history interview in the context of memories and subjectivities shaped within and against the background of late 1960s’ new left cultures. Since the ‘reflexive turn’ of the 1990s, oral historians’ concern with subjectivity has encouraged the practice of self-reflection on personal experiences and the social identities that they bring with them to the interview. Influenced by the legacy of feminist methodology, recent female historians, interviewing women about their experiences in the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), have been particularly careful to reflect fully on the points of personal intersection and relational difference between them and their respondents (Browne, 2011; Rees, 2010). This self-reflective approach is an acknowledgement that the oral history interview is a relational dialogue in which two subjectivities are at play, and in which new subjectivities are created, on the part of both interviewee and interviewer, that result from the interactions between them.

Behind this honest sharing of identities and experiences of both interviewer and respondent lies anthropologist Victor Turner’s (1975) endeavour for the oral historian to aim for ‘an objective relation’ to his or her own subjectivity (p. 31). The hoped for outcome is, as Valerie Yow (1997) states, for the overall interpretation to be as objective as possible, while using subjectivity to the utmost advantage (p. 71). However, in this article, I wish to move beyond considerations of the purely social in the reflexive interview relationship, to also incorporate the powerful, but often subterranean emotional realm shaping the dialogue. The article will discuss the dynamic meeting of two subjectivities, of interviewer and interviewee, in the context of assessing memory stories of Britain’s 1968 radical scene. Conceiving the self as a reflexive entity that changes over time, it will reflect on the psychic demands men and women faced in their efforts to remember younger selves on the social margins, living out a commitment to radical political change. It will argue that attention to the inter-subjectivity in the oral history interview offers a means of negotiating the complex web of memory, culture and unconscious desire that make up stories of revolutionary identity and experience. Through this process, the oral history interview offers a conduit through which new narratives around 1968 may be brought forth into the public domain to destabilise dominant discourses of this contested period.

Britain in the 1960s

The two interviews that will be discussed in this article come from a research project based largely on the narrative memories of 50 men and women who came of age in radical left circles in 1960s Britain. The project explored the British experiences of activist life previously neglected in histories of 1968 that focus heavily on Western Europe and North America. Placing individuals at the centre of the study, respondents’ stories offered valuable insight into how social, political and emotional experience in the Trotskyist and non-aligned left milieus intersected with specific experiences of social class, family relations and gender, and the changing post-war British society to shape early adult life and selfhood. Close attention was given to the impact of new left cultures upon subjectivities, and to how young activists mediated between radical and mainstream cultures in their efforts to shape a reflexive self.

In mid-1960s Britain, young men and women became politically active on the left when boundaries between groups were fluid and in the process of change. As teenagers, apprentices and undergraduates, individuals immersed themselves into an array of left groups on the Trotskyist left, in the International Socialist (IS) and the International Marxist Group (IMG), as well as joining non-aligned grass-roots community and theatrical groups, concentrated mainly in north and east London, though not excluding cities and towns in both northern and southern regions of Britain. Such activity often occurred as a result of youngsters’ previous involvement in social and political sub-cultures encountered earlier in the decade, notably the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Young Socialists (YS). Between 1966 and 1969, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC) – a national body co-ordinating Britain’s anti-Vietnam War movement – emerged as the heart of an all-encompassing new left scene that incorporated Trotskyist, non-aligned and counter-cultural-inspired artistic and theatrical groups alike. From 1969, the VSC’s demise initiated a paradigm shift across the activist network. The once fluid left landscape grew increasingly demarcated between the Trotskyist organisations IS and IMG, on the one hand, and the loose collectives of ‘non-aligned’ left activists on the other. During the 1970s, Trotskyists concerned themselves with building revolutionary organisations oriented towards the industrial working-class, while the ‘non-aligned’ left came to be characterised by loose radical communities of socialists, feminists, gay liberation activists, anarchists and squatters. The period 1969–1971 also heralded a political transition when the ‘new politics’ of Women’s Liberation began to transform the political, cultural, social and sexual lives of men and women on the extra-parliamentary left.

During 2009–2010, I conducted 50 oral history interviews with former activists. My intention was to claim a valid space for their subjectivities and the new left cultures they created within the framework of 1960s historiography as well as the growing body of literature on the individual and collective memories of 1968. ¹ Recent efforts to historicise the global political and social upheavals that accompanied this period have included little discussion about the place Britain’s radical left played either in global or national terms. Limited efforts to incorporate the stories of British new left activists into the transnational picture of 1968 have resulted in narrow, even pejorative accounts of student activists whose actions and rhetoric were relatively insignificant in comparison to the national power struggles played out elsewhere across the globe. In his assessment of the British anti-war movement, Gerard DeGroot (2008) suggests a possible reason for the dearth of studies on the activist experiences of British men and women: ‘The demonstrations are notable for what did not happen. No one was killed. Neither tear gas nor water canons were used ... Britain was and remains a stable society’ (p. 363). His readiness to dismiss the actions of young ‘politicos’ as lacking national political importance overlooks the valuable historical understanding to be gained from examining the impact of 1960s’ protests on the individual subjectivities of ordinary grass-roots activists whose voices have yet to be heard. ² His account of British activism draws on previously recorded testimonies of leading figures from the student movement, and the London counter- culture, that have long been in the public domain, and that have heavily informed the limited scholarship on this area (Collins, 2003; Eley, 2002; Fraser et al., 1988; Green, 1998; Green, 1999). DeGroot’s account illustrates the point Andrea Hajek makes in her editorial, about the way in which dominant, collective narratives of 1968 – in this case of student revolt and cultural upheaval – have obscured the experiences of individuals whose intensive grass-roots activism both shaped the new left networks, and added meaning to their lives.

Oral history, subjectivity and reflexivity

My attention to activist subjectivities was informed by the recent interest historians have shown in the construction of the modern self. Individuals’ memories of everyday life within Trotskyist groups, and the non-aligned left, offer a unique perspective of post-war selfhood, of young individuals’ relationships to politics, society and culture. They present new insights into the ways in which young men and women used dissenting 1960s’ cultures to construct meaningful identities. Simultaneously, oral history narratives illuminate the complex relationship between memory, politics and subjectivity. For my respondents, the oral history interviews served as a means of remembering not only past activist selves, but also for reshaping political subjectivity in a left landscape transformed beyond Margaret Thatcher and New Labour.

Meanwhile, the challenge I confronted as interviewer echoed the dilemma Michael Roper (2003) detailed about his interviews with psychoanalysts: how to gain a full understanding of how interviewees had felt, in this case, during their period of activism, and of the later subjective significance of their experiences (p. 27). This demanded careful attention to the complex political, cultural, social, and also to the psychic context shaping the personal stories told. Following the cultural investigations of memory, initially pioneered by sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, oral historians interested in the subjectivities around 1968 have become attentive to the ways in which individuals draw upon publically available discourses of the period to shape meaningful narratives of their own experiences (Halbwachs, 1992). Robert Gildea – in his presentation on French activists’ memories of 1968, from which his article in this issue was drawn – illustrates how French activists narrated memories similar to the narratives often found in literature about the trajectory of events around 1968. He found that individuals were most likely to elicit a pre-existing narrative where they did not have to negotiate a painful past through 1968, and where they had a clear conception of their self-identity. Such findings have been informed by pioneering oral historians Graham Dawson, Alistair Thomson, and more recently, Penny Summerfield, who have shown how pre-existing cultural discourses bring to interviewees an all-important sense of composure, a form of psychic ease individuals achieve through composing a version of the self they can comfortably accept (Dawson, 1994: 22–23; Summerfield, 2004: 65–93; Thomson, 1994: 244–54).

The plural subject was the key agent behind the emancipatory impulse underlining most cultural representations of 1968: students, workers, blacks and women are among the social groups whose stories dominate the literature. Collective liberation was the hallmark or ‘spirit’ of the social protest movements whose members sought to overturn the authoritarian, elitist power structures that prevailed in the Western world and beyond. Italian oral historian Luisa Passerini (1996) was the first to highlight the ways in which the 1968 spirit had shaped an enduring collective subjectivity for her and her respondents. Her ‘collective autobiography’ of Turin student activists portrayed the psychic power of the plural subject, an identity that derived from the ‘vein of ’68’ as ‘a worldwide phenomenon’ that had shaped a ‘social imaginary of 1968’. ³

However, these cultural patterns of memory formation were noticeably absent in the testimonies of many former activists whose experiences of 1968 had occurred within the context of the two main revolutionary Trotskyist organisations, IS and IMG. These were some of the most difficult, but also some of the most revealing interviews I recorded for the project. Questions that were intended to elicit reflection from interviewees on remembered feeling and the internal self were often frustrated by their desire to narrate intricate accounts of organisational politics and labour struggles in which they had intervened in the late 1960s and 1970s. Most of these interviewees had joined IS and IMG in 1967 and 1968 as students participating in university protests and VSC demonstrations. However, in 1970–1974, the focus of these groups had shifted away from students onto the struggles of the industrial working class. These men and women were eager to tell me their stories precisely because they felt misrepresented by dominant representations of 1968, which did not accord with their own memories of far left activism. Instead, the cultural and gendered legacy of their organisations remained pre-eminent in shaping their memories of life on the left, and they sought to preserve for historical posterity stories of militancy that had occurred within a lost landscape of working-class industrial labour disputes in which they had come of political age. Gender was another powerful discourse shaping new narratives around the British extra-parliamentary left. At issue was how men and women constructed mutually compatible gendered and political subjectivities in relation to dominant discourses of Britain’s experience of 1968. Examinations of cultural discourse and composure have found particular application in regard to gendered identities, as men and women sometimes struggle to negotiate past and present discourses of masculinity and femininity (Dawson, 1994: 23; Roper, 2000; Summerfield, 2004: 70–71). At the time of interviewing, the few available memoirs of activist life had been written mostly by socialist feminists, such as Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal, pioneering members of the WLM, who had spoken critically about their alienating experiences as women within far left circles (Rowbotham, 2000; Segal, 2007). The personal, subjective focus of these accounts, which included open reflections about sexual relationships, was far removed from the political narrative of far left campaigns that former members sought to see represented for historical posterity. For men and women who had belonged to far left Trotskyist groups, attempts to successfully constitute themselves as political and gendered subjects had involved negotiating the complex and often contradictory discourses within both mainstream and radical Trotskyist cultures. In this milieu, activist culture had been embedded in the masculine, industrial world of class-politics with political and private life carefully demarcated. Drawing upon the same terms of mobility, efficiency, intellectual debate and action that had revolved around daily grass-roots organising and industrial struggles, the militant labour culture of Trotskyist membership had shaped a normative standard for women as well as for men. But when it came to constructing identities as mothers, fathers, workers, wives, husbands and sexual partners, this culture had the potential to create sometimes fractured subjectivities for organisational members. The challenge was then to access the range of emotional experiences of these men and women’s organisational lives and to understand how they shaped their stories of activism. Michael Roper’s emphasis on the psychological and inter-subjective dimension of memory narratives offered possibilities for illuminating the subjectivities invested and being composed during the interview. Roper is one of few recent historians who have followed the footsteps of Alessandro Portelli and Luisa Passerini to perform influential work on the workings of memory, the unconscious and the crafting of subjectivities. ⁴ He has argued that if the intention of the oral historian is not to psychoanalyse our informants, nonetheless, it remains necessary to account for movements within the interview in mood and content, which ‘may require some interpretation to be made of how the lived life, through the story told, is being brought into the interview’ (Roper, 2003: 26). He suggests that some of the most useful signs for understanding the subjectivities enacted within the interview come from how, as interviewer, the narrative makes us feel now (p. 27). This involves thinking about how anxieties and emotional conflicts from our own pasts may be unexpectedly triggered by what we hear in the narrative (p. 22). We also need to consider the unconscious dynamics within the interview relationship, how the interviewee is using the interviewer to convey, what they are unable to in words alone, about the past and present emotional significance of their experiences.

Interview with Norman

An interview with one former IS member highlighted some of the psychic challenges cultural discourses around 1968 have created for previously far left men and women in their efforts to tell their stories. Norman was a longstanding member of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), as the IS subsequently became known from 1977. He was one of only four respondents (all former IS and IMG members) who answered notices I had placed in left-wing journals for potential interviewees. This initiative immediately signalled a desire to tell a story of self for a particular purpose. From the beginning, it became quickly apparent that Norman sought to present an alternative perspective of the British 1960s to challenge narratives of cultural and sexual revolt that he believed dominated the official histories. Throughout the interview, Norman repeatedly denigrated the ‘flower power’ images of hedonism the media continued to perpetuate of the 1960s. He showed me a letter he had written to Socialist Worker (the SWP journal), in February 2008, applauding the comrade who had criticised the cultural misrepresentations of 1968 as ‘a year of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll – and “student riots”’ (Birchall, 2008). In the interview, Norman told the same political account he had presented to the SWP editors. At the forefront was his activism in the London West India docks during the strikes of 1966. That year, he had joined the IS while an economics undergraduate at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was one of the small numbers of left-wing students who, from the mid-1960s, had joined the organisation at universities across Britain. By the spring of 1967, the Trotskyist groups’ IS and (from 1968 onwards) the IMG had begun to displace the Labour Party as the left organisations of choice for students frustrated by the moral and political betrayals of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. ⁶ Public spending cuts, wages restraint forced by the Prices and Incomes Board, immigration and race, the Industrial Relations Bill of 1969 and the Rhodesia issue all occasioned the left’s disillusionment with Labour. ⁷

However, it was activity against the Vietnam War that swelled the student membership of IS and the IMG, in conjunction with the VSC. Wilson’s policy of giving the United States moral support, while resisting pressure from President Lyndon Johnson to send troops, provoked outrage on the student left. At the LSE, the IS Socialist Society had emerged during 1965–1966. It grew out of the smaller Marxist Society, and during the following year, became closely intertwined with the growing penumbra of radical enclaves in the capital, supporting the anti-Vietnam War movement. In his final year, Norman had ‘fallen in’ with Marxist Society members, and joined the IS after meeting these charismatic socialists. A dedicated member, skilled in the art of paper sales, he soon came to the attention of the leadership. IS leader Tony Cliff singled him out for activity in the West India docks, that is, to sell the IS journal SWP and to build up contacts in the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), in anticipation of imminent industrial action over the Devlin Report on the workings of the Port Transport industry. In 1965, the Devlin report had recommended the ending of the casual day-to-day organisation of all dock labour as a way of reducing strikes. The plan backfired when, in October 1966, dockers in London and Liverpool struck over the first phase of the rationalisation scheme.

Norman’s narrative of this episode reflected Stuart J Hilwig’s (2010) arguments about the way in which the methods of oral history prompt respondents not only to draw from their personal and collective memories, but also to historicise the events in the knowledge that the interviewer will record their testimony for historical posterity in a printed text (p. 225). Part of the challenge I encountered in the interview was to listen and read beyond Norman’s account of labour disputes and IS politics to connect with the affective male subject narrating a story of selfhood. This meant moving beyond an understanding of the way in which Norman engaged with cultural constructions to compose a self, in order to also consider the psychological motivations behind his narrative. Building a rapport with an interviewee and being able to empathise with their life-story necessitates being receptive to their emotional state. Yet, Norman was reluctant to respond to opportunities to reflect directly on his felt experiences as an IS militant. He sought to educate me in the role IS had played in the dock disputes. His narrative was most coherent and reflective when detailing the industrial culture and trade union politics inside the London docks that had informed his grass-roots activities. In the IS and the IMG, dedication to the organisation had placed heavy demands on the young men and women who joined. The male-dominated industrial ethos of the docks, the factory and the mines had called upon members to subordinate the self to a traditionally working-class world of labour politics. In this environment, activism was imbued with a discourse of industrial efficiency carrying connotations of speed, agility and productivity. The culture enabled activists to keep pace with the rapidly unfolding industrial strife, from 1969–1972, that culminated in the ‘glorious summer’ of 1972, when a wave of factory occupations, national strikes by builders, dock workers and miners saw the numbers of strike days rise from less than 5 million in 1968 to 23.9 million in 1972 (Harman, 1998: 223). Organisational selfhood incorporated the methodical, routine patterns of branch life as well as the discipline that was requisite to absorbing a vast body of information about the intricacies of union and far left politics. Norman was one of a number of former IS and IMG members who narrated themselves in terms of political action, discipline and skill, showing how the external art of politics engaged internal psychic life, as activists learned to think of themselves mediated through the culture of the organisation.

The challenge was then to access the range of emotional experiences of this organisational life that continued to shape Norman’s story. In addition, we need to consider the unconscious dynamics within the interview relationship, how the interviewee is using the interviewer, just as a patient may use an analyst, to convey, what they are unable to do in words alone, about the past and present emotional significance of their experiences. The question for my relationship with Norman was therefore why he chose to invest his story within me in a particular way. How did my subjectivity inform his narrative? And what clues did the telling provide about his past and present subjectivities, as shaped by his political experiences?

The inter-subjective encounter

The months leading up to my interview with Norman, in April 2009, had been turbulent. I had conducted the first round of interviews for my project during a new daunting phase of life: following 2 years of treatment for an eating disorder, I was living on my own and finding recovery difficult. An intense interview schedule and the pressures of combining my doctoral and part-time work with intensive exercise and cleaning regimes meant I was slipping, and my anxiety levels were at an all-time high. Persistent hunger makes one super alert; it heightens the body’s senses and throws it back to fight or flight mode. All internal and external sounds become louder, and one furiously scrutinises the behaviours of everybody around. As I read my body against those of others, compared size and shape, my search went beyond the visceral to suggested thoughts or feelings, as the overwhelming need for control extended to individuals whose thoughts and actions threatened to disturb my carefully ordered, though in truth, chaotic world. I projected continuous fears of self-judgement, convinced everyone around me was also judging me, measuring my actions.

Upon entering Norman’s house, the vision of disorder that greeted me made it difficult to concentrate on little else, and I had to fight the rising panic. As I moved from the hall to the kitchen, I failed to spot any visible surface space either on the floor or the cabinets. Unwashed dishes competed for space with half-eaten leftovers. Eating disorders are often accompanied by obsessive compulsive behaviours, and my need for visual order became more acute during times of stress. Norman offered to make us tea. I politely accepted, but flinched at the milky, lukewarm liquid. Another eating disorder trait: all liquids and foods must be piping hot. I tried to sip, but, perhaps noticing my unease, Norman looked disappointed and slightly anxious. The tea wouldn’t do. He could do better, and he switched the kettle back on to try again.

The interview finally began and proceeded along the life-history course: childhood, relationship to parents and school experience. From a lower middle-class London family, Norman’s parents had both worked for the co-operative store. At the age of 17, Norman had decided not to complete his A-levels. Through a contact of his father’s, he went to work in the city as an office junior. The firm had dealt in the wholesale purchase and sale of canned goods. Norman described in detail the process of quality control the tinned food went through before it reached the shelves for sale. The firm had bought thousands of cans of foodstuffs from a producer overseas. At the wharf, the cartons were opened, the cans unpacked, examined for quality, and if deemed up to standard, the original label removed and the firm’s label added. The result: ‘nothing of value was added to the food in the can, but the housewife was to be charged an additional six pence for the trouble’ (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009). After 4 years of excelling as a salesman, Norman became uncomfortably conscious that the firm was exploiting the consumer, the housewife, with a family to feed. So, in 1963, he gave up drinking and dancing, and dedicated himself to evening classes where he earned three A-grade A-levels. Soon after, he was accepted to study for a bachelors degree at the LSE, but ‘again ... had to work like stink just to keep up with everything’ (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009). Listening to Norman, I became attentive to the rigorous self-discipline that had structured his experiences as a young man. The precision with which he relayed his story revealed something of the careful, methodical approach he had shown towards organising. His attention to detail, dedication to the politics of IS and the importance he attached to getting activities right were qualities he prided himself on as an effective grass-roots activist. Indeed, in 1964, he had come to IS leader Tony Cliff’s attention selling IS papers to tenants on the Highbury Grove housing estate in Islington. ⁸ Norman highlighted the successful combination of honesty and persistence with which he had presented his well-practised arguments to the Highbury Grove tenants. He explained how his success in selling the IS journal on the estate had brought him to the notice of the leadership:

Some people would come back and would have sold five or six [papers], and I would have sold sort of fifteen or sixteen, and Cliff said me, ‘Norman, come here, what is this, you know, what is happening?’ And I explained to him how I did it. I bang on the door and I tell them you’re rents are going up. Then I’d say, ‘I’m from an organisation that says that’s wrong and we can do something about it. And here’s our newspaper. Would you like one, and do you want to put your name down for the tenants’ association’? And it was a sort of series of questions, the answer to each of which it was easiest to say yes than no. And, if done reliable, then, most of the time that would work. Yeah? (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009)

A quiet pride underlay this telling. Norman had proven himself, to the tenants as an outsider they could trust, and to the leadership, as a dedicated, skilled member who could be useful. This was pride in the skills of the city salesman that had been invested in a humanitarian cause he believed in. His ability to apply logical, truthful arguments to ordinary people, clearly and methodically, had won them over and brought him to the attention of Cliff, who nurtured talented young activists.

Yet, what struck me was how Norman’s attention to detail had entailed a level of self-control and emotional suppression that seemed to be the price of being a good member. Although he had found a task and a political space in which he could act genuinely to shape grass-roots politics, he remained distanced from the lives of the people he contacted. Their stories remained unspoken beneath his political account. Once he had imparted his information to the tenants, his task was to move the conversation on ‘to where you really want to be’. The thinking behind his approach had been ‘how could we advance the interests of this particular working-class in this particular mass struggle?’ His methodical actions were informed by the larger political vision of IS, which meant politicising the tenants’ struggle, and recruiting new members. The emotional economy and carefully modulated tone with which Norman narrated these memories suggested what it had meant, subjectively, to belong to IS: immersing himself in a struggle, and proving himself as an activist had demanded firm control of his emotions, and care as to how he invested himself in the relationships he formed. His responsibility was to advance the political interests of the organisation to which he belonged over and above any personal attachments he might have formed in the course of campaigning.

Yet, this did not mean that in the course of being active, he never formed emotional attachments to the contacts he met. In 1966, Cliff introduced Norman to Terry Barrett, docker and representative of the TGWU in the West India docks. Norman had worked with Barrett to produce a rank and file newspaper, which they distributed by ‘the tens of thousands’, travelling between London, Hull, Southampton and Liverpool, ‘me and him in my little minivan’. The image he conjured suggested intimacy and affection between the docker and his 24-year-old self. When I asked Norman directly about his feelings towards Barrett, the qualities he highlighted echoed those he had suggested earlier in reference to himself: Barrett’s capacity for hard work, for consistency, loyalty and reliability. He too was temperate in his approach: ‘He worked like a trooper, had nothing materially, a council flat and a very nice, though very thin wife, three or four kids, but with guts, would stick up for himself, thought the system was wrong, not from a revolution point of view’ (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009). Norman’s observation about the Barrett family and their poverty introduced a new human, subjective dimension to his story that I heard loudly. I baulked at the image of Barrett’s ‘emaciated’ wife and became hyper-alert to the meaning of Norman’s story. As a young student, from a comfortable middle-class home, he had been concerned by the sight of the woman’s frailty. Out of concern for the family’s health, he would call in to ‘drop off some fruit’ and ‘stop to play with the kids’.

In the midst of Norman’s political narrative, the memory held meaning, disrupting an account focused on IS politics and the Devlin dock dispute. It seemed to open up a space in which the emotional distance he had maintained as an activist temporarily dissolved, and I gained a glimpse of his vulnerability as a young activist. As he went on to detail the political challenges that had confronted Barrett as an unofficial dock workers’ leader, Norman’s narrative moved on to reveal the pressures that he too had been under during the dockers’ struggle:

At a dock gate meeting if they say, ‘no we are not going with you on this’, you have no position. The only power you have is putting forward the position what people are feeling aggrieved about. That requires for you to make sense of a mass meeting on the stones at six thirty am, running around ... For three weeks, every week, I used to get up at five am, and down at the dock gate we were up, and I had to show myself to be consistent to him, and to make his attempts to convince the dockers, about what needed to be done, as effective as possible. (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009)

For Norman, the importance of getting it right implied a manner of being on behalf of the organisation that aroused an underlying anxiety, which he had been unable to show openly. In 1966, when Cliff had brought him in on IS action inside the docks, he was under pressure to demonstrate his loyalty and potential as an effective activist. The end of the dock dispute in 1967 had also seen him torn between his duty to the organisation to accept political defeat, and to move on from the struggle, and the personal loyalty he felt towards Barrett that made this difficult. On the one hand, the image Norman conjured of ‘poor old Terry’, at the end of the strike, ‘all by himself with all his placards’, suggested the remorse he had felt for his comrade, as he left him behind to face the coming of the Devlin rationalisation. On the other hand, the language of the organisation seemed to provide a level of self-protection that had helped him to offset his guilt about moving on. As an IS activist, Norman stressed the ‘other [political] priorities’ he could be directed towards. He assured himself, as much as me, that he and the IS had ‘acted appropriately and correctly throughout’. But it was hard as an interviewer to escape the conclusion that Norman’s first experience of activism in a major industrial dispute had left a lasting emotional mark, precisely because of the emotional turmoil it had provoked. This was one political memory that stood out clearly from his years as an IS member, and as he inferred in his letters to the SWP journal, informed the subjective meaning that for him revolved around 1968. The conflict between personal and political loyalties in the docks had felt real, and to assuage the potency of this remembered feeling, he needed the struggle to matter, to attain political significance by enshrining it within the public memory of 1968.

If Norman had struggled to articulate precisely how he felt under pressure to meet his own, Cliff’s and Barrett’s expectations, I nevertheless heard this anxiety because of my own experience of trying to maintain a disciplined external life. The unconscious associations between us concerned the psychological need for precision, for self-control and for hard work that we both shared, and that, each in our own ways, we had brought to the interview setting. At the height of my own perfectionist obsessions, I was sensitive to Norman’s need to apply his political actions and arguments exactly for the sake of the branch and the wider revolutionary goals of the party. Yet, whereas I was being worn down by the severe restrictions my controlling behaviour was placing upon my emotional and social life, for Norman, the pressures of being a good militant seemed to have been offset by the agency his life in the organisation had provided him. The IS had given him a framework for life and self. Through studying Marxist theory in the weekly educational classes, and participating in grass-roots working-class struggles, he had found a political space in which to challenge the social and economic inequities he had first encountered in early 1960s Britain: ‘You don’t know what the future is going to hold but if you can shake it up a bit that is a very nice feeling. The issue needs to be convinced [that] what you are doing is right and self-justifying and on the way. I felt more alive then, looking back, than I have since’ (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009).

After the interview, I reflected upon Norman’s dishevelled appearance and his untidy surroundings. I wondered how to explain the contradiction between the purpose and precision with which he had narrated his younger, organisational self, and the sense of disorder that he now presented. He had not always been so unkempt. Other former comrades remembered him as slightly old-fashioned, well-groomed and smartly attired. He also mentioned how as a young IS man, untidy housemates had been a source of tension in his domestic life. Yet, even his speech was now unclear and imprecise. He had a weak chest and his breathing was laboured. Somehow this physical ailment seemed to symbolise his uneasy inner state. After a brief period as a full-time organiser for IS, Norman had devoted 10 years of his life as an active branch member in Brixton until the early 1980s. During this period, he had also been active in his college teaching union. Yet, since then, I sensed that his life had been out of kilter. Just like the first cup of tea he had made, things were not as they should be for him. His reflection on the defeat of the dockers’ strike by the Wilson government in 1968 quickly became a lament for the lost industrial landscape of the West India docks in which he had discovered his identity as an IS activist:

That mass trade union situation did lose and get clobbered. Canary Wharf was a wharf at one time. New ports were being developed down river. With the London docks you could get the small ships in, but with these larger container ships you need large ports, and they need to be organised from the ground up, and there was much less ... that split the movement and made it more difficult to fight. (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009).

In the 1990s, this landscape had been displaced by the construction of what now forms London’s main financial district, the symbol of the boom years of commerce and consumerism that had prevailed at the turn of the twenty-first century. Norman’s sadness derived not simply from the defeat of the trade union movement and the socialist left that had occurred during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s conservatism and Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, but from the uncertainty this had created for him as a human agent in a landscape he no longer recognised.

As I made moves to thank Norman for his time and to bid him goodbye, I sensed his disappointment in me was connected with his discomfort in the present political and cultural climate that had minimised space for his story of IS activism to gain a hearing. Did I have to go so soon? I had not eaten the biscuits he had offered. Nor had I drunk my second cup of tea. He had looked to me as an opportunity to briefly recapture the lost political agency of his youth. Through my project, he could ensure that the correct story of 1968 was told, that is, the struggle of IS and working-class militants working to bring about socialism from below:

In terms of trying to apply that idea of socialism from below, and making it relevant to the class struggle, I think we had a good go, and a good input, and that was a very different orientation from what would come out of the milieu of hippies and short skirts thing. (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009)

Gender and inter-subjectivity

Norman negotiated the dominant discourses of cultural and sexual revolt around 1968 to set himself and his history apart, in an effort to achieve composure as a political and affective male subject. He sought to gain recognition from me, interviewer and professional historian, as to the authority of his story. But when the topics shifted from discussion about the business of IS activism to questions about everyday personal and social life, and about relationships, the inter-subjectivity within the interview did not facilitate his quest for composure. Norman’s narrative was most fluent and coherent when he was able to elaborate the techniques he had employed as an IS member to recruit new members and to establish ‘contacts’ with trade union representatives, first in the docks, and in the 1970s, in nearby factories. ⁹ In such instances, he talked easily and at length:

I suppose, because of what I had done when I was a salesman, it was always reasonably easy, because you could always get on with people by finding out about them ... One bloke, Donald Griffiths, he was in the electrical contracting industry and they had a punch up, and we got him to write his ideas down and [we] got a pamphlet out of it, and we had something for me to take round the local power stations and perhaps open up a factory sale. I had to pretend I was an electrician with me donkey jacket and go in with fifty copies of something the bosses didn’t want on their premises. (Norman, personal communication, 7 April 2009)

Norman’s humour enlivened his account; he was relaxed and clearly enjoying the opportunity to show off his organising skills by telling me details about his political skills. It may have been the case that he hoped to impress me, not only in my capacity as historian, but as a young woman showing interest in his stories of himself as a young man. Where his account became disjointed and fractured was in the second part of the interview, when I asked Norman to tell me about his friendships and personal relationships during his years in the IS. He responded to such questions only very briefly and awkwardly. In the 1970s and 1980s, he had had a few long-term relationships with women who were also IS members. He revealed that he had never married, but was unwilling to explain the reasons why he had not done so. He seemed embarrassed to be talking about this intimate area of his life and quickly changed the topic back to a discussion of politics and activity centred around the organisation: ‘[The IS] was a source of solidarity between us. Yes, we were in the same branch. Was it a bus depot we did together? No, that was Edith, wasn’t it?’

It was significant that for Norman, IS membership had coloured all areas of life, linking the public with the private. His relationships with women had been shaped by life within the organisation, which had acted as a bond between revolutionary couples. Such testimony militated against the official discourse of the organisation that had refused to grant political space to personal or domestic life. In the early 1970s, male IS members had dismissed the new personal politics of the WLM as ‘frivolous’ and ‘diversionary’ (Paczuska, 1971). Women’s Liberation had called for a new politics where individuals would draw upon personal life experiences to inform radical thinking about consciousness, sexuality and male–female relations. In Britain, the new personal politics had arisen partly as a critical response to the harsh sectarianism of far left Trotskyism where politics was situated externally to members’ personal lives, defined in terms of effect, external structural theory, paper sales and mass demonstration tactics (Rowbotham et al., 1979: 34–35). IS members had also spoken of the internal culture of the branches that showed little sympathy for any personal difficulties that might have restricted the time they could devote to organising. Norman allowed me a brief insight into a private inner landscape of personal life that was normally subordinated to the struggles and activities of the moment. Yet, his memories about the private sphere were hazy and remained mostly submerged beneath his self-professed identity of IS man. This was the persona of the proficient and loyal organisational member dedicated to the building of the revolutionary party.

There are several possible reasons for Norman’s reluctance to talk about his personal life and for the ‘discomposure’ this topic seemed to cause him (Summerfield, 2004). Above all, he sought to present an account of himself through the IS, the organisation in which for nearly 30 years he had been an active member. At the time of the interview he remained a loyal supporter of its successor, the SWP, and his narrative was clearly shaped in dialogue with his memories of the politics and culture of the organisation. He had come of political age as a young activist amid a culture of frenetic activity centred around the rent strikes, the docks and the VSC, prior to the emergence of Women’s Liberation. Within this culture, he had perceived women as fellow comrades or honorary men who shared in the competitive spirit of loud intellectual debate, paper sales and beer drinking. Norman remembered all the IS women he had known as ‘good bricks, reliable and prepared to take choices’. These terms were all consistent with the image of the good activist with which he had framed himself and his comrade Terry Barrett. It was clear from my questions to him about the impact of Women’s Liberation on the organisation that he had been puzzled and disapproving of a female politics that had challenged the very essence of his identity as a revolutionary man married to the industrial class struggle. The inter-subjectivity of the interview contributed to Norman’s discomposure because my questions about personal life and inner feeling invoked the very language of personal politics to which he was unable to connect in order to narrate his particular story of self. As an IS man, he had not been acculturated in the feminist language of subjective feeling that had since also become embedded within modern Western culture. Norman’s dismissal of the media’s interest in stories about 1960s’ sexual liberation and cultural revolt suggested a similar distaste for the ‘confessional culture’ in which people talk intimately and openly in public about their personal lives. The difficulty was that as a young woman and oral historian, I came to the interview from inside this subjective turn. Between us, there lay a gulf of age, gender and culture that we struggled to overcome. Part of the disappointment Norman expressed at the end of the interview may well have reflected his realisation that I embodied the personal political discourse of modern culture that had informed the personal memoirs of feminist writers. In his eyes, this culture had restricted the space available for his own political memories to be represented. Related to this culture was the new masculinity of the 1980s that had coincided with the demise of the old left. Norman had seen the rise of second-wave feminism accompanied by the construction of a new masculinity rooted in a capacity for ‘soft’ feelings and behaviours. In the late 1970s, ‘non-aligned’ left men had embraced this new masculinity in the men’s movement as a challenge to the heroic masculinity of the revolutionary organisational man. It may well have been the case that in my language of feeling, Norman heard echoes of what for him had been an uncomfortable new male language of left politics whose advent was related to the erosion of the old industrial labour heartland and a working-class militant masculinity he and other IS activists had held up for emulation.

Far left women, on the other hand, responded more easily to the subjective framing of the oral history interview than men. The explanation for this was not simply to be found in their more sympathetic response to the WLM that made them more readily open to a language of personal politics. In the 1970s, women in the IS and the IMG developed a complex range of collective and individual relations to Women’s Liberation and ‘women’s’ politics that sometimes marked a dislocation between their identities as Trotskyist activists and social and emotional female subjects. A possible explanation may then simply derive from the cultural differences that distinguish Western men’s and women’s self-narratives. Research into the relationship between gender and spoken communication has highlighted that women are more likely than men to tell personal stories and to tell their stories by drawing upon shared modes of experience with the purpose of transmitting a culture. This focus on the personal, ‘on mundane, everyday events and the use of supportive’ conversational strategies, it is argued, reflects women’s efforts to negotiate a narrative culture in which men’s stories have traditionally dominated (Abrams, 2010: 120).

In contrast, men are more likely to tell stories centred around particular events, and with a specific purpose. Men often dramatise their narratives so that the act of story-telling becomes a performance in which they are the central protagonist (Coates, 2003: 37). Of course, there exists, at any moment, a range of masculinities and femininities in a culture that intersect in complex ways with class, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race and age. In the case of the oral history interview, these masculinities and femininities also intersect with the subjectivities of the interviewer as well as the cultural discourses of the past and present with which the gendered subject engages to narrate a story of self. Norman presented several different masculine identities in the course of the interview. These ranged from the skilled male activist, who was respected and conversant with working-class militants and IS members alike, to the insecure private man uncomfortable with a language of intimacy and emotion, which he struggled to access. His narrative was most coherent when he adopted the communicative style that would have likely used in his activist circles. As the skilled recruiter and organiser, he re-enacted these roles before me, including a dramatic performance of the dialogue and action that ensued. At one level, his narrative conformed to a masculine tradition of stories shaped around themes of struggle, achievement and skill. He told stories of political struggles he thought worth telling, in order to illustrate a political point. But at a more profound level, the undercurrents of Norman’s narrative, the dislocations and the fractures revealed an uncertain male subject struggling to come to terms with a rapidly changing political and social, past and present landscape.

Interview with Pam

Norman’s narrative performance contrasted distinctly with the story Pam told about her life as a revolutionary woman in the 1970s. ¹⁰ Pam’s account offered an alternative gendered perspective of far left subjectivity, illuminating the relationship between femininity, far left politics and fractured subjectivity. Her dislocated story reflected the psychic legacy of her experiences as an activist and the ongoing struggles she faced to process the powerful lingering feelings from those years.

Pam’s history of activism started in 1968: in her mid-twenties she began to participate in anti-racist projects in London, through associations such as The Campaign against Racial Discrimination (CARD) and the Action Campaign to Outlaw Racial Discrimination (ACORD). In December 1967, she had returned home to Gloucestershire, radicalised after 2 years of teaching in Zambia on the Voluntary Service Overseas programme. Before leaving Britain, in 1965, she had started a relationship with a South African medical student who was studying at St Guy’s Hospital in London. The couple had planned eventually to start a new life together in the recently independent East Africa, he to set up a medical practice and she to become a teacher. The relationship had instilled in Pam a close attachment to Africa and interest in its bitterly contested politics. In 1968, engaging in anti-racist community projects around Hackney and Islington had offered her the nearest way of translating her African-Marxist frame to London’s working-class East End landscape where she worked as a comprehensive school teacher. But in the early 1970s, the relationship ended and Pam discovered she was pregnant. ¹¹ The humiliation of queuing for the dole along with other single mothers, down the Holloway Road, provided the catalyst she needed to commit herself to revolutionary politics, and she joined the IS.

Pam held very different hopes for the interview from Norman. She seemed eager to invest herself at a much deeper psychological level, and she spoke about her experiences much more reflectively. From the beginning, she adopted an open, intimate and conversational style in which she assigned me the role of female confidant. Later in the interview, Pam explained how she had ‘always felt closer to women’ than she did to men. She valued the ‘richer communication’ she found possible with women that came from the ‘instinctual sense ... of knowing how each other was thinking and feeling’ (Pam, personal communication, 8 May 2009). It was significant that she chose as the location for the interview her small kitchen rather than the more formal setting of the study, which she shared with her male partner. In this way, the kitchen became a traditional female space, in which work and conversation had for centuries gone hand-in-hand. The setting signalled the trust Pam was willing to invest in me as a fellow woman and academic. We quickly established a relationship that felt equal and supportive in spite of the age gap.

Whereas Norman and I had sat at opposite ends of a large dining table, separated physically, by age, gender and culture, Pam positioned herself adjacent to me across the table. She paused quite frequently, interrupting her story with reflections on everyday social and cultural practices, including childrearing, education and the differences between men and women. She also sought my opinion, sometimes looking to me to affirm or offer explanations for her own past actions, thoughts and values. Pam clearly saw the interview as an opportunity to reflect on her past experiences and to make sense of her conflicting feelings in a supportive female-to-female dialogue. She expressed no wish to present a political narrative of the struggles in which she had intervened, and the details of the campaigns remained in the background of her story. In contrast to Norman, the oral history interview was for her a safe therapeutic space in which to make sense of past conflicts between her political identities as a revolutionary and her social identity as a post-war middle-class White woman. ¹²

Pam laboured to remember the precise details of her years of far left activity. Part of the difficulty was the sheer range of radical activities she had participated in: she had struggled to find a radical group that could accommodate the wealth of identities she carried. She could find no obvious political or cultural expression for a stable and coherent subjectivity as a White, educated, middle-class single mother, Marxist and feminist. Between the early 1970s, while in London, and the late 1970s, after moving to Oxford, she attended meetings of the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and the IMG. In the summer of 1971, she briefly joined the Finsbury Park IS branch before a factional struggle forced her decision to leave. As a mother and newly recognised feminist, she also threw herself into community campaigns, working to change the curriculum of the local Islington nursery and forming a network of Black and White working-class mothers in the area. Pam’s fractured story may have owed something to the difficulties of narrating an account as a far left woman without a cultural frame of reference in which to situate her conflicting identities and feelings. In the late 1960s, her entry into radical left circles had followed a gradual, faltering pathway far removed from the ‘conversion-like’ experience that many feminists described upon finding Women’s Liberation (Stephens, 2010: 84). Her revolutionary identity was bound up with a traumatic, passionate love affair and an internal battle to liberate herself from the social expectations of her rural middle-class parents. The interview confirmed the importance of understanding stories of 1968 in the context of individuals’ personal life histories and subjectivities. Based on the premise that a life history narrative is ‘a history of layers, full of shifting strata ... a mutilated yet still living past’ (Kennedy, 2010: 181), Pam’s story also showed the value of considering the imaginative, unconscious and figurative dimensions within her spoken memories. She remembered her radical past painfully and unevenly. Her narrative was stilted, broken up by frequent pauses, as she struggled to recall the sequence of events. The strain of trying to recapture a younger self showed, as did the importance Pam attached to the task. But, in contrast to the interview with Norman, the trauma of recall related not to unease with a discourse of the personal, but to the fractured subjectivity that had resulted from her young adult life as a female activist and single mother on the Trotskyist left. Her willingness to participate in the interview seemed to be motivated by a desire to continue an earlier period in which she had reflected upon this part of her life.

In 2006, Pam had deliberately set about recalling her radical self in readiness for a paper she and a female comrade had decided to write together about their experiences as revolutionaries. After earlier, separate periods of activism in the IS, in the early 1970s, at the end of the decade, the two women had met as members of the Workers’ Socialist League (WSL). This breakaway Trotskyist group had been formed in 1975 after a split in the Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP), the largest Trotskyist organisation in Britain. A small group of members led by the prominent trade union activist, Alan Thornett, had contested the alleged corruption of Trotskyist ideals by WRP leader Gerry Healey. They had gone on to compete with the WRP for trade union support mainly around the British Leyland car factory at Cowley, in Oxford, known in the 1970s as a stronghold of the Shop Stewards’ Movement. Within the WSL, Pam and her comrade had been particularly active in bringing feminism to bear on the group’s revised revolutionary thinking by taking up issues affecting female factory workers, such as the question of night work as a barrier to equal pay.

In their own private lives, they had also lived out the personal as the political. As single mothers, they had embarked upon collective living, a practice more common among feminists in the WLM than in the Trotskyist milieu. They shared domestic and childcare responsibilities in a house near to the British Leyland plant in Cowley. The arrangements were designed to allow each woman time for the political organising and intellectual study that WSL membership had involved. Simultaneously, deeper forays into Marxist views on the family had seen the two women attempting to subordinate personal family and sexual life ‘for the good of the Party’ (Chambers and Preston, 2006: 3). Like many feminists of the 1970s, they were influenced by the writings of the Russian Bolshevik and feminist, Alexander Kollontai, who had seen attempts to develop freer, non-exclusive relations between the sexes as vital to the creation of a truly collective society founded on the proletarian principle of comradeship. The women denounced monogamous relationships as imposing ‘an illegitimate emotional imperialism’ upon the body and emotions. Their feminism helped to foster an ethos in which comrades willingly intervened in members’ relationships on behalf of the Party if their partners were considered ‘hostile’ to WSL politics (Chambers and Preston, 2006: 11). This determination to smash bourgeois sexual morality had come at a high emotional cost for members, as they struggled to suppress feelings of jealousy and hurt that WSL politics had labelled ‘backward’.

Pam’s uneven, fractured narrative suggested the traumatic legacy of trying to reconcile the intellectual and emotional dimensions of a divided female self: one half committed to the making of a new Marxist utopia, the other half still embedded in the social customs of her conservative middle-class upbringing. During her time in the WSL, Pam had struggled to manage the painful knowledge that her partner was with another woman, even though outwardly she upheld a front of comradely conduct. In meetings, for example, she acted in a ‘comradely fashion’ with the other woman, but privately broke down in tears when alone at home:

You know, but it was very hard to be in the same room as her. She wasn’t in the same branch, but branches met together for what they called educationals so that was really hard, and I didn’t, you know ... I did feel wildly angry by it, and I would be very, very upset, but not in front of him. I don’t think ... I think. Because I thought as a revolutionary I should be able to tolerate this and he should have absolute freedom to ... (Pam, personal communication, 8 May 2009)

Throughout the interview, Pam laboured to correctly situate memories of events and feelings in their rightful context. At times, she appeared pained about her inability to remember more precisely. The trauma of remembering the conflict of sexual relations was compounded by the guilt she resurrected about neglecting her infant son to the thrill of activism. Her fractured narrative of these years reflected the fractured self that had resulted from trying to inhabit two conflicting social worlds as a lone mother and revolutionary. The world of 1970s single motherhood had denied her sufficient space for the revolutionary life that fired her intellect and fulfilled her social conscience. She had been unable to balance the ‘two heads’ of mother and revolutionary that she wore, and the guilt that had disturbed the political idyll continued to haunt her memories:

We had to be back to put the child to bed and take turns whereas I would be eking my time out and not going at the appointed time ... I imagine I would find myself so engrossed in what I was doing, and think it was so important ... You always felt torn, obviously, but looking back on it I don’t think I took the mothering part seriously enough. I think he was quite a neglected child. (Pam, personal communication, 8 May 2009)

The statement suggested an additional layer of guilt: Pam lived with the uncomfortable conviction that she had betrayed the comradely code binding together the two female friends. Her need to be active had come from deep within, transcending all other commitments, so that occasionally the tension of dealing with the conflict of identities had threatened to tarnish the revolutionary sisterhood uniting her and her comrade. Letters between the two women show that moments of unbridled optimism and collective strength in this newfound way of sharing politics, love and sex – ‘Feeling incredibly optimistic and cheerful. The future is ours’ – could be tempered by instances of disguised hurt: Pam ‘“closed down” ... was also unsympathetic and even aggressive ... after M left them for another woman’ at which her friend was devastated (Chambers and Preston, 2006: 4).

However, beyond the pain of recalling the guilt of a younger radical self, the trauma of remembering related to a still raw wound of grief underlying Pam’s oral history narrative. In order to access and to understand this unspoken trauma, I had to examine the ‘dialectic of emotions’ between us to understand the inter-subjectivity we had created (Roper, 2003). As interviewer, I had to listen to how Pam’s testimony made me feel both at the moment of listening, and later, when I revisited her transcript. This was something that I would have been unable to achieve through an assessment of the written transcript alone. Instead, I had to search within myself, to think about why I felt the way I did, and what this might suggest about the subjectivity that Pam enacted in relation to me. Throughout the interview, I felt weighed down by a heavy, almost debilitating sadness that tainted even the joyful memories she related. Sometimes, I inwardly questioned how legitimate were the experiences of comfort and companionship she associated with her activist days. Across the kitchen table, this outwardly composed, professional academic woman exuded a vulnerability that made me want to reach out and ease her burden. I felt torn: I wanted to understand the feelings she described, but felt unable to trust her memories of emotions because she seemed too confused as to what she had thought or felt and why. I also felt anxious about my inability to make sense of her inner conflict. She looked to me for explanations that I was unable to give. Whereas the empathy I had felt for Norman related to the self-regimentation we both shared, with Pam, my empathy was facilitated by the intimate female-to-female relationship she had created from the beginning of the interview. Yet it did not automatically empower me with understanding in the same way as the empathy I had shown Norman. Pam and I shared similar class and educational backgrounds, but we had few social or political experiences in common. From the outset, she often spoke about people and relationships without an accompanying explanation, assuming an understanding on my part of details of her life that only a long-term friend might have known. The sadness I sensed in her was unspoken and intangible, and her subjectivity, as a young activist and an older woman, remained elusive. Only upon returning to Pam’s narrative and reading it in conjunction with the account of her dreams, did I begin to make sense of her subjectivity as shaped by an ongoing process of mourning.

In the paper Pam had written with her friend, she related the painful effort of delving back into her past. The effort of deliberately remembering had triggered not only memories but also dreams and images in a backward sequence. A preoccupation with fissures in glaciers seemed to be symbolic of sections and aspects of her life she could not bear to look at. The painful task of locating past identities spoke of a terror of what she might find and the damage it might inflict on her present composed self. She was uncertain how deep she could bear to delve. She reflected how, the ‘depths and sudden cracks’ in the glaciers ‘evoked the terror of memorising when you don’t know what you’ll find, or what you’ll think, what you’ll be obliged to think about – what will emerge from the tumble’ (Chambers and Preston, 2006: 11). Despite the pain, the past held a powerful magnetic draw that she was unable to resist, and she wrote of the compulsion to go back and to come to terms with uncomfortable feelings. In one dream, someone’s arm had been severed in various parts, and the stitching and medical treatment had been done incorrectly, ‘it had to be redone, the wound reopened’ (p. 11). Like Norman, Pam too needed to compose a version of her radical past that she could comfortably live with, in the present day. To achieve this composure, she too applied herself to the task of remembering as a deliberate process. She sought to return to the past and to make a new history. The motif of the open wound evoked the healing process that remembering had only begun to initiate. However, this graphic image spoke of more than just the emotional trauma WSL gender politics had inflicted upon her.

The motif also pointed to the wound left by the child she had lost prior to her becoming politically active. In 1969, Pam had agonised about whether or not to see through an unplanned pregnancy without the full support of her African partner. She decided to have a termination, and soon after the couple separated. For Pam, this double loss had been more than she could bear: ‘That was all bound up with not being able to bear the separation and thinking, well, maybe I could have kept this child, and so in my imagination, this lost child became quite a real thing’ (Pam, personal communication, 8 May 2009). The motif of the open wound signified the enduring trauma that had since been compounded by the death of her child’s father, while the glaciers suggested feelings frozen in time, her inability to come to terms with so much loss. For Pam, the end of her first love had become entwined with the demise of her radical hopes and dreams: the young couple’s shared dreams of a future in a free East Africa and her own hopes for a more equal, socially and sexually liberated England. There was also a sense that the guilt she remembered feeling as a revolutionary was suffused by the guilt she now felt for having willingly accepted her partner’s withdrawal from the lives of her and her infant son. Following their son’s birth in 1970, the couple’s separation had coincided with the rise to power of Ugandan military dictator Idi Amin. Only now did Pam appreciate her partner’s own suffering during this tumultuous period:

We didn’t talk about that, but he must have been completely devastated by it because he [Amin] was ripping up his whole plan of building a medical department and all the dreams of Africa, and it wasn’t just there. What was it, forty coups in seven years, or something like that? Awful. So I never talked to him about that. It’s a shame. (Pam, personal communication, 8 May 2009)

The trauma marking Pam’s narrative was not altogether removed from the ‘grief’ Passerini identified ‘hanging over’ the Italian 1968 generation (1996: 132). Pam too mourned the demise of the promise of radical youth and the agency her revolutionary dreams had given her. Yet the individual subjectivity she composed in the oral history interview was informed by a complex wealth of personal and political, social and emotional experiences that transcended dominant collective narratives. Crucial to this subjectivity and also to the shape of her story was the relationship we established. The oral history interview offered Pam an opportunity for mourning and healing because from the moment of introduction she chose to invest in me her story of female identity and political experience within a safe, woman-to-woman environment. She set the terms of the interview relationship, but in contrast to Norman, she entrusted me with the freedom to interpret her experiences as I saw them. Indeed, through me, she hoped to make sense of her experiences in a way that had yet not been possible. Her story revealed how the gendered social and cultural dimensions of far left revolutionary experience were infused by individual histories of love, contested familial relations, as well as by international politics and conflict. Only by reading the conscious and unconscious components of the dialogue could Pam’s story, and the past and present subjectivity contained therein, gain a hearing. Her narrative testifies to the complex relationship between discourse, memory, and subjectivities informing the unique voices of 1968.

Conclusion

This article has sought to reflect on some of the possibilities and challenges of practising oral history in the context of understanding activist subjectivities and Britain’s relationship to 1968. In the 1960s and 1970s, the formation of activists’ inner lives occurred within the context of profound external shifts in the wider international and national body politic. For the men and women within my study, the process of understanding oneself, of creating an identity, occurred in a national and international setting of expanding social and political boundaries. But the cultivation of selfhood also occurred in a local familial context, which fostered particular ways of seeing, feeling and being. The subjectivity of young activists, although shaped by the new left cultures in which they lived out early adult lives, was entwined with individual experiences in the family, community, school and university, and with relationships formed within these sites. Forty years later the process of remaking selves took place amid a vastly reshaped political, social and emotional landscape. The two oral history narratives I have discussed here testify to the value of oral history as a historical practice to uncover new personal political and private stories around 1968. They have highlighted how individuals’ memories of activist life were informed by the social and psychological legacy of the far left cultures they and their young comrades helped to make. The shape of Norman’s and Pam’s memories revealed the gendered dimensions of revolutionary life and subjectivity that informed the sort of representations they sought to present of themselves and their radical histories. Yet, their memories were also informed by the encounters that took place between us. Within each interview, a particular meeting of subjectivities took place. This article has thus addressed the complex relationship between memories of past left cultures, past and present subjectivities, and the making and remaking of activist selfhood. The memories discussed here existed on the borders between conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings and behaviour. They spoke of an unfolding personal and political grief for lost cultures, political landscapes and relationships. They testified to individuals coming to terms with their experiences within these sites and the role that the interview relationship contributed to that process. An important argument of this article has been for oral historians of 1968 to think about the inter-subjectivity within the interview as part of their quest to unearth richer narratives of radical subjectivity. In the context of 1968, the value of oral history lies in its still subversive potential to challenge dominant discourses. This derives in no small part from its dialogic nature and the destabilising presence of the interviewer. By listening carefully to my own internal state, and by asking important questions about why the interviewees made me feel a particular way, I believe that my assessment of the inter-subjective encounter enabled me to achieve the sort of ‘serious engagement with subjectivity’ (Roper, 2003: 30) that scholars of 1968 are starting to achieve.