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By Root 1747 0

Campaign for Interracial Friendship’ (SCIF), which was not so much a real political operation (though Colin MacInnes went about the area, a favourite stamping ground of his, posting its news-sheet through letter boxes) as an example of the modern media operation which, like others of its kind, fizzled out after a few months of rather successful publicity. It did indeed mobilize the ‘stars’, mainly of jazz – most of the big British names were there, Johnny Dankworth and Cleo Laine, Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber, as well as some pop stars – but its strength lay in the operators who could get stories into the press and programmes on to television, and produced newsworthy ideas such as the televised interracial children’s Christmas party of 1958. While it lasted, it enjoyed the invaluable help of the remarkably able and admirable Claudia Jones, a US Communist Party functionary born in the West Indies and expelled as a ‘non-citizen’ from the USA in the witch-hunt days, who did her best, with indifferent success, to bring some Party efficiency and some political structure into the Caribbean immigration in West London and to get adequate backing for her efforts from the British CP. An impressive woman, she has been unjustly forgotten, except perhaps as one of the inspirations behind what has become the annual, and no longer political, Notting Hill Carnival.

Third World passions did not become a major inspiration for the left until the 1960s, and, incidentally, weaken the hold of the Cold War crusading ideologists on western liberals and social democrats. Yet by the end of the 1950s the Cuban Revolution was already in power, about to add a new image to the iconography of world revolution, and to turn the USA into a highly visible Goliath facing the defiance of a bearded young David. In 1961 the reaction to the attempted Bay of Pigs invasion was immediate – as immediate as the reaction to the Soviet invasion of Hungary had been in 1956 – and it extended far beyond the usual parties, signers of petitions, and indeed the usual range of protesters. Ken Tynan telephoned me desperately the morning the news came through: something must be done! As soon as possible. How could we set about it? Though a genuine man of the left, whose political sincerity both Marlene and I always defended against those who accused him of posing, he was far from the usual member of the ‘stage army of the good’. Had he been, he would have known what to do himself. When we had set up the usual committee, rounded up the usual suspects for letters of protest, and organized a march to Hyde Park – I cannot for the life of me remember whom we had as speakers – I recall noting with agreeable surprise how unlike the usual left-wing demo this one was, at least in appearance. The call to defend Fidel Castro, through Tynan, or perhaps more likely Tynan’s Man Friday Clive Goodwin, actor, agent and activist, had mobilized a remarkable mass of younger theatrical males and females, and young women from the fashion agencies. It was the best-looking political occasion I can remember, a wonderful sight, and all the happier since we knew by then that the American invasion had been defeated.

So, almost without noticing, I found myself – and the world – slipping into a new mood as the 1950s turned into the 1960s. Even politically, although after 1956 I had neither decided to leave the CP nor been expelled, I no longer found myself as isolated as Party members had once been. Party labels were no longer decisive for those who supported the new political campaigns – anti-nuclear, anti-imperial, anti-racist or whatever. When some communist historians founded a new historical journal, Past & Present, in 1952, about as bad a time in the Cold War as can be imagined, we deliberately planned it not as a Marxist journal, but as a common platform for a ‘popular front’ of historians, to be judged not by the badge in the author’s ideological buttonhole, but by the contents of their articles. We desperately wanted to broaden the base of our editorial board, which at the start was naturally