Fresh Garbage was an occasional newsletter produced in a very rudimentary manner by the Keble Left Caucus in the mid-1970s. It was duplicated Gestetner-style, with content being typed on to 'skins', stencils, and some basic graphics using pin pricks on the stencil. The college had a very basic hand-powered Gestetner machine and we bought packs of paper and ran off perhaps a hundred or two-hundred copies.
There were about a dozen of us involved in the Keble caucus - and its general approach was not so much non-party as anti-party, though we included at least a couple of members of the Labour Party and one of the Communist Party.
Most Oxford colleges had a small caucus group. These were set up as an extension of SocSoc, the Socialist Society - although I think I once stood as a candidate for SocSoc in some election or other, I can't recall going to any SocSoc meetings. Another unifying element for the caucuses was the weekly publication of the Oxford sutdent left Strumpet, which published something like 120 issues. It sanitised its title to Red Herring before ending up among the fishbones of history.
The caucus group met more or less weekly, very occasionally had speaker meetings, and once or twice fielded a football team to play, in kickabout fashion, against another college's caucus. I remember particularly playing against Wadham, as they were then a coresidential college and fielded a mixed team.
Fresh Garbage, remarkably, lasted for a dozen issues over about two years (1975-77). The caucus also produced a freshers' guide, and spearheaded the disruptive 'Fred Bakunin for SabPres' campaign in the Oxford University Students Union elections. I gave my complete set of Fresh Garbage to the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick. When I visited there recently (not to commune with my past but to access other of their holdings), I took the opportunity to photograph all the material and it's presented here.
I came up with the name Fresh Garbage from the song by Spirit on their first album. Quite a few of us wrote for the newsletter, so I am certainly not claiming it as all my own work. It didn't change the world, or the college, or indeed those who produced it. But I have at times posted publications just as marginal and ephemeral, so Fresh Garbage too is now available digitally for your enjoyment and edification.
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