Interviews with the New Left
‘It Was the First Time I Felt the Spirit of Revolution’: Protest and Politics in the late 1950s and 1960s
Neal Ascherson interviewed by Andrew Whitehead
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This is the text of an article published in History Workshop Journal and posted online in November 2023. The text as published is available on open access here: https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbad020/7429464
​  The article should be cited as: Andrew Whitehead, Interviews with the New Left: ‘It Was the First Time I Felt the Spirit of Revolution': Protest and Politics in the late 1950s and 1960s: Neal Ascherson interviewed by Andrew Whitehead History Workshop Journal, 2023, dbad020, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbad020

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Neal Ascherson in about 1963, when the Observer correspondent in Bonn. Photo courtesy Neal Ascherson.

  The protest against the invasion of Suez in Trafalgar Square in November 1956 was one of the biggest and most turbulent demonstrations in London since before the Second World War. The crowd was angry at what they regarded as the deceit of Anthony Eden’s government in deploying troops against Nasser’s Egypt in concert with France and Israel. The aim of the invasion was to seize control of the Suez Canal, which Nasser’s government had nationalised. In both political and military terms, the operation failed. Anthony Eden was out of office within weeks, and the debacle was seeing as confirming Britain’s eclipse as an imperial power.
  Neal Ascherson had witnessed the ugly side of Britain’s colonial policy close up, as a soldier in Malaya – ‘I’d seen how the Empire works and I thought it stank’, he recalls - and as an activist working with one of the first nationalist political parties in Uganda. But he was still shocked as well as appalled that Britain could take a covert role in an aggressive invasion. That’s what propelled him and thousands of others to come to the protest at Trafalgar Square and then to head down Whitehall towards Downing Street, where their advance was blocked by a phalanx of police, some of them on horseback.
  Ascherson’s reflections on politics and protest in the oral history conversations transcribed below begin with that Sunday afternoon rally and continues until the close of the 1960s and his leading role in a remarkable act of subterfuge: smuggling Rudi Dutschke, the German revolutionary who had been severely injured in an assassination attempt, to Ireland and the temporary sanctuary of the Dublin home of Conor Cruise O’Brien, diplomat, writer and Labour Parliamentarian.
  It takes in Ascherson’s memories of student radicalism in Berlin and then the Paris May Days of 1968 – ‘the most interesting experience of my life’ – both of which he reported on for the Observer and experienced as a participant too. He was politically engaged as well as seeking the informed detachment of the news correspondent. In Paris, he saw a movement develop which believed it could ‘realise a completely different world’. Oral history is not always an entirely reliable means of seeking dates and details, but as these interview transcripts demonstrate, it can reveal mood, sentiment and the passion of the time more tellingly than other forms of historical enquiry.
  Neal Ascherson was born in Edinburgh in October 1932. He got a scholarship to Eton and undertook National Service in the Royal Marines and had combat experience in Malaya. He studied history at King’s College, Cambridge, and began a long and distinguished career in journalism with the Manchester Guardian. He joined the Observer in 1960 and remained with the title (apart from a few years at the Scotsman) for thirty years, for much of which he was a foreign correspondent. He subsequently wrote for the Independent on Sunday. As well as being one of Britain’s most admired journalists, he is an authority on central and eastern Europe and has written several highly regarded books about Poland and its history and about the Black Sea region. He lives in North London.
  The edited transcript published here is of two telephone conversations on 3 and 19 February 2021. These were conducted as part of an oral history of the British New Left. Neal Ascherson has very kindly given permission for the transcript to be published and has made some minor revisions to the text. The full transcripts will be deposited in due course at the Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.
                                                                                                                                                            Andrew Whitehead
 
 
Andrew Whitehead: What was your personal and political journey that took you to Trafalgar Square on that November day in 1956 for the Suez protest?

Neal Ascherson: Well, I come from a naval family. My father was a naval officer but he was quite left-wing in a New Statesman sort of way. Quiet. And I had been brought up to be critical about society and its unfairnesses - you know, the class system, as I saw it, in Britain. And then I did my National Service in the Royal Marines. I was in Malaya, then of course part of the British Empire, and essentially run on rubber estates and tin mines, extorting enormous sums of money. And I felt I'd seen how the Empire works and I thought it stank.
  So, then I went to Cambridge. I had a scholarship to Cambridge. And there we all talked about our experiences and feelings. I got very close to and became great friends with several African students. And others also, some of whom had gone through National Service like me - the same sort of place, or worse.
  Anyway, so then Suez took place. And it wasn't so much the feeling of 'this is a part of the struggle against imperialism' which took me to Trafalgar Square. It was much more a feeling of absolute disbelief. I'd never thought that a British government could lie and cheat in order to carry through the invasion of another country.[1]

AW: At that time you were working for the Guardian in Manchester, is that right?

NA: Just started, that's right. It was my first job. Actually, I'd been working in Africa before that – in Uganda, where I'd been part of the one of the nationalist movements, the Uganda National Congress. It wasn't so much about that. It was sheer horror that something so criminal and dishonest can be done by a British government. I don't think any of us quite realised it was possible.

AW: Where you angry when you went on that demonstration?

NA: Yes, we were all angry. Yes. And I met people, quite a lot of people I knew, when I finally got to London. And of course the other thing - which heightened the horror and outrage – was that it happened at the same time as Hungary, those November days when the Soviet army returned to Budapest with the tanks. And there was a very strong feeling - it wasn't really right with retrospect - that Suez had been timed deliberately to be hidden by world outrage at what was happening in Hungary. That this was an excuse for Britain and France to do what they wanted to do in Egypt. I don't think that was really the case but nonetheless it certainly felt like that.[2]

AW: Did you have a political allegiance at that time, late 1956?

NA: No I didn't. I probably supported the Labour Party and I had friends who were connected with the Labour Party. But I wasn't a member of any party or identified with any.

AW: What are your memories of the Trafalgar Square protest?

NA: Well, the actual Trafalgar Square bit of it was the memory of this enormous crowd. And of the speeches. One of the things that struck me was listening to Aneurin Bevan speaking, I remember.[3] And he was a very Welsh person in the sense that his form of extreme anger was satire and comedy. So his speech was incredibly funny. It was mocking, of course, but it was jokes and wit - which I was very surprised by and taken aback. I thought: surely it should be much more solemn and condemnatory. But it wasn't like that. And I remember that speech best of all.
  And then we all moved down towards Downing Street - in order to get out Eden, by the scruff of the neck or whatever it might be.[4] It was sort of spontaneous. Everybody just moved down like a great river. And of course Downing Street was open in those days. There wasn't the Thatcher gates and all that protection. And so people were attempting to storm in there. And the police were beating them back and calling in more and more horses, mounted police. It got very ugly with a lot of fighting and use of batons. I hadn't really seen anything like that - didn't quite understand that it was possible to see a British copper striking a woman, a young woman, in the face with a club with full force. I didn't think that sort of thing happened in Britain. But it happened - all round me.
  I remember rescuing somebody because I was holding on to a bollard and he was holding on to my legs to prevent him being hauled off. But he made a big mistake, typical of those times. He was, like me, a public school boy. When he saw what the police were doing to individuals in the crowd, he at one point shouted at a policeman: “I've got your number, don't think you'll get away with this!” And of course, as anybody could have told him, the police just turned on him and went for him and started hitting him and dragging him off. And so I tried to hang on to him. That's where I met my first wife - who at that time was his girlfriend.

AW: So you met your first wife at Trafalgar Square at the demonstration?

NA: Yes. Nick was a friend of mine. He had been at Cambridge. And he'd done his National Service in Korea and been horribly wounded. He had dreadful holes all over him. And his girlfriend was also an undergraduate at Cambridge. So there were the three of us. And in the crowd, on and off, other people were there who I knew. It was a very big crowd. This fighting went on - interminable rushes and charges and counter-charges. And then (laughs) in the crowd there were a number - quite a lot I suppose in those days – of real old veterans of pre-war struggles, class struggles and big violent demos and all the rest of it. And I remember them shouting - they were old cockneys from the East End: “where's your bloody marbles! who's got the marbles?” What, what? He said: “you’ve got to bring marbles, you throw them under the police horses and they fall, they slip”. And it turned out of course (laughs) nobody knew that because a generation had passed so nobody had brought along any marbles to throw under the hooves of the police horses.
  Another thing, there was someone - he may have come from some leftist movement or other - but suddenly in the middle of this heaving crowd, he managed to erect a kind of little step-ladder and stand on it and shouted and started addressing the crowd. And what he said was: “let's get out of here, comrades, let's go to their clubs, that's where they all are, hiding, in clubland. It's no use being here, they're just puppets of the capitalist class hiding in Downing Street, but the real enemy, they're hiding in their rich men's clubs, up West.“ In fact, a lot of people listened to this and took it very seriously. And a large part of the crowd - this is after the demo had been going on for hours and hours - broke away and formed up in different columns, processions, and started to march off intending, I suppose, to break the windows of all the old clubs in St James's (laughs). At that point, the whole demo began to really run down and disperse.

AW: Did you get in to Downing Street yourself?

NA: No, we were all in Whitehall. Nobody actually got into Downing Street that I know of.

AW: Did you feel frightened?

NA: No! I felt angry - not frightened.

AW: Had you been on previous demonstrations?

NA: Let me think - I don't think so. No, I think that was my first substantial political demonstration. I might have been in some sort of small parade in Kampala in Uganda on which we carried little placards saying 'Independence Now' or something. But no, it was my first big demo.

AW: Did it radicalise you or were you already radicalised?

NA: Well, it radicalised all of us I think. Because it was quite a moment in Britain and I'd say particularly England. And particularly for the nicely brought up public school boys and public school girls and the middle classes who were left inclined and liberally minded and all the rest of it. But they never thought that anything like that could happen. I don't mean hitting women with clubs so much as this enormous crime being committed by a British government. It really did permanently open people's eyes. People's attitudes to politics and what was possible with politics was never the same again, I think. Certainly not for anybody I knew.

AW: Of course, 1956 was the year of Khrushchev's secret speech and the Observer's publication of the text. And then as you say of Hungary. And we had between those, E.P. Thompson and John Saville publishing the Communist dissident journal the Reasoner. Were you aware of all those developments at the time?

NA: I was certainly aware of the 20th Congress speech, yes. I was on the Guardian in Manchester, I think I'd joined in the summer. And people were continuously talking about the 20th party congress speech by Khrushchev and what this meant.[5] And that of course folded into reactions to Hungary, and the Guardian's stance on Suez, which was related.

AW: Did you know people who were coming out of the Communist Party at that time?

NA: No, I don't think I did. Afterwards I probably met quite a lot of people who had left the party in 1956 because of Hungary. But not at the time.

AW: What about your political path after that demonstration? What sort of political activity did you undertake - demonstrations or campaigning or anything of that sort?

NA: No, no. I didn't. I just went back to being a reporter. I was doing my first job on the Guardian. It was just local reporting of a very, very basic kind. Foot slog stuff. I remember I was staying with some Canadian friends, who put me up at first when I was in Manchester. And it was a great Canadian economist, Harry Johnson, who was a great friend of mine, and his wife Liz. And when all this started, the Suez thing I mean, Liz was absolutely distraught. And once, I remember, she was in tears. And she said: “don't you understand that war isn't normal! War is wrong! It's a mistake! When it happens, it means that something terrible has gone wrong. And here you are” - she said to me – “and you're just like all the rest of them, you think that it's sort of seasonal: wartime - peacetime - wartime - peacetime, like night and day, winter and summer. It's not! Peace is normal!” I'd never thought of that, to tell you the truth, because I'd been brought up in the war. It had never occurred to me that peace was the normal condition of mankind and that a war was a terrible, preventable, aberration. So, that was one of the things I learned.
  I also learned from going around talking to people on the doorstep, which was my job. And people were - particularly working class people - furious with the Guardian for condemning the Suez operation and condemning Eden. They thought it was disloyal. And the attitude of most people I talked to when I raised the subject was: “well, my dad, he had to go, didn't he, in 1914. And I had to go in 1939. Well, now it's the lad's time to go. Everybody has to go once in their life, don't they.” It was their attitude - complete fatalism about war and peace. It made a profound impression on me.

AW: Did you get involved in the CND-style peace movement?

NA: Ban the Bomb? No I didn't as a matter of fact. I wasn't entirely convinced by unilateralism. I felt it would only work in the context of worldwide or general nuclear disarmament. I thought that for Britain just to abandon its nuclear weapons wouldn't mean anything, wouldn't have much influence on anyone. And I just felt - perhaps I was still a militarist at heart somewhere: you've got these weapons, you'd better keep them for the moment; this is not the time to give them up, it's a dangerous world.

AW: Eric Hobsbawm was your tutor at Cambridge - ?

NA: Yes

AW: You must have known that he was not only a small c but a capital C communist. Did the communist tradition have any interest or appeal to you?

NA: Well, when I was an undergraduate, it had a kind of wicked appeal for me and my friends because it was so sort of forbidden: communists, oh! So anybody who was a communist was obviously fascinating and interesting and admirable. But apart from that, not much. I read history at Cambridge. We were taught Marxism. But Eric never tried to proselytise among his students. I knew perfectly well that he was a communist. He never made any secret of it. But he didn't influence me in that way, or say: do you want to join the Party?
  I joined the Guardian in 1956. And then I had my first experience of being a foreign correspondent in '58 - I was in France during the 13th May, the big Algerian putsch which in effect put de Gaulle back into power. Then I went back to Manchester; moved to London and worked for the Spectator very briefly; and then in 1960 I was hired by the Observer.
  In 1963, I was sent by the Observer to Germany and so started being in central Europe. I visited Poland first in 1957 - just a year after the Polish October.[6] The Polish October was very important on quite a lot of people I knew who felt: here is a non-dogmatic Marxism at last which can produce a government which doesn't censor and is open to discussion and rather pluralist, and it's not the Soviet model but something much, much better but still very Marxist. And so many people were fascinated and excited. These were people on the left who were undecided, particularly after Hungary and after the 20th party congress, about what to do. So that was an influence. But from 1963 on, of course, I didn't know much about what was going on in the UK. I was away.

AW: And you were in Paris in '68?

NA: Indeed, yes.

AW: What was it like being there? I know you were reporting, you weren't a participant at all -

NA: Well, I was a participant (laughs). But I was playing a dual role I'm afraid. I was a prohibited immigrant in France after that. I was associated with the SDS in Berlin, you see. And the SDS - the Sozialistische Deutsche Studentenbund – were, I suppose you could say, New Left in many ways. New Left in the sense they were contemptuous of the Soviet Communist model. And they looked forward to a new kind of revolutionary Marxism which was workers’ control and no bureaucracy etcetera etcetera. Anyway they were extremely arrogant about their command of theory and all that. And before the May events in Paris, events of that sort had already been going on in West Berlin for nearly a year. And so they sent a mission to instruct the French comrades (laughs) on the correct theoretical perspective of what they were doing. And so I went with them.
  My memory is actually rather hazy because things became so weird and violent. But I remember (laughs) I was addressing French student meetings in the Censier campus of the Sorbonne, for example. So I was involved as well as reporting - which obviously upset the Observer. They didn't complain about it but I could sense the disapproval. Because I identified very strongly with the Paris May.

AW: So you felt yourself to be a revolutionary Marxist at that time?

NA: Well, I couldn't go along with a lot of what they said. I wasn't at all sure about the Third World-ism which was very much part of particularly the German attitude, which was that the revolution has to start out there and then it will come toward the metropole, and what we can do is to start the long march through the institutions here, starting with the universities. But basically it's 'out there' that the struggle will be decided - and I wasn't too sure about that.

AW: Did you find May '68 energising?

NA: Oh yes, very. I think it was the most interesting experience of my life really. Yes.

AW: The most interesting experience of your life?

NA: Yes, because it was the first time I felt the spirit of revolution, as it used to be called. And that was such an extraordinary experience (laughs). It’s what happens to young people, I suppose, at the moment a revolution suddenly begins and just begins to take off. Not that it lasts unfortunately. It doesn't. But it’s that moment of possibility. It's when people look around at that familiar landscape which they'd grown up in, and they look at the hills and peaks that surround the valley, they've always been there. And then suddenly you think: they're wobbling! They're not made of stone, they're just theatre scenery! Somebody put them there. And we can knock them down. We can do anything! Everything we see is a sort of construct put up to deceive us and if we can just tear this set and scenery down, we can make our own - realise a completely different world.
  So it’s that sense of possibility, and its effect on young and excitable people. Their faces change. Their features seem to change. They look quite different (laughs). It's just an extraordinary moment. And I understood the experiences - I wouldn't say I was lifted off the ground in that way myself completely. I was older of course, seven or eight years older, than most of the students. And I'd seen more of the world than they had.

AW: Did you think that May '68 pointed a way forward for major western nations?

NA: Yes, I thought so at the time. I did. I thought that this upheaval clearly was changing Germany in a way none of us could foresee - but everything could be overthrown and everything could be changed. And France again, it wasn't really like Germany. Germany had this huge idealistic vision of the future and total change. France was really very old fashioned. There wasn't a great deal of new thinking going on in the Paris May. There was an enormous amount of picking on some very old lines, some of them going back to 1789, and some of them going back to Babeuf-ism and that kind of movement. Some of them were Trotskyite of course, that kind of movement. But there wasn't a lot of original thinking. They just wanted to, I suppose, recreate their visions of their revolutionary past. Some people wanted to remake the Paris Commune or whatever it might be. But Germany was a bit different.
  Anyway, looking at Britain, I was, very unfairly, a wee bit contemptuous about British students. They demonstrated and they marched, Vietnam demonstrations and Grosvenor Square and all the rest of it.[7] But I found it very unconvincing and I thought: nothing's going to happen here much; they don't understand what it's all about; for one thing, they hadn't a coherent theory of what's going on. And that was very, very condescending and wrong. You know in later years talking to people, young people, who were there, took part in some of those demonstrations, occupations, and all the rest of it, I realise that it was an absolutely incandescent moment in their lives. It was so important to them. And that they felt: ‘at that moment, I became free, I broke away from everything I'd been taught and all the people that tried to hold me down and I suddenly realised what I could be and what we could be’. So I clearly underestimated the optimism of the moment in Britain. It certainly wasn't visible to me at the time.

AW: Were you in London for any of the Grosvenor Square demonstrations?

NA: Yes I was, one or two of them.

AW: How did they compare to the Suez demonstration eleven or twelve years earlier?

NA: That's a good question. Well, they were far more sophisticated in the first place, in that people knew what they wanted to do. They didn't expect anything but violence from the police. And they were ready for it. So it was that difference. It was the same slightly unrealisable aims. I think they wanted to storm the American embassy in Grosvenor Square as they wanted to storm Downing Street in 1956. And they weren't going to get there. But they were big, passionate demonstrations and also I got to understand that there was now a kind of, not a class but a category of very, very experienced demonstrators or revolutionaries, whatever you like to call them - rather like Berlin students, who all had their equipment with which they set out on a demonstration, including a bicycle helmet and all the rest of it that you needed.
  And in Britain too, I noticed on the London demonstrations a lot of very experienced, very tough people. I saw Vanessa Redgrave on one of them. It was one of the Grosvenor Square ones, and the crowd would every so often roar and rush forward against the police and a lot of fighting, hitting, and then the demonstration rolled back slightly to sort of draw breath before the next charge. And suddenly I saw this apparition - this tall, pale young woman standing between the police and the demonstrators gathering for the next onrush and she was saying: “don't you realise the police are working people too, you know, it's not them who are the enemy”. And then the demonstration rolled forward, it would have rolled straight over her - I never saw her again, anyway

AW: The German SDS, tell me more about them?

NA: Well, they started as the student wing of the Social Democrats. And they became radicalised in the - when? - well, I suppose in the course of the Sixties really, very late Fifties and early Sixties. And they began to get into trouble with the main SPD which said: you're turning into communists, this is no good and we don't approve. And links between the SDS and the main SPD were frayed and broke at quite an early stage.
  The SDS were never communists. They never approved of what was happening in East Germany which they regarded as bureaucratic state capitalism or whatever you want to call it. Neither were they very interested in the German working class which they dismissed as 'integrated' by the bourgeoisie. They were very much a student movement. In West Berlin, the working class hated the SDS. The working class there was extremely conservative with a small ‘c’ because of their real terrifying experience of what Stalinism really looked like, and anything red - apart from the dear respectable SPD - was absolute anathema to them. 

AW: They sound as if they are sort of Maoist?

NA: Well, there was a tendency towards Maoism. They certainly had this idea: oh, what Mao is doing is terrific, you know, because he has the same idea as we have which is that everything has to be done by direct assembly and direct choice of the people. Away with Bureaucracies! Away with Structures! - which simply confined the revolutionary spirit to the converted. And so they had this delusion that China’s Cultural Revolution was something terrific and liberating. They weren't Maoist; they just approved of Mao. And quite a lot of Mao’s little red books circulated. But then so did Reich's The Function of the Orgasm which  somebody produced, a cubic kind of edition, which was regularly thrown at the police. The idea was that being bombarded with The Function of the Orgasm, they'll understand their own nature and suddenly sort of transform themselves.

AW: And you were a member of the SDS or a sympathiser?

NA: Well, I was a sympathiser. I was a member of the Republican Club, Republikanischer Club, which was the SDS's kind of intellectual centre for continuous lectures, discussions, debates, meetings and so on. I wouldn't join the SDS - I wasn't a German; I wasn't a student; I was a journalist. They knew me, because I was one of the very few foreign correspondents who was sympathetic to the movement.

AW: And when you went to Paris, was it principally for the SDS or principally for the Observer?

NA: Principally for the Observer.

AW: So the political side of it was an add on, so to speak?

NA: It was really. '68 for me started in '67 really, in Berlin. And it was then that the demonstrations began to thicken and take on a formidable aspect. I got to know Rudi Dutschke a bit -[8]

AW: Did you like him?

NA: Yes, very much. Very much. But that's another story.  He was shot in '68. I returned to London in 1969. And I was contacted to say: he's got to get out, can you look after him? So I said: yes. So he appeared, with Gretchen, his American wife. And he was still badly, quite badly injured. He stayed with us for a bit.

AW: You helped to get him out of Berlin or you helped him once he was already in London?

NA: To get him out of Britain at one point. Callaghan was the home secretary and they suddenly got worried about Dutschke's presence and gave him an expulsion order. And this was awkward. We had to hide him – though they obviously knew where he was. At that time, Conor Cruise O'Brien entered the scene. Conor Cruise was an extraordinary person - terrible in some ways, deplorable, but also a terrific man in other ways. He got in touch with me and said: “bring him over to Ireland”.[9]

AW: I take it you met Rudi Dutschke in Berlin?

NA: Yes, that's right. I wouldn't say I knew him well in the Berlin times. I met him.

AW: What impression did he make on you?

NA: Well, I was impressed by his intensity and vigour. There was nothing frivolous about Rudi Dutschke. I was also impressed by his seriousness - his feeling that everything must be rationalised and theorised as well as acted upon. He was thinking as well as acting. And I was impressed by his ability to control other people - his ability to constrain wild idiots who wanted to do something irretrievably violent. And his continuous insistence that making demonstrations in a protest movement was a learning process. After every demonstration you had to think: now, what did we learn from this? what does this teach us? So that was what impressed me.

AW: Was he charismatic?

NA: Yes, of course he was. He was very charismatic. He had a good voice, a deep voice. And he was quite striking looking - this black shaggy hair.

AW: Were you in Berlin on 11 April 1968 when Dutschke got shot?

NA: No. We were all on holiday in Bavaria in fact - with some friends, a great friend who was also very much part of this movement and knew all the SDS people. And we got this message - absolutely horrified. The landlady whose pension it was - was delighted of course, but that's Bavaria. She just thought: ‘that's great, they've killed this red, good’. But we knew at once - we had to stop the holiday at once and get back to Berlin as fast as we could.[10]

AW: Because it was such a big story?

NA: Well yes, it was from the point of view of journalism. But I think those of us who weren't journalists and the party on holiday, we all felt the same - we must get back, something terrible's happened, this is awful.

AW: Did you get anywhere near to the hospital? Did you see him in hospital?

NA: I didn't, no. The fact that he'd been shot immediately inflamed the whole movement in West Berlin because they attributed it entirely to the Springer press, Bild Zeitung having inflamed opinion against him as a red agent and an agitator infiltrated by the East Germans or something. All of which was of course nonsense. But anyway that was very much put on the front pages with photographs, 'public enemy number one', you know, over months and months. Because you must remember in West Berlin, this had all been going on since early 1967. Protests first came to a head on June 2nd, 1967, when the Shah of Persia visited West Berlin and was met by massive demonstrations. There was a violent battle with the police outside the Opera, and in the aftermath a police officer shot the dead the student Benno Ohnesorg. That set off demonstrations and fires all over the inner city and jerked the whole student movement into a much higher gear of militancy.
  So the Springer press was seen instantly by people as the target responsible for the shooting. And so the instant reactions was to blame the Springer press and then to head toward it with intentions of burning things down.

AW: Did that happen?

NA: Well, not quite. There was the usual enormous conflict with the police. They got as far as the streets outside the Springer building and they burned, I think, a number of delivery vans and work stopped in the press buildings. I think they got the paper out, as a matter of fact, somehow. But certainly a lot of editions were lost. A lot of people were hurt, a lot of people were arrested and dragged off. It was quite a fierce, horrible thing. I wasn't actually involved in that. I was away probably writing my story. One of the ironic things today is that the street immediately outside what used to be the Springer headquarters building, which was deliberately built right on the Berlin Wall, that street is now called Rudi Dutschke Strasse.

AW: When did you see Rudi Dutschke afterwards?

NA: Well, I didn't see him afterwards for a long time. He was shot in spring of 1968. I ended my posting in Berlin at the end of the year. I went back to London in '69. So I didn't see him again until I was approached in London by people who said: ‘look, can you take him in?’

AW: So you were asked to give him shelter and get him out of the country?

NA: Yes, because they felt that he was becoming insecure. He was being pursued by agents of the West German authorities. I don't think there was a warrant for his arrest but there was a general assumption that he would be tried and imprisoned if he hung around in Germany which is why, as soon as he was able to, he left. And his wife went with him and their little boy, the baby. He was called Hosea Che - 'Ho' after Ho Chi Minh for short.

AW: So what did you do then when you were asked to help?

NA: Well, I said 'yes' of course. We were living in Bethnal Green at the time, that's me and my first wife. We had a spare room. So we said yes. I can't remember precisely who it was who approached me about this. Because I knew a lot of them - the people who were on the run after the whole Berlin movement began to run down and the police got after them. Some of them fled to Italy. Some of them, of course, fled to Allende's Chile. Others fled all over the place - many to Italy. One or two came to Britain.

AW: And he just appeared at your door?

NA: Yes. I mean, we knew he was coming of course. He came to the door. That's right. The family - there were three of them. By then, Ho had been born.

AW: And did they use an assumed name?

NA: Not at that stage, no. I don't think there was much of a case for hiding their name. Clearly the authorities knew where they were and who they were. Because the day after Rudi arrived, all of a sudden our telephone stopped working. And a telephone crew appeared the next day. And they started fiddling with the telegraph pole immediately outside our back door (laughs). So it was not too difficult to establish what was going on.

AW: So they bugged your phone and they probably bugged your house as well?

NA: I don't think they bugged the house. They bugged the line, yes, but not the house I don't think.

AW: And how long did Rudi Dutschke and his family stay with you?

NA: Well, it was not all that long. I think it was a couple of months. Not much longer. And then he moved on to somewhere else. Probably somewhere else in London. Because he, like many political refugees, found it absolutely wonderful to be in England where nobody cares about their neighbours. They're not curious, they don't even know who their neighbours are. And even if somebody said: this is Rudi Dutschke living next door to you - they would just say: who? (laughs)

AW: When he was with you, was he able to get out and about? What was his health? And what was his English like?

NA: Well, his English was pretty vestigial. People came to see him - so there was a constant stream of visitors, mostly German revolutionaries. I remember one occasion, a man who was a real stormy petrel of revolutions, he just went from one barricade to another, came round to see Rudi. He was very, very vehement and he was shouting at Rudi about some new theory of revolution which he'd developed. And Rudi was sort of sitting there. And poor Rudi eventually said: “I can't take this, it's hurting my head, stop it, stop it” - and clutched his head. And he really was in a state. It was hurting him being yelled at by this guy. So I had to usher him out.
  But quite a lot of others came too - some of them madmen, some of them interesting, some of them women and girls but obviously part of the movement. And then - I don't think it was while he was still staying with us - I suddenly got approached by someone else who said: “you've got to get him out of here”. Because Callaghan had been the home secretary, and had been under a lot of pressure to expel Dutschke. He'd given him leave to remain initially for a limited period. And then there was a lot of fuss.[11] And Rudi attended some meetings. He certainly went to some political meetings of the far left in Britain. I don't think he spoke. He went there to listen and was identified and I think he talked with people afterwards who came up to him. And of course Special Branch were watching his every move. And they then said he'd broken the conditions of his leave to stay which were: no political activity. And so Callaghan pounced on that and said: well, you've broken the terms of your permission to reside in the United Kingdom so you must go, you must leave.
  So it was at this point that this whole business of getting him to Ireland arose. I was in contact with Conor Cruise O'Brien who telephoned me and said: “let's do this together, I'll take him in - but you've got to be careful about bringing him”. I fixed their journey under the name of Drucker, for some reason. I escorted the Drucker family including little Ho - we all took a taxi and then got onto a night train to Holyhead. From Holyhead, we got on a steamer to Dun Laoghaire. I'd booked a cabin for them. And it was bitter cold - horrible weather, pouring rain and very cold and windy. So we got across and got to Dun Laoghaire - I'd have thought about three in the morning, maybe four, just before dawn anyway.
  And I remember looking over the rail as we came alongside the jetty, and there was a lonely figure on the rain-swept quay. It was Conor Cruise waiting with his car. And so we went down and drove across Dublin to the other side to Howth, which was where he lived then with his wife. So I delivered them. And I remember they were completely bewildered being ushered in out of the cold and wet and darkness into this very warm, noisy Irish kitchen, which was full of people at six in the morning - people who dropped in to have a mug of tea. It was all very Irish, and homely and reassuring. Strange but very reassuring.

AW: Was Conor Cruise a minister at that time?

NA: No, he wasn't. He was Labour Party - he wasn't a minister at the time. He wouldn't have got away with that. You couldn't say that the Irish authorities were friendly to German revolutionaries. However, Conor was a man of enormous courage and when he thought something was right, he did it. He thought the British were behaving in a typically British, insensitive, cruel way to this wounded refugee who tried to fight for democracy or social democracy, all the rest of it. He unhesitatingly took him in himself. I stayed overnight and then Conor drove me back to the airport the next day. And that was the last time I saw Rudi.[12]

AW: Do you think Special Branch knew Dutschke was on the boat?

NA: I just don't know. If they'd been any good they would have known but - who knows?

AW: Did you let the paper know that you were doing this?

NA: No. I didn't.

AW: It would have been a good story, wouldn't it?
​
NA: (laughs) Yes, I suppose it would. It would have been a story, yes. But no, I didn't.
 

[1] The Trafalgar Square demonstration against the invasion of Suez was on Sunday, 4 November 1956 and was called by the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress. British military action in Egypt, in concert with French and Israeli forces, had begun a few days earlier. It was prompted by the decision in July of Egypt’s new president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to nationalise the Suez Canal Company. Neal Ascherson wrote about the Suez demonstration in the Independent, 5 October 1996: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-lie-that-changed-us-1357018.html

[2] The Manchester Guardian for 5 November 1956 which reported the previous day’s anti-Suez rally under the headline ‘Wild Scenes in Whitehall’ and also reported continuing British and French air attacks on Egyptian military installations had as its main story the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising with the headline: ‘SOVIET TANKS CRUSH RESISTANCE’.

[3] Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan was at this time the shadow foreign secretary. He had been the minister of health in the Labour government of 1945-51 and was the leading figure of the Labour left. An audio extract from his speech at the Suez protest is available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZmw8XIoZeY

[4] Anthony Eden was the Conservative prime minister at the time of the Suez invasion. He resigned two months later.

[5] On 25 February 1956, the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, made a ‘secret’ speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union denouncing Stalin’s ‘cult of personality’. The complete text of the 26,000 word speech was not published by Moscow, but the Observer obtained a copy which it printed in full in its issue of 10 June 1956.

[6] The Polish October of 1956 was a brief liberalisation or ‘thaw’ in Communist rule. It immediately preceded the anti-Soviet Hungarian uprising.

[7] Several large demonstrations in London against the Vietnam War culminated in Grosvenor Square, then the site of the United States Embassy. The most turbulent was on 17 March 1968.

[8] Rudi Dutschke, born in what became East Germany in 1940, was at this time the most prominent figure in the revolutionary left in West Germany.

[9] Conor Cruise O’Brien was an Irish diplomat, politician and writer. He was elected to the Dáil Éireann, the Irish Parliament, in June 1969 as a Labour candidate and in the mid-1970s served as a minister in a coalition government. Neal Ascherson wrote an obituary of Cruise O’Brien for Open Democracy in December 2008: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/conor-cruise-obrien-the-irascible-angel/

[10] Rudi Dutschke was shot three times and seriously injured outside the SDS office in Berlin on 11 April 1968. His attacker is reported to have shouted: “You dirty communist pig”.

[11] Jams Callaghan the home secretary in a Labour government from November 1967 to June 1970. He later served as prime minister. The Dutschke case is discussed in Katharina Karcher, ‘A Threat to National Security? The Legal Dispute between “Red Rudi” and the British Home Office, 1970-1971’, Contemporary European History, published online 25 February 2022: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/contemporary-european-history/article/threat-to-national-security-the-legal-dispute-between-red-rudi-and-the-british-home-office-19701971/76EF30415F3FB85CC0E34C15528FFBB9

[12] Rudi Dutschke, his wife and son stayed with Conor Cruise O’Brien in Dublin for several weeks early in 1969. They returned to Britain but were expelled in 1971 and moved to Denmark where he died in 1979. The story is briefly recounted in an article in the Irish Times, 26 May 2018: https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/hiding-in-howth-when-the-1968-revolution-came-to-ireland-1.3507225