30 June 2024
Pride beyond June: readings in LGBT+ history, culture and theory
As Pride Month’s celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer communities comes to a close, this post picks out some of the books currently available to readers in the British Library. Although our digital collections are not yet available following the cyber incident, our contemporary print collections in St Pancras offer a wide range of approaches to LGBT+ culture and history. The books featured below are just a selection of more recent publications that are held in St Pancras and should be available to order to our reading rooms.
Our collections are particularly strong for their international coverage. If you are keen to learn more about the development of transnational campaigns for LGBT+ rights from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Laura Belmonte’s history of the international LGBT rights movement offers a good starting point. The book celebrates the growing reach of struggles against homophobia but also flags up continuing threats to LGBT+ rights.
The international LGBT rights movement : a history. Laura A., Belmonte. London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Shelfmark YC.2022.a.6510
Another historical work, providing an international perspective spanning from Finland to New Zealand, the UK and USA, and focused on the first decade after the second World War is Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, edited by Heike Bauer and Matt Cook. Collected essays examine the legacy of the 1950s and challenge preconceptions about this period.
Queer 1950s: Rethinking Sexuality in the Postwar Years, edited by H. Bauer and M. Cook. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Shelfmark YC.2022.a.1503
The work of activists, artists and academics comes together in another ground-breaking collection comprising essays, poems. literary analysis, ethnographies and methodological questions exploring LGBT+ experiences in the Caribbean. The book aims to disrupt conventional understandings of the Caribbean as deeply homophobic by focusing on LGBT+ agency.
Beyond Homophobia: centring LGBTQ experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean, edited by Mojo Anderson and Erin C MacLeod. Shelfmark YC.2021.a.5033
Still in the Caribbean, and focusing on the Hispanic nation of the Dominican Republic, Streetwalking by Ana-Mauríne Lara presents the varied strategies employed by LGBTQ community leaders in the Dominican Republic in their struggle for recognition, and rights. Lara employs Maria Lugones's theorisation of streetwalker strategies and Audre Lorde's theorisation of silence and action to explore the exercise of power and agency among the LGBTQ community of the Dominican Republic.
Streetwalking : LGBTQ lives and protest in the Dominican Republic, by Lara, Ana-Mauríne. New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2021. Shelfmark YC.2022.a.1315.
Published within Northwestern University Press' 'Critical Insurgencies' series of literary studies, Emilio Amideo's Queer Tidalectics brings a range of theoretical perspectives to bear on Black diasporic experience and aesthetics. The book looks at the work of Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo. In particular, it explores their use of the idea of fluidity as a means to evade and overcome sexual, gender and racial boundaries. Amideo employs the theoretical perspectives of Sara Ahmed, Édouard Glissant and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others, in a fascinating and probing contribution to Black queer studies.
Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature by Emilio Amideo. Northwestern University Press, 2021. Shelfmark YC.2022.a.5531
The Library's shelves are rich in academic studies applying theoretical approaches to a range of contemporary questions. But it's not all heavy theory: there are a broad range of more accessible texts waiting to be ordered up to our reading rooms. Georges-Claude Guilbert's book, Gay icons: the (mostly) female entertainers gay men love, provides a readable consideration of the way superstars and divas contribute to gay culture. The book focuses on individuals including Mae West, Julie Andrews, Britney Spears, RuPaul, and Cher to consider their appeal and what it is that makes them icons. This book is just one of many that consider gay or Queer icons in cinema, music and the arts. Other books to address this theme include The little book of queer icons by Samuel Alexander (London: Summersdale, 2019, shelfmark YC.2019.a.9751) and Heroes and exiles: gay icons through the ages, by Tom Ambrose (London: New Holland, 2010, shelfmark YC.2011.a.3923).
06 June 2024
D-Day: from memory to commemoration
This post highlights a small selection of the many books published in the last two decades and available in the Library that bring a contemporary approach to the history and understanding of D-Day and the battle for France.
In The time left between us, by Alicia DeFonzo, Lincoln : Potomac Books (University of Nebraska Press), 2022, shelfmark m22/.11296, the author explores the link between past and present through her grandfather’s experience of D-Day and fighting in France.
To coincide with the 80th anniversary of the Normandy landings on 6 June 1944, BBC2 has screened a groundbreaking documentary series, D-Day: The Unheard Tapes (available on iPlayer). The series brings to life audio interviews with those who fought by using actors who resemble the speaker at the time of the war to lip-synch to the recordings. The use of actors bridges the gap brought by time and gives a contemporary feel to the recordings, many of which have not previously been heard beyond the archives where the tapes are held. The series, accompanied by a new book – one of many focusing on D-Day to be released this month – highlights the way these events are passing from the testimony of living witnesses into cultural history.
Both the programme and the accompanying book offer new insights, and show that there are new and different ways of approaching history both to make it meaningful to younger generations and to re-examine established narratives to draw out different aspects and understandings. This post focuses on some of the books currently available to readers in the Library’s reading rooms that have been published in recent years that bring a contemporary approach to the telling of social history. Some of the books featured in this post bring to the fore different perspectives on the invasion, others consider how a younger generation can relate to these events, and some examine the social and political implications of the commemoration of war and of D-Day itself.
The selection of books highlighted are among those that are held in print format and should currently be available to readers in the Library’s reading rooms. Most are held at our St Pancras site whilst a couple are held at our site at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Some books held in Yorkshire are now available to readers, although those held in automated storage cannot yet be accessed following the cyber incident last year. Just under half of our current intake of books published in the UK come to us in digital format, and access to these has not yet been restored, so they are also excluded from this selection of books. An update on the restoration of services can be found on our Knowledge Matters blog.
And so to the books we can make available to readers... Pictured above, Alicia DeFonzo’s The time left between us blends memoir, history and oral story-telling. DeFonzo, who lectures in English at Old Dominion University in Virginia, retraces her grandfather’s steps through France and Germany and weaves his account of his experiences in wartime Europe into her own memories to understand the relationship between past and present. Her grandfather’s memories – passing from the Normandy landings to the liberation of concentration camps - become part of her own history. Starting from the realisation that she knew almost nothing about this history and that her grandfather had not previously related these experiences – she arrives at an understanding that she has a part to play in safeguarding and transmitting memory.
D-Day minute by minute, by Jonathan Mayo. London : Short Books, 2014. YC.2015.a.763
A more straightforward, fast-paced, and highly accessible account of events is offered by Jonathan Mayo’s D-Day minute by minute, London: Short Books, 2014 (shelfmark YC.2015.a.763). In just over 300 pages, Mayo’s book draws on a wide range of personal narratives to construct a detailed account of events as they were experienced not only by those who fought but by many people impacted by these crucial events, from French villagers and journalists, to schoolchildren and nurses. Mayo’s book focuses not on military strategy but on the human experience of involvement in shaping the course of history.
Normandy '44 : D-Day and the battle for France: a new history, by James Holland, London : Bantam Press, 2019, YC.2020.a.1072
A similarly broad range of experiences is brought to the fore in James Holland’s Normandy ’44: D-Day and the battle for France. Holland uses archival research and eyewitness testimonies from around the world to re-examine established narratives of the invasion, bringing out the human aspect of the conflict as well as differing perspectives, with accounts from civilians and resistance fighters as well as military personnel.
Forgotten: the untold story of D-Day's Black heroes, by Linda Hervieux. New York, HarperCollins, 2015. Shelfmark m15/.11728
Blending social history, biography and an account of military events is Linda Hervieux’s book, Forgotten: the untold story of D-Day's Black heroes (New York: HarperCollins, 2015, Shelfmark m15/.11728). The book focuses on the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion, a unit of African-American soldiers within the racially-segregated US forces involved in the assault on the beaches. Using military records and interviews with surviving members of the battalion and their families, Hervieux highlights the sense of freedom these men gained in Europe and in England in the lead-up to the invasion. The book notes the lack of recognition accorded to these men and the denial of military honours after the war. The disparity between their experiences in Europe and the segregation and injustice they faced at home was an important backdrop to the emergent civil rights movement.
A breath of freedom: the civil rights struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, by Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. YC.2013.a.5132
This theme is shared by Maria Höhn and Martin Klimke’s book, A breath of freedom: the civil rights struggle, African American GIs, and Germany, which explores the social and historical impact of serving in Europe for African American servicemen and how this fed into activism within the civil rights movement. Although not focused specifically on D-Day, it is one of a number of books to consider the wider social and political aspects of participation in the fight to bring to an end to the German occupation of Europe. This is explored in a more recent work by Sandra Bolzenius, Glory in their spirit: how four black women took on the Army during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), shelfmark YD.2022.a.1758. The book records a strike against discriminatory work assignments by four African American female privates serving in the Women's Army Corps (WAC) at Fort Devens, Massachusetts in 1945. At the time, their well-publicised protest “pushed the army's segregation system to its breaking point”.
Woman at the front: memoirs of an ATS girl: D-Day to 1946, by Sylvia Wild, Stroud: Amberley 2012. YK.2013.a.3983
Returning to different perspectives and experiences of D-Day itself, is Sylvia Wild’s first-person account, published in 2012, of her service in the Auxiliary Territorial Service as a shorthand typist working for the Senior Royal Engineer officers developing the D-Day plans concerning ports, docks, harbours and railways as part of Operation Overlord. Her service continued in France, where she lived in French households as transport services were reinstated in France, Belgium and Germany. Her first-hand account could be read alongside the very different experiences of the 39 women who served in France within the Special Operations Executive working undercover to support the French Resistance. Their story is recounted in Kate Vigurs’ Mission France: the true history of the women of SOE, published in 2020 by Yale University Press, shelfmark YC.2022.a.4932.
Normandiefront: D-Day to Saint-Lô through German eyes, by Vince Milano and Bruce Conner. Stroud: Spellmount, 2012. Shelfmark YK.2013.a.1164)
A different perspective on the fighting, based on interviews with, and the testimony of, German combatants in 352 Division is offered by Normandiefront: D-Day to Saint-Lô through German eyes, by Vince Milano and Bruce Conner (Stroud: Spellmount, 2012, shelfmark YK.2013.a.1164). Through the course of their work over many years, the authors collected German and Allied photographs and documents, many of which had not previously been published. Although focused more on the course of the battle than on the feelings of those involved, the book gives an insight into a very different experience of how events unfolded.
D-Day UK: 100 locations in Britain, by Simon Forty, Swindon: Historic England, 2019, shelfmark YC.2020.b.320
The preparations for D-Day and the way that they involved a wide range of people from across the country is the focus of D-Day UK: 100 locations in Britain, by Simon Forty (Swindon: Historic England, 2019, shelfmark YC.2020.b.320). It is one of a number of books to consider the planning and information-gathering that was necessary before the invasion could be attempted. This is also the focus of Bletchley Park and D-Day: the untold story of how the battle for Normandy was won, by David Kenyon, published in 2019. Using previously classified documents, David Kenyon shows how preparations for the Normandy landings in 1944 - the turning point in the war in Europe - began at Bletchley in 1942, with the careful collation of information extracted from enemy signals traffic.
Bletchley Park and D-Day: the untold story of how the battle for Normandy was won, David Kenyon, New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2019. YC.2020.a.1359
The cruel victory: the French Resistance, D-Day and the battle for the Vercors 1944, by Paddy Ashdown, London : William Collins, 2014, shelfmark YC.2015.a.14166
In a very different vein, Paddy Ashdown’s book about the French Resistance in the Vercors mountain range near Grenoble aims to tell a story overlooked by most English-language histories of D-Day. As Allied troops stormed the beaches in Normandy, the resistance in the Vercors rose up in a planned rearguard action that was brutally crushed when German reinforcements arrived. The book shows how the tragedy gave the Vercors a place in French history and gives voice to the many fighters who fought to gain a say in the future of their country.
Divided memory : French recollections of World War II from the Liberation to the present, Olivier Wieviorka, Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2012. Shelfmark YC.2013.a.312
Wieviorka's important book tackles the conflicting memories of all aspects of wartime France: the fall of France, Vichy, the Occupation, the deportations, the Resistance, trials and amnesties. Wieviorka examines the contested area of who should be honoured within French history in the wake of war and occupation.
D-Day in history and memory: the Normandy landings in international remembrance and commemoration. Edited by Michael Dolski, Sam Edwards, and John Buckley. Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 2014, shelfmark YC.2015.a.5044
The politics of commemoration is the focus of a work bringing together a collection of essays on the complex and often conflicting memories of D-Day. The work aims to deconstruct and counter the way D-Day has frequently been mythologised by bringing together multiple national viewpoints.
D-Day remembered : the Normandy landings in American collective memory, Dolski, Michael, 2016. YC.2017.a.7666.
Addressing similar themes, historian Michael Dolski’s book examines how understandings of the past are shaped by the present through consideration of how D-Day is remembered and commemorated by Americans. His study aims to expose and consider the cultural functions of war remembrance. Drawing on a wider range of international examples of warfare, Commemorating war : the politics of memory, by T G Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (New Brunswick, N.J.; London: Transaction 2004) is one of a growing number of academic works to explore war memory and the role of commemoration. The latter book is available on the open shelves in the Social Sciences reading room at SPIS303.66 and can also be ordered to other reading rooms via shelfmark YC.2009.a.7918.
Because of the Library's IT outage, readers will have to wait a while before access is available to the new crop of books published to mark the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, but as services are restored, anyone with an interest in delving deeper into this history will be able to access these works in the Library's reading rooms.
08 March 2024
Finding Women's Studies on the shelves: an international turn
'Transnational feminist politics, education and social justice', edited by Silvia Edling and Sheila Macrine. Shelfmark YC.2023.a.64. Books published by Bloomsbury are received in print and continue to be available to readers.
The cyber-attack on the British Library and the resulting IT outage have thrown a spotlight on the Library’s collections held in physical formats such as print and manuscripts. Whilst the Library is working to restore access to digital collections and to material stored in Yorkshire at Boston Spa, the physical collections held in London are still available to readers. Written on International Women’s Day, this post takes a look at the books on the shelves in the Library's basements at St Pancras. Focusing on books on Women's Studies, it considers the (temporary) effect of bringing a hybrid library back to a primary reliance on print.
'Edith Cavell: faith before the firing squad', by Catherine Butcher (shelfmark YC.2016.a.12850) gazes out from the centre of a row of books received through Legal Deposit. Works centering women are spread through the collections. This book comes from Lion Hudson (Monarch Books) who publish Christian material, in print format.
The Library restored access to a temporary version of its online catalogue on 15 January. That catalogue, based on a back-up version, includes material received by the Library up to April 2023. The catalogue marks material held in physical form in London as ‘should be available’, whilst e-books, e-journals and e-resources that cannot be accessed, and print materials held at Boston Spa, are marked as ‘unavailable’. Some materials available online can still be accessed too.
What does this mean in practice for anyone looking for contemporary published books in social science subject areas?
The answer, in short, is that whilst most older social science books are still available, a sizeable proportion of more recent publications from the UK and Ireland cannot currently be accessed.
After non-print legal deposit regulations came into force in 2013, most of the UK’s major publishers of academic texts switched to depositing their publications in digital format. This includes very many of the big-hitters in the social sciences. For books, think Routledge, Ashgate, Gower, Sage, Policy Press (Bristol University), Palgrave Macmillan, Rowman & Littlefield, and smaller independent publishers such as Intellect Books, Verso, Pluto, IB Tauris, Saqi and Zed Press. Those depositing e-books rather than print also include several university presses, among them UCL, Manchester, Liverpool, Wales, Huddersfield and two of the major US university presses, Yale and Chicago. For journals the list is similar but also includes Taylor & Francis and Oxford University Press. These are major publishers of social science materials.
For these publishers, the Library holds books and journals in print format to at least 2013 and sometimes beyond, as not all publishers switched to digital deposit at the same time. All had completed their transition by 2018, so any books and journals received since then will have been received in digital format and are not currently available. The Library is working to restore access to these materials.
Academic publishers who continue to deposit their books in print include Cambridge University Press and Bloomsbury (the latter deposits print and digital copies), as well as Oxford University Press (books, but not journals), along with very many international university presses who deposit because they distribute their books in the UK and Ireland. A wide range of smaller UK and Irish publishers also deposit print copies, but their output in the social sciences is much smaller than the academic presses who deposit books and journals in digital format.
'Women’s rights in armed conflict under international law', by Catherine O’Rourke. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020. British Library shelfmark YC.2022.a 1908. Books published by Cambridge University Press are received in print and should be available.
Legal deposit regulations cover the UK and Ireland. The Library purchases a wide range of academic material and other books relevant to readers’ needs published outside the UK and Ireland. Purchased books in English and in European languages are received in print format and are held in London at St Pancras. The vast majority of these books should be available to readers, but readers planning to consult items should contact the Reference Services team by emailing [email protected] in advance of their visit to ensure that specific items are available.
A screenshot of a catalogue search showing recent books acquired by purchase as mostly still available to readers.
Assessing the resources that are currently available for social science research, there has been less impact for books published before 2013. After that date, the switch to digital deposit means that a substantial proportion of books published in the UK and Ireland are not currently available. Books published outside the UK and Ireland, in Europe, the Americas and Oceania, are less impacted by the IT outage. Most more recent books published in Africa and Asia are not available as most are stored at the Library’s Boston Spa site: there is information about alternative resources on the Asian and African Studies blog. Additional materials, especially reference books and recent issues of some journals, can be found in the Library's reading rooms, including the Social Science reading room and the Asian and African Studies reading room.
'Gender and elections', by Susan Carroll, Richard Fox and Kelly Dittmar. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022. British Library shelfmark YC.2023.a.1355.
The Library is still able to provide readers with access to a very wide range of important academic texts across all subject areas within the social sciences. In the absence of a large part of UK and Irish publishing, the more recent books available have a slightly more international frame of reference.
Etel Adnan's artwork graces the cover of the monumental 'Arab American women; representation and refusal', edited by Michael W Suleiman, Suad Joseph and Louise Cainkar. Syracuse University Press. Shelfmark YC.2022.b.1696
Knowledge and inspiration combine in 'Womanist and mujerista psychologies: voices of fire, acts of courage', edited by Thema Bryant-Davis and Lillian Comas-Díaz. Washington, D.C. : American Psychological Association, 2016. Shelfmark YC.2016.b.1854
A brief walk along the shelves in the Library’s basements reveals a rich range of books relevant to women’s studies and women’s history. Whilst they are generally spread fairly thinly across the shelves, they wait to be discovered and called up to the light of the reading rooms.
The relatively rare sight of two books in a row with a focus on women and gender. Both the ethnographic study 'Sex, shame and violence: a revolutionary practice of public storytelling in poor communities' by Kathleen Cash (YC.2016.b.1866) and 'Nurses as leaders: evolutionary visions of leadership' by William Rosa (YC.2016.b.1867) are US publications (published by Vanderbilt University Press and Springer, New York respectively) showing the international coverage of currently-available, more recent, material in the social sciences.
Recently published books in the humanities and social science sit side by side on the shelves in the basements, whilst works of fiction, general interest, and children's books are housed at Boston Spa. Interestingly, current drama is housed in London, illustrated in the image below showing three plays, 'Mum' by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, August Strindberg's 'Miss Julie' adapted by Amy Ng and Lulu Raczka's 'Antigone'. In the centre of this shelf, partly hidden by its label, is Chiara Bottici's 'Anarchafeminism', published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2022.
Social science and humanities books received from UK, Irish and some international publishers by Legal Deposit, and stored at St Pancras.
'Anarchafeminism' by Chiara Bottici (London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). Shelfmark YC.2022.a.8306 is among books available to readers.
Chiara Bottici is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, USA, and has written extensively on philosophy and myth. Judith Butler, who will be speaking at the British Library on 19 March 2024 (in person tickets are sold out, but online tickets are available), reviewed this latest work by Bottici, saying "This is a capacious, clear, and revolutionary text that will bring readers who are just starting to learn about feminist philosophy as well as those who have been around a long time. This book does an excellent job in communicating the value of the anarchic, especially in its resistance to the leader, and its thoroughgoing affirmation of the value of freedom. This freedom is not a narrow idea of personal liberty, but an entire mode of transforming the world. We learn as well about a 'transindividualism' which allows us a way to rethink global solidarity for our times." (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/anarchafeminism-9781350095854/ viewed 8/3/2024).
22 March 2022
7 Days, Culture and the Arts
In 2020 the British Library acquired the papers of Anthony Barnett, best known as the founder of the campaigning organisation Charter 88 and the website openDemocracy. This series of six posts highlights a discrete part of the archive, consisting of documents and ephemera from Barnett’s time as a member of the collective behind the revolutionary weekly newspaper '7 Days'.
Fifty years ago, on 22 March 1972, '7 Days' published an emergency issue that saw it go into ‘suspended animation’. Funds were sought for a relaunch but, apart from a special issue in May 1972 to commemorate the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, the paper disappeared. In this sixth and final post in our series, Maxine Molyneux recalls her time as Arts and Culture Editor and reflects on a unique experiment in cultural politics.
(The second post in the series was written by Anthony Barnett, the third post was by Graham Burchell, the fourth post by Bill Mayblin and the fifth by John Mathews.)
Cover of the emergency issue of 7 Days, March 22, 1972. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Not long before the launch of the first issue I was invited by the 7 Days collective to take on the job of Arts and Culture Editor. At the time, I was stitching together a living as a freelance journalist, writing articles here and there, doing part-time editing and translation jobs and writing PR leaflets on art shows for the amusingly titled Tomorrow’s News. I was lucky to have a regular commission for the International Herald Tribune to cover exhibitions and fine art auctions, and write the odd feature and book review, for which I was paid $12 a piece, almost covering my weekly rent.
In 1971, London’s cultural scene was alive with radical groups of artists, film makers and playwrights who were part of the broader political ferment, not only of the student movement but of a generation. At various times in that transitory world I had found myself sharing houses and flats with activists and artists, one time with the founders of the Red Ladder agitprop theatre group, another with one of the leaders of the radical film activist group, Cinema Action. There was a feeling of excitement, of innovation about, but there was also an intellectual appetite for the radical cultural moments and thinkers of the past, whether in drama, art or film.
Young activists debated the work of Brecht and Eisenstein, read Freud and Lacan as well as Marx, Mao and Lenin. I recall attending a very serious weekly (or was it fortnightly?) - Theoretical Practice group [1] run by Kasim Kahn from his flat in Finsbury Park. We travelled up by car, me, the feminist artist Mary Kelly, and Clive Goodwin (our driver), literary agent and founder of the Black Dwarf. There, in our group of seven, we pored over passages of Althusser, Balibar, Pierre Phillipe Rey and learned that The Grundrisse marked a distinct break in Marx’s thinking.
My life then was lived in contrasting spaces – private views in the old art world’s Bond Street galleries – and the fringe world of art activism, politics and theory groups, and they would often collide. I remember being at some private view held at the Royal Academy when a group calling themselves ‘the Black Hand Gang’ let off a small smoke bomb leading to a dramatic evacuation of the assembled guests. Agitprop cinema and theatre, fringe performance and avante garde music, and some madness too – all were part of the wave of creative energy and radical politics of that time.
What was compelling about 7 Days was that it was a project of the independent Marxist left, and was fully committed to serious and critical coverage of culture. I was ready for a change, and without hesitation I accepted their offer and took the post of Arts Editor for the brief life of the paper.
7 Days’ arts coverage attempted to bridge high and popular culture. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
I knew some members of the collective if not personally then by name. I had met Peter Fuller in his art critic days at an ICA exhibition of Picasso’s Minotaur prints which we were both covering, and got to know him as a friend. I had also met Fred Halliday earlier at the offices of Black Dwarf, on my return from a work trip to Argentina, and was serving as interpreter for some Latin American revolutionaries who were on a European fundraising tour. When Fred and I met again in 7 Days we ended up sharing a tiny office with grimy red lino, and freezing, but for a bar heater which my co-occupant would stand in front of to warm up while the backs of his trousers slowly burned ever larger holes. No one cared much about their threads on the 7 Days collective.
Reviewing the 21 issues of the paper half a century later I am struck by the breadth and depth of its cultural coverage. 7 Days aimed to transform what it saw as the regressive tropes contained in ‘British values’, racism, sexism, philistinism, homophobia and elitism among them.
The first year of the gay liberation movement’s existence celebrated in 7 Days with a discussion of the London GLF group’s manifesto. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
More ‘Gramsci than Guevara” it was a platform for feminist ideas, and it was committed to anti-racist struggles and cultural interventions. In its arts coverage in particular it sought to create a bridge between high culture and popular culture. Short articles were accompanied by longer think pieces, underground and radical manifestos, analyses of advertisements, reviews of books like One Day in the life of Ivan Denisovitch. Thanks to being able to draw on a pool of talented writers sympathetic to 7 Days, there was no difficulty in finding a diversity of cultural content. Peter Wollen (aka Lucien Rey) on Realism, John Berger and Anya Bostock on a biography of Mayakovsky, but also a ‘Rock Special’ which included an interview with Jack Bruce ‘Life with Cream” and an appreciation of Miles Davis.
Issue 4 ran a photo-feature on the 1971 Miss World protests by womens’ and gay liberation activists. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
By today’s standard 7 Days was neither egalitarian nor inclusive in its internal relations.
As Rosie Van de Beek observes, the collective was made up of ‘insiders and outsiders’. Nor was it as inclusive in its coverage – notably of Black artists and writers - as it would be today. A piece on Mustafa Matura’s play As Time Goes By was perhaps the exception.
Yet feminist content there was aplenty, thanks largely to the women in and around the collective. Articles included ‘A bash at Women’s Hour’; a review by Sally Beauman of Cosmopolitan, flagged up as ‘an odious new magazine for women’, a critical discussion of the Playboy exhibition, a special feature on Miss World and Mecca, a photo feature on what was described in somewhat patronising language as a ‘ large and satisfactory demonstration’ that ‘took place outside the Albert Hall’. This, along with critical coverage of vaginal deodorants - symptomatic of capitalism - a report on a revolt by members of the BFI against the governors, pieces on Surrealism, a Hogarth show, and Kathleen Tynan interviewing Germaine Greer on the publication of The Female Eunuch. Positive appraisals of Alexandra Kollontai and an extended interview with Simone de Beauvoir by Rosalind Delmar, and pieces by Laura Mulvey and Mary Kelly, brought feminist analysis and politics into art theory, film and popular music.
Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive
It is sad to note how many of the active members of the collective and its supporters are no longer with us, friends Peter Wollen, Clive Goodwin, Peter Fuller, and dear Fred Halliday [2] among them. Also sad to recall others whose brilliant work in the cultural field has fallen out of favour - I think here of Trevor Griffiths whose play Occupations, on the Turin strikes of 1922, was a subtle exploration of Gramsci and left political strategy.
Playwright Trevor Griffiths respond to Tom Nairn’s review of his play ‘Occupations’. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Since those times the work of the margins has mostly moved into the mainstream, and the members of the collective went into the academy, publishing, or into other professions. 7 Days was a short, intense, highly rewarding and formative experience for those associated with it. It was a space where politics, culture and radical ideas found expression. It forged some important and enduring friendships. When it folded I decided not to continue in journalism but to head for university, where I remained.
The times of 7 Days were so very different, shaped as they were by a young generation that believed that political progress and social change was possible. Important and positive things were achieved in and after the 1970s before reaction set in. Today we live in more threatening, darker times, but a new generation of radical activists has come into politics, incensed by growing inequality, corrupt elites, and the failures of governments to tackle the climate crisis. There is a revival of interest in Marxism and radical thought among students, and more urgent talk of the need for change. The work of cultural transformation continues, but proceeds by other means - the print media is joined by podcasts, social networking, blogs and much else besides. I suspect that if 7 Days were alive today it would be in one of those formats, or perhaps something entirely new, and, who knows, it might well have been able to survive and to flourish.
‘Seven days to save 7 Days’. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
[1] Theoretical Practice started in 1970 as a reading group and set up other groups dedicated to thinking critically about Marx’s work and that of the French structuralists. It went on to produce seven issues of a journal also called Theoretical Practice, that published translations of leading theorists in the Althusserian school.
[2] Fred and Maxine married and had their son Alex in 1985.
27 January 2022
Designing 7 Days
In 2020 the British Library acquired the papers of Anthony Barnett, best known as the founder of the campaigning organisation Charter 88 and the website openDemocracy. This series of six posts highlights a discrete part of the archive, consisting of published and unpublished material, editorial documents and ephemera from Barnett’s time as a member of the editorial collective of the revolutionary weekly newspaper '7 Days', 50 years on from its publication.
In this fourth guest post, Bill Mayblin recalls his role in the production and design of the paper and the shifting media and cultural landscape for newspaper publishing in the early 1970s. (The second post in the series, written by Anthony Barnett, is here, and the third post by Graham Burchell is here.)
In 1971 I was twenty three years old, which would have made me one of the younger and certainly one of the less noticeable members of the 7 Days editorial collective. I would be surprised if many surviving members even remember me. But together with Alan Turkie, who was even younger (but perhaps more noticeable) we were the production team responsible for designing, pasting up and delivering the weekly edition of 7 Days for print. For my part I was thrilled to be part of something as exciting and worthwhile as this brave venture, but also slightly in awe of the fierce intellects and articulate egos that made up the rest of the collective.
Cover of the 9th February 1972 issue which dealt with the events and the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, using photographs to powerful effect. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Design is perhaps too grand a word to describe my role on the paper. All basic design decisions – grid, fonts, masthead – had already been taken before I joined. Layout and paste-up would be more accurate to describe my job and this involved cutting up photoset galleys of type, laying out the page and pasting copy onto grid sheets with Cow Gum – the standard technology of the day for offset litho printing.
Photographs we would mark up separately for the printer to size, screen and drop in. Every Tuesday would see a marathon all-night session to put the issue together in the cramped offices in Shaver’s Place, SW1. And on Wednesday morning one of us, tired and bleary-eyed, would take the train to Colchester to deliver the artwork to the printer.
My overriding memory of those all-night sessions is of fighting for space – space on the page, that is – in order to use photographs large and to have sufficient ‘air’ around the typography. It was often a losing battle. There was always too much copy. ‘Alex, we need to lose thirty lines here.’ would be a recurring refrain. Alex Cockburn, our calm and indefatigable editor would pore over the galleys and cut what he could, but inevitably pages would often look as if text and photos had been squeezed in with a shoehorn.
The truth is that 7 Days was never a design-led publication, members of the collective were far too politically focused for that. I don’t remember a single meeting at which the paper’s design was specifically or seriously discussed. Whatever design ethos it did have was already embedded at the very genesis of the project. 7 Days was to be a tabloid format, 24 page paper that embraced the documentary power of photography.
When talking of the paper with people at the time I would habitually describe it as a ‘leftwing photo-journalistic weekly’. Only now as I write that down, fifty years on, does it occur to me how strangely old-fashioned this description feels today. Three words that still have perfect currency on their own, but together seem to belong to a distinctive period of 20th century history that was perhaps already coming to an end when 7 Days was launched.
It’s the photo-journalism bit that dates it. With the sheer saturation of photographic and video images in today’s mainstream and social media we can forget just how novel and powerful documentary photography was for much of the last century. From the 1920s onwards modernist graphic design had championed photography, with its promise of objectivity and truth, as the prime if not the only ‘modern’ way of making images. The photo-journalist was born and it was the black-and-white photograph, often radical, dramatic and shocking that gave us our memorable images of the world through peace and war.
Growing up in the nineteen fifties and sixties I can remember the impact of publications like Life, Paris Match and Britain’s own Picture Post (a conscious model for 7 Days), and in the late sixties the Sunday broadsheet supplements, particularly the Sunday Times under the influence of art editor David King, brought us powerful photo essays such as Don McCullin’s images of the Vietnam war. It was this tradition that 7 Days was proudly stepping into.
But times were changing, and art and graphic design are perhaps where it could be seen first, and most clearly. The sixties had also given us psychedelia, pop art and the counter culture. If we talk of modernism we must also acknowledge the beginnings of postmodernism, a rejection of ‘Truth’ and of the photograph as its embodiment, and an embrace of complexity, playfulness and irreverence.
A memory stands out for me here. Alan and I were working to lay out pages for the week’s issue and someone brought in the latest issue of OZ magazine. We flicked through it, slightly sniffy but also fascinated at its chaotic energy full of radical free-standing artwork, vaguely pornographic cartoons, whole articles printed in yellow type reversed out of a pink background (totally illegible – tut-tut). And yet exciting and in tune with a particular zeitgeist.
It was not our target readership of course and although it was clearly anti-establishment and loosely in our camp we could chuckle dismissively at its outlandish graphics. And yet there was always the nagging feeling that at some cultural level this was what our paper was now competing with for readers. In 1971 even before computers and the internet our media and cultural landscape was shifting and 7 Days was perhaps stranded on one particular shore.
Inside page from the 9th February 1972 issue focusing on the events and the aftermath of the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Looking back on 7 Days’ brief existence I am amazed and proud at the breadth and depth of its coverage through a tumultuous time of home and global politics. The sweep and standard of its journalism, in words and images, was high. But as one of its design team I feel entitled to admit that its ‘look’ was not always so good. There were many pages, with cramped type and wonky sub heads, that make me wince when I see them now. But there were also occasions when we won the battle for space, and designed memorable spreads, pages that sit more proudly in that modernist tradition of photo-journalism.
Sadly in the spring of 1972 7 Days produced its final issue and a talented group of people went their separate ways. As for me, I went on to design numerous other publications many of which I am more proud of from a simple design point of view. But I have to admit they tend now to merge together in my memory. But 7 Days, that six months in 1971-2, working through the night in Soho with Alex Cockburn, Alan Turkie, (my close friend to this day) and assorted members of the collective who would drop by to discuss, argue and generally get in the way – that was something special.
Bill Mayblin, 2021.
16 December 2021
‘You Cannae Eat Ships’: 7 Days and industrial news.
In 2020 the British Library acquired the papers of Anthony Barnett, best known as the founder of the campaigning organisation Charter 88 and the website openDemocracy. This series of six posts highlights a discrete part of the archive, consisting of published and unpublished material, editorial documents and ephemera from Barnett’s time as a member of the editorial collective of the revolutionary weekly newspaper '7 Days'.
In this third guest post, Graham Burchell recalls his role as industrial correspondent for '7 Days' and reflects on the industrial relations landscape of the early 1970s. (The second post in the series is here.)
Looking back on my experience on 7 Days, I find I am very surprised that I was ever invited to become the full time “industrial correspondent” for this New Left, revolutionary, but hopefully commercially viable, photo-news weekly. It now seems to me extraordinary.
‘You Cannae Eat Ships’, 3 November 1971. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Apart from a brief experience of trade union activity, through involvement in an unsuccessful attempt to form a “breakaway” union of telecommunication workers, separating from the large postal workers union (UPW), I had no experience and little knowledge of the world of industry or trade unionism. It was a brief experience-experiment: the national postal strike of 1971 put an abrupt end to the plans of the new union, forcing its handful of members to choose either to join the UPW strike or become strike-breakers, “scabs”. It also put an end to my trade union experience.
My involvement came about as a result of my decision to ‘boycott’ my final exams at university, abandon academic life, and philosophy, and throw in my lot – irrevocably, I imagined – with the working class and its struggle. I became a trainee overseas telegraphist in the Post Office. Anthony Barnett’s approach to me came after I had reconsidered this decision, left the Post Office, sat my finals, and rediscovered my interest in philosophy.
As well as my lack of experience and knowledge of industrial matters, of economic policy or trade unionism, I had no experience of journalism and the kind of investigative activity and writing it involved. Moreover, I was temperamentally unsuited for the job: 24 years old, I was too self-conscious and too intimidated by the people I needed to interview to be able to approach them with any confidence or authority. I was frequently in the office, not knowing what to do, and I recall Peter Fuller, in charge of Home news, and a real journalist, impatiently telling me that I should be “out there” getting stories. But I had very little idea of how to go about this.
Indeed, the high points of my experience on the paper – a visit to Glasgow to report on the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders’ “work-in”, to Coventry to interview engineering workers facing the prospect of unemployment and striking for the first time since the war, an eye-opening trip down a coal mine, an interview with the miners’ leader Lawrence Daly, and a journey to Kirby and Liverpool with the playwright John McGrath to report on a factory occupation – were all initiated and arranged for me by others. On the trip to Liverpool, I was little more than John McGrath’s awestruck passenger observing how all the people we met in Liverpool – union organisers, shop stewards in the occupied plant, and everyone in the bar of the Everyman Theatre – seemed to know and greet him as a friend.
‘From Militant Miners the News ‘It’s All or F**k All’, 15 December 1971. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
The term “industrial correspondent” is not used much today. The social, political and economic landscape in which journalists with this title once operated – a world of major national industries, large national trade unions, and the quasi-corporatist “industrial relations” and economic management set ups which had governed the relations between employers, workers and national governments since the Second World War – has disappeared.
The Miners: Week One, 19 January 1972. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
7 Days was launched in what we can perhaps now see was an important moment in the early stages of this transformation. It was an imaginative venture, an attempt to get free from old models of a militant Left journalism tied to the policies and positions of a political organisation, to create something radical and independent that would speak to the new forces and movements we felt ourselves to be part of, even possibly to represent. But, despite our aspirations, perhaps we failed to identify what was in fact new in what was happening. In 1970, Edward Heath’s Conservatives were elected on a radical ‘free market’ manifesto. Harold Wilson derided the Conservative programme as the work of “Selsdon Man” (after the hotel in which the manifesto had been drafted). He depicted it as the product of a kind of paleo-conservatism. This set the tone for what became a persistent critical theme: that the Conservative programme came from, and would take us back to, the past. But maybe “Selsdon Man” was not a paleo-conservative relic, but something new, albeit perhaps still inchoate, foreshadowing the neoliberalism that would come to dominate the future?
In 1971, a record number of people were involved in “industrial disputes” and more days were “lost” through strikes than in any year since 1926. The reform of “industrial relations” was at the heart of the Conservative government’s agenda. A new Industrial Relations Act, introduced quickly and coming into force in 1971, sought to shift the balance of power between employers and trade unions in favour of the former, on the one hand, and in favour of the power of official trade union leadership over shop-floor organisation and their ‘unofficial’ actions on the other. At the same time it gave greater powers of intervention and sanction to the State.
‘Forcing Unions to Break the Law’, 23 February 1972. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
The first steps in the government’s attempt to dismantle the post-war tri-partite consultative arrangements inaugurated a long period of bitter and intense struggles. When the first issue of 7 Days appeared, the Upper Clyde work-in had been underway for a number of weeks, other kinds of factory occupations followed elsewhere, a battle between engineering workers and employers was brewing in Coventry, the first national miners’ strike since 1926 seemed likely, and the trade unions were gearing up their opposition to the provisions of the Industrial Relations Act. I had a great deal to learn, and it had to be learned ‘on the job’. 7 Days gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the people engaged in these struggles – shipbuilders on the Clyde, engineering workers in Coventry, manufacturing workers in Kirby, miners in Kent – even if I may not have known how best to learn from them and remedy my ignorance.
In January 1972, under the headline “A Great Year for The Thirties”, I summed up 1971 as a “year of revivals”: “The traditions that hang like a fog around the British labour movement had their moment in a nostalgic resurrection of the Thirties”, I wrote. While it was true that some trade union and Labour leaders, as well as many on the far Left, frequently evoked the past when describing Conservative policies – referring to a “class struggle” being “resurrected” by the Tories, for example – both headline and article failed to do justice to the reality of the struggles I reported on. Moreover, they did not accurately represent what I myself had found and written about, which could not be reduced to this summary judgement.
‘A Great Year for The Thirties’, 5 January 1972. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
In my brief experience as a journalist, in the rapid background research I had to undertake and in meetings with those directly involved, I inevitably had to get to grips with the always specific features of the different struggles I had to describe and the ways in which the past was present and active within them. Behind the grand historical references, the images and narratives evoking a deep continuity between past and present struggles, I quickly encountered a more messy history present in the form of agreements struck in the past, court judgements, laws, constitutions and rule books, traditional forms of working practices, divisions between different groups of workers, and so on, which shaped the various struggles and which I had to try to understand.
My article alluded to the familiar Marxist trope of experiencing the present through models, characters and images borrowed from the past: the famous quotation from the opening lines of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. But I was, of course, oblivious to the fact that my criticism applied equally, indeed with greater justification, to myself. In an ‘Ideas’ piece, written a few weeks later, I summed up my strictures on the inevitable limits of the workers’ “economic struggle” by looking back to the Russian Revolution and invoking – resurrecting – the thoughts of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as my authority!
“Industry” was, of course, only a small part of 7 Days, and it was far from central to the concerns and interests of the paper’s contributors and readership. My impression is that we thought we were living in an exciting and optimistic historical moment in which it was not unrealistic to think of ourselves as protagonists of a process of revolutionary change. It may be that in looking for signs of the possible existence of a “revolutionary situation”, we failed to detect other powers knocking on the door.
I think it unlikely that the kind of politics 7 Days wanted to promote and represent would have survived subsequent political-economic developments – the collapse of the Soviet empire and the inexorable rise of neoliberalism in particular – but it still seems to me a great shame that the ambitious project of a commercially viable independent, radical photo-news and ‘ideas’ weekly paper did not survive longer and have a chance to develop and change.
25 November 2021
Six months that launched the Seventies
In the second part of this series, Anthony Barnett's guest post recalls his time as a member of the editorial collective of a little-known revolutionary weekly newspaper entitled '7 Days'. In 2020 the British Library acquired the papers of Anthony Barnett, best known as the founder of the campaigning organisation Charter 88 and the website openDemocracy.
Looking back half a century to 7 Days makes me realise the pain of its failure which is still buried within me - it was such a glorious achievement and had such promise. I’ve been asked to say something about how I became involved, what I saw as being at stake, the experience of producing it, and how it influenced me. To start to answer them I want to signal why it was so good and why something so good failed.
What 7 Days expressed in its range, radicalism, intense seriousness and dramatic layouts was the radical spirit and global intelligence of the young English left of ‘the Sixties’. It was the anti-Vietnam war movement turned into stunning photojournalism. It was the best revolutionary radicalism, shorn of its Trotskyism. It was a pioneering engagement with feminism and anti-racism. It was fresh and fearless.
The attack on Miss World. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
One person orchestrated the outcome across the pages of 7 Days, edited the layouts and presentation: Alexander Cockburn. I dislike the term ‘flair’, as I associate it with superficiality. But Alex’s flair was breath-taking in its audacity. Thanks to him, 7 Days focussed a tabloid energy on the British class system and its snobbery as well as world capitalism and its proto-fascism.
I’ll take a closer look at the first issue to show its range which was crucial to the paper’s qualities, building on Madeleine Davis’s analysis in her opening post. Page 2 reports the trial of the Mangrove 9 (recently brought back to life by Steve McQueen). The portraits of all nine were to fill a page when the historic 55 day trial ended. Rage against racism, in the UK and around the world, was a 7 Days theme from the start.
The Mangrove Nine. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Page 3 has reports on the European “Common Market”, the role of the City of London and a financial scandal in Italy. They initiated coverage of capitalism rather than ‘the economy (at the back, launching a weekly essay on concepts, Gareth Stedman Jones asks ‘What is Capitalism?’).
Two photo-stories give the paper its hard-hitting edge. One exposed a reunion of ex-SS Nazis in Bavaria and got the cover splash. The second is a dramatic account of how a British army unit provoked a riot in Northern Ireland. It is by the photographer, Tom Picton, who became a regular. It proved a harbinger of Bloody Sunday, which 7 Days covered like no other mainland paper.
Bloody Sunday. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
A striking report on a ‘Day at the Dogs’ by Peter Fuller, who was the indefatigable home affairs editor, launched coverage of sport with a strong working-class angle.
7 Days pioneered discussion of mental illness as a form of control and repression. In her cool, invaluable overview in the digitised archive, Rosalind Delmar, the paper’s production manager, captures the radical imperative to break the silence about this issue. A story on ‘Madness in Two Minds’ and one on ‘Inside Britain’s Psychiatric Prisons’ launched the coverage along with a provocation (by one of the editorial collective, John Hoyland under a pseudonym) about whether parents should make love in the presence of young children (answer, not if they sit on top of you).
The Labour Party features in a short article by Tom Nairn, ‘Has the Labour Party any new ideas?’ Tony Benn had published a Fabian Pamphlet that called on Labour to adopt workers control of production, referendums (there had yet to be one in the UK), direct action against the media and democratic education to replace elite rule. Nairn says it is absurd to think Labour could just adopt such a “staggering” vision. He points out that in a subsequent Fabian Tract, Tony Crosland’s responded to Benn with a call for what Nairn saw as right wing-populism - a warning of what was to come. Nairn’s conclusion: “totally new” thinking would have to come from outside Labour. No one thought its source would be a Conservative of whom we had barely heard, Margaret Thatcher.
Turn the page and the nature of pop music and the role of musical charts is looked at by Dave Laing, while Stuart Hood (once the BBC Director of Programmes) writes on TV as an industry. Next there is Peter Wollen on the “Real, Surreal and Mundane”. In part he discusses how we mostly see paintings reproduced in a small format in books and this changes their nature. Opposite, a review of the ‘Advertisement of the Week’ is by John Mathews. Across all such coverage the new weekly focussed on the production of what is experienced and refused to take the output of capitalist society at face value.
In addition, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith contributed a superb review of Bertolucci’s The Conformist. He sets out how it resolved failures in his earlier films and shows how a bourgeois husband “is more fascist by his emptiness than anyone who is fascist by conviction”.
If this wasn’t enough, a four-page feature follows on gambling, its nature, scale and addictiveness and the role of the state by Jon Halliday, the brother of Fred Halliday, who was in charge of 7 Days' ‘Foreign News’, and Peter Fuller.
The British Army at work. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Later, Fred Halliday was to write a multi-page spread on why Nixon was going to China - one of the world-turning events that coincided with the six-month life of 7 Days. These included Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, when the paper ran the photographs others would not; the first miners’ strike that humiliated the Heath government; the trial of the Mangrove nine; the women’s liberation attack on the Miss World contest at the Albert Hall; the liberation of Bangladesh, and the huge, penultimate Vietnamese attack on the American regime in the South. It was the six months that launched the Seventies.
7 Days could have been an English language version of Libération, launched just over 18 months later in July 1973, or the Tageszeitung launched in 1978 - both also started with egalitarian editorial collectives – and survived, even if, like them, it would have undergone the traumas of a triumphant market fundamentalism. A print publication needs in some way to be a ‘home’ for a core readership. 7 Days never had the time to build one. But the potential readership was there, later expressed by Rock against Racism and, in the early Eighties, with Ken Livingston’s inventive and effective Greater London Council (1981-86).
7 Days closed because it had no serious start-up funding. It was without capital in a capitalist world and lacked any core backers. But this itself needs explanation. I was the prime mover and fund-raiser, using a dummy we’d created as well as a business case. At the heart of it, all of us were attempting to by-pass the sectarian divisions of the English far-left by seeking to demonstrate what could be done by looking outwards. But this also meant there was no initial network of organised support in a highly sectarian situation.
The Miners’ Strike. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
Specifically, it was an effort to recover from the wounding split in the Black Dwarf . 7 Days was what the Black Dwarf should have become. This sounds like an odd thing to say, I know! Black Dwarf was a revolutionary paper conjured into existence by the theatrical agent Clive Goodwin and the poet Christopher Logue and others, edited initially (after a false start) by Tariq Ali. I joined the Dwarf later. Among its other editors and contributors who were to work full-time on 7 Days were Fred Halliday (who delighted in the Dwarf’s memorable front page banner: “We shall fight, we shall win, Paris, London, Rome, Berlin”), Peter Fuller, who wrote pseudonymously the Dwarf’s ‘City’ column and John Hoyland.
Tariq Ali became a committed Trotskyist and decided to help create the International Marxist Group (IMG), as a British branch of the Fourth International. Backed by like-minded Black Dwarfers (none of whom were writers), he urged Goodwin to make it the paper of the IMG and Goodwin refused. Ali had recruited a wealthy supporter and they split off to launch the Red Mole. I took over editing the Black Dwarf but Goodwin had no funds and it died.
As it did so, some of us determined to start a new paper out of the ashes of the debacle, convinced that a committed non-sectarian paper of the left was needed. An example of the linkage: a key contributor to 7 Days was the great critic Peter Wollen, who wrote the Xmas cover story ‘Was Christ a Collaborator?’ I asked him why he wanted to become involved with us and not Red Mole. He said that it was when he saw one of the later Black Dwarf’s that I edited, where I’d put FOOTBALL FOOTBALL on the cover. Here is a characteristic picture from the time, with Margarita Jiménez.
Margarita Jiménez. Copyright © 1970 Howard Naish.
7 Days became a message in a bottle. One that recorded what the left’s culture and spirit should have been like. I’m very happy that Madeleine Davis’s eagle eye spotted the bottle and has opened it up half a century later.
Looking back I realise that for me personally it was a moment of uninhibited revolutionary expression. Much later I enjoyed bringing some radical energy into constitutional reform with Charter 88 – but it was consciously preconditional: a call to democratise the state sufficiently to make socialist strategy a credible option. Twelve years after that, the aim of openDemocracy was to create a space to prevent suffocation by Blairite globalisation. But 7 Days was an uninhibited ‘weapon’ of revolutionary advocacy, advance and learning, or so we thought!
How did it influence me? I felt vindicated as well as defeated. It meant my experience of that period was different from many of those who joined organisations like the IMG, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), or even became Bennites. It was defeated but it deserved to have survived. I was greatly helped overcome the loss by gaining the friendship and mentorship of John Berger, whom we’d asked to become a ‘Trustee’ of 7 Days. He was a wonderful example of how to retain voice and principle even when times are dire.
I’d like to add one codicil. We were not helped by the state of England. In his article, Nairn quotes Tony Crosland, once the most interesting of Labour intellectuals. Now he denounced ‘participation’ and ‘liberation’. The British people, Crosland claimed, “prefer to lead a full family life and cultivate their gardens. And a good thing too … we do not want a busy bustling society in which everyone is politically active and fussing around in an interfering or responsible manner”. This still shocks. It expressed the deep conservatism of the political class and the revulsion shared by the Labour leadership of democracy itself. Unfortunately, at the time, far too many voters agreed. They had still to vomit up the loathsome elixir of fatalism, deference and belief in British superiority and this effected everyone. This helps explain why 7 Days was also like an oasis in a desert.
The spirit of 7 Days in this stunning layout. Credit: CC BY-NC 4.0 by 7 Days, Image courtesy of Amiel Melburn Trust Archive.
17 November 2021
Football fanzines from print to the digital age: call for academic partners
The British Library is pleased to invite academics at UK universities and Higher Education Institutions to collaborate with us on two jointly-supervised doctoral research projects. One research topic is entitled Football fanzines and fan communities in the digital age, and the other is Investigating the origins and development of the Cotton collection. You can read more about them on the Library's website.
Both studentships will be funded for up to four years through the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships scheme. The research projects draw on the Library's collections, expertise and resources, and are aligned with our vision statement, programmes and purpose as a national library. Prospective HEI partners are invited in an open competition to submit proposals to bring their own expertise and perspective to our research themes.
We would welcome applications from academics of postgraduate status currently employed at UK universities/Higher Education Institutions, who would be interested in joint supervision of a collaborative doctoral project that draws on the Library’s extensive holdings of printed football fanzines and fanzine websites in the UK Web Archive. The project would begin in October 2022.
Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships at the British Library
The Library’s curators can offer guidance on how to locate and access items in its printed collections and on ways to undertake research using the web archive. We would be keen to collaborate with academics with experience of researching fanzines and/or football fandom and with research interests in digital communications and fan websites. This project will also offer significant opportunities for wider outreach and engagement, ranging from blogposts for more general audiences and content creation on the Library’s website, to the creation and development of collections in the web archive of fanzine and fan websites.
Copies of the Gillingham fanzine Brian Moore’s Head and Birmingham City fanzine The Heathen.
The main purpose of the research will be to investigate the way football fanzines and fan websites communicate with their readers, and how they contribute to building fan communities and giving voice to the concerns of fans, in a forum separate from, and often critical of, clubs and organisational structures.
The Library holds an impressive, but under-exploited, collection of the football fanzines that emerged as an offshoot of punk culture, and it continues to build on those collections. While the late 1980s represent a high point when many new fanzines were established, their transition into the era of digital publishing has been uneven. Some print editions have been replaced by websites and e-zines with fan input, others use their online communities to add to the content of the print edition and extend its reach.
The final print issue of long-running fanzine OLAS / Over Land and Sea as West Ham moved from the Boleyn Ground at Upton Park.
This doctoral project will investigate the extent and impact of digital publishing for football fanzines and consider how fanzines and fan forums can be archived, preserved and made accessible where they transition from print to digital formats or exist in dual formats.
April 2013 capture of Beesotted, a Brentford fan’s network in the UK Web Archive.
As well as extensive collections of printed football fanzines received through legal deposit from the 1970s onwards, the Library holds a wide range of football-related websites collected from 2005 onwards (with a majority 2013-present). Much of the existing research on football fanzines pre-dates the move towards digital publishing, although there has been some more recent research on fan forums linked to fanzines.
This project offers an opportunity for new research that encompasses both print and digital materials, but it does not seek to prescribe a particular set of research questions, whether approached thematically or in relation to a single club or group of clubs. Depending on the interests of the academic partner, it would be possible to look at the portrayal of gender and the representation of women both in the game and fan communities, or to consider the representation of sexual identity through fanzines from a critical perspective, both to highlight progressive elements and to understand the challenges to change within the game.
There is scope too to examine racism in football and efforts to challenge and stand against racism within fanzine communities. It is possible that the extension of online fan forums has opened up fanzine websites to the expression of racial hatred or nativism similar to that found on social media more widely, in a way that runs counter to the fanzines’ origins in punk and alternative culture. It would be possible to pose questions about editorial control and codes of conduct within fan forums and fanzine websites.
The research could also investigate the way changes in football ownership and ticket pricing have impacted on the social class background and economic status of matchday fans. It may further explore the degree to which fanzine websites and online forums have extended the reach of fanzines and enabled those who follow a team but are unable to attend matches to be part of an online fan community.
March 2019 capture of Merthyr Town fanzine Dial M for Merthyrin the UK Web Archive.
More information on the call for academic partners can be found on the Library's website.
Completed application forms and brief CVs must be submitted to [email protected] by 5pm on Friday, 10 December 2021. Late applications cannot be accepted.
Before submitting your application, please ensure you have read the Information for HEI Applicants and are aware of the specific characteristics of the AHRC CDP scheme, the selection criteria and the envisaged timetable.
Contested Ground fanzine.
Social Science blog recent posts
- Pride beyond June: readings in LGBT+ history, culture and theory
- D-Day: from memory to commemoration
- Finding Women's Studies on the shelves: an international turn
- 7 Days, Culture and the Arts
- Designing 7 Days
- ‘You Cannae Eat Ships’: 7 Days and industrial news.
- Six months that launched the Seventies
- Football fanzines from print to the digital age: call for academic partners
- Introducing '7 Days': a revolutionary weekly newspaper in the Anthony Barnett archive
- Important information for email subscribers
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