Gordon Carr
Christie Books, 2003
p/b, £34 (inc. p and p) from www.Christiebooks.com
This is a reprint of Carr’s 1975 book on the Angry Brigade (AB), done in an A4 format paperback, to which Stuart Christie has added dozens of photographs of the participants, the scenes of the various bombings, magazine covers and other graphic illustrations to make an illustrated history. There are also comments from a Special Branch detective involved in the case, and two of the AB defendants, John Barker, who was found guilty, and Christie who was acquitted.
Since Christie has reprinted Carr’s book, rather than write his own, I assume this means that that the version Carr presented in 1975 is accurate. As for the story itself, knowing little about the AB, I found it very interesting and nostalgic to be taken back to the years of Edward Heath as seen through the eyes of the non-aligned radical left of 1971; though at this distance those perceptions seem very odd indeed. Carr quotes a letter from one of the AB defendants:
‘Killing Mr Heath, Mr Maudling and Mr Powell would not be murder, the removal of tyrants such as these can only further the cause of humanity.’
Or take this from AB’s Communiqué No 7:
‘The Angry Brigade became a reality when we knew that every moment of badly paid boredom in a production line was a violent crime.’
Whatever you think of Heath and co., there is no rational universe in which they could be described as tyrants or badly paid, boring jobs could be ‘a violent crime’.
I wouldn’t much like to have to reexamine my behaviour and thinking in the early 1970s and neither does John Barker. In his review of an earlier book by ‘Tom Vague’ on the AB which is reprinted here, he is clearly having trouble dealing with his and the AB’s actions. I was having the same trouble until I read his comment about them:
‘….we were libertarian communists (sic) believing in the mass movement and for another we were NOT THAT SERIOUS. Put baldly like this it sounds especially arrogant, Yeah man, we never took it seriously anyway: what I mean is that like many young people then and now we smoked a lot of dope and spent a lot of time having a good time. We had none of the vanguardist assumptions of the Red Army Faction in Germany…..’ (emphasis and punctuation in the original).
At this point the penny dropped. The AB were stoned; and there’s nothing like being stoned a lot to distort the perception of reality. At Keele University the year before, also fuelled by dope (and a lot of cheap LSD), a group of students burned down the university’s administration building and misdirected the police inquiry which followed.
Whatever the AB was it wasn’t the ‘urban guerilla group’ of Carr’s 1975 subtitle. Carr and Barker tell us that the AB were influenced by the Situationists: the bombings they did were events, spectaculars, rather than warfare. In his comments on the AB made in 2002, and reprinted here, Special Branch officer Roy Cremer implies that the series of little AB bombings hadn’t been taken terribly seriously had been interpreted by the state as spectaculars, in effect until the AB blew-in the front door of Cabinet Minister Robert Carr’s house. The state then did its homework and busted the group and planted a load of weapons to make the case seem stronger. Barker tells us he was a guilty man framed.
Did the AB have any effect? Not really: the arrival of the IRA with real bombs, not spectaculars, shunted the AB off into a historical siding. Barker and Christie do their best to find something of value in their actions but I don’t see any.