My Soho period was the fifteen years from 1949 to 1964, with the odd absence for army service The people I knew as names and characters rarely frequented the Colony.   Dylan Thomas was more often found in the Mandrake than the Colony, Ironfoot Jack and Harry Diamond more often in the French Café than The French pub.  Diz Disley played everywhere in those years. Later he was to make Stephane Grappelly famous again.Soho’s brief reign as a springboard of popular music owed more to his omnipresent guitar than it did to later personalities.

 Soho had its outposts too. The Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue where John Rety and Harold Jackson put together the first underground paper Intimate Review, with advice from Bill Hopkins of the New York Times.  The Yellow Door just along from the Old Vic where Mike Pratt, and Lionel Bart presided over as extraordinary a bunch of impecunious artists actors and musicians as anything out of Henry Miller. And, my place 50 Pearman Street, which took the overflow from the Door and became a crashpad for the late Davey Graham, Jack and June Elliott, Derroll Adams, Jody Gibson, and Redd Sullivan. 

And never to be forgotten, just across Charing Cross Road from Soho proper, The Cottage Club home to many of the jazzers of the New Orleans Revival, and the swing musicians displaced by bebop, where you could drink from three in the afternoon‘til midnight.  (A big deal then).  The Cottage Club,  run by Gerry and Al,  never seems to be mentioned in stuff about Soho yet at this period it was central to many of our lives. 

It is this Soho that affected the lives of so many artists, musicians, and writers who did not centre their lives round Jeffrey Barnard and his cronies.

 Fifty years ago I put together some thoughts on the libertarian strands I had found, or thought I had found, in science fiction.  It was, admittedly, a jejeune effort. Overwritten, even purple in some places, it tended to mistake fashionable trends for serious theories and showed clearly that I lacked the conceptual apparatus for what I was trying to say.  However as I was doing O levels at the time its faults were probably forgiven by most.  The only exception I came across was a group of militant feminists who dismissed all science fiction as “boys stuff”, without apparently having read the material I was citing or actually coming to grips with the arguments I was making.  One wonders what this group would have made of Judith Merril or the admirable Ursula LeGuin.  Science fiction not being the respectable genre it has since become these attacks by people who did not know what they were talking about were commonplace at the time and most people concerned with the field ignored them.

The piece had been published in Colin Ward’s monthly review Anarchy, was referenced here and there in the political and academic press, and I thought properly forgotten.  The advent of the net changed that and in recent years various people have seen fit to publish it, overly praise it, attack it and abuse me for it.  In fact a controversy has been raging about my defenceless head without this particular blog virgin being aware of it.

Initially I didn’t mind, I was even mildly gratified, disconcerting though it was to be confronted by my youthful work nearly fifty years later.  Nevertheless one recurring canard really got up my nose.

It seems to have originated with a publication called Black Flag and the self publicising Stuart Christie.  I was press officer for Stuart Christie’s defence committee in 1963/64 when he was accused of carrying explosives into Spain  to blow up General Franco.  A pacifist myself I found the idea of a longhaired youth in a kilt,hitching along the Route Nationale with a haversack full of explosives, so bizarre that I organised my campaign on the basis of innocence. I obtained a generally sympathetic coverage and Christie received a prison sentence instead of the expected execution.  but Stuart , who at the time was apparently seeking martyrdom,  never forgave me, and various attacks appeared in Black Flag.  All of these were badly informed and several were quintessential codswallop but the winner was a piece attributed to  the now famous fantasy writer Michael Moorcock.

As quoted in Black Flag he stated that I had claimed the egregious Robert Heinlein for the anarchist tendency in science fiction.    This was nonsense on stilts.  My judgment was the reverse.  I had actually written “Robert Heinlein would appear to be that rare thing a fascist science fiction writer”. This comment was based on limited reading and may be questioned but it is what I said .  Moorcock could have checked this by going back to my original piece but seems to have relied on his memory, or perhaps on information from Christie himself, both dubious methods of establishing the truth about anything.

I would appreciate Mr Moorcock, or his swarming minions, removing this canard from the net and an apology for the error would not be unacceptable.