What was Hornsey 1968 all about? ­ The Hornsey Archipelago
Brian Marsh

116 paragraphs in three parts: preface, chronology, an oral history.

Preface

1 Writing a personal interpretation of history is a risky
business. If it is too personal it becomes a vanity publication
which no-one will read except the author and his best friend.
If it is too broad it will just conform to the averaged out
history of the period with all the blood and gore removed and
all the creases ironed out, safe but dangerously close to
rewriting history with another agenda. Slavery? The
holocaust? Somewhere between the two an editor would
strike a balance. Your history is not my history and vice
versa.

2 But I was there at Hornsey in 1968 and from my vantage point
it was very important to those of us who were. What each
person contributed or extracted and what each person
received is certainly not the same. Some simply used the
structure of the union movement to seek power. Plain selfish
greed for 'party' political power. Copy-cats of capitalism
where power is measured in profit. Others used their
established positions of power to play history games, yet they
were an inextricable part of the system and if they couldn't
make the institution change then they inevitably perpetuated
it and settled in to become just another part of the problem. I
was just interested in design as a means of affecting
change. While a student I was merely a transient player in the
statistics of the time as far as they were concerned.

3 To write about an era, even a short period of three or four years
in the 1960's, it is necessary to set down the hazy memories
in the context of events and values current at the time
and to frame the personal experiences in the general social
landscape. To do this I have, elsewhere, noted the major
events from 1960-1981. On another occasion I started even
as far back as 1846. Not quite living memory, but just about
that of my great-grandparents' handed down family
memories ­ before that it's pretty much all irrelevant since
history is continually rewritten to each writer's own agenda.
The crusades? Don't worry, here I start the chronology
around 1964 only because it is the Summer during which I
left home in Bath, Somerset, and started at Portsmouth
College of Art in Hampshire. I was seventeen. With two Alevel
GCEs rushed through in lower sixth I applied for art
college. I don't detail the pre-diploma course at Portsmouth
as it has little to do with events at Hornsey, except getting
me on the course there, and is an episode that can better be
dealt with on its own merits at another time, a separate
chapter of my life. Some of the memories I write about refer
back and forth from Hornsey to Portsmouth, even Paris, and
Sweden and Finland. It is the culmination of events during the
Summer of 1968 when Hornsey College of Art was involved in
a Sit-In that has been the catalyst for these thoughts. Unlike
a politician, a creative person usually doesn't have time or
interest to keep a diary. All that I kept was a few posters
which have now been deposited in relevant archives.
(Middlesex University, and Paris) The political animal seems
to document their every sordid manoeuvre in climbing the
greasy pole.

4 Perhaps historians have to do more than trawl incomplete
archives and to ask the right questions as an investigative
journalist would of witnesses. As detectives and
criminologists say; 'follow the money'. Hindsight and
original insight have different weight. If I go off on tangents
from time to time then that is just the way memories work,
referencing context from all directions, a matrix of influences
and experiences each re-evaluated continually in a dynamic
process of thinking; not imagining, not inventing, not reinventing.
The real stuff of oral history. No-one will write it
as accurately for you posthumously!

The context of the times
Date: News headlines: Comment:

May 18, 1964 Mayhem at Margate as Mods and Rockers battle on beaches
Maybe I was more like a Mod without a scooter
or the dapper threads.
June 8, 1964 London: Christine Keeler is released from prison.
This seemed all about spies, but she posed
modestly naked in a photo, taken by Lewis
Morley, with her seated on a chair, a copy of
Arne Jacobsen's. Which was more influential,
the woman or the chair!
August 2, 1964 UK: Police are flown to Hastings to break up clashes between
Mods and Rockers.
August 7, 1964 US steps up action against Vietnam.
The unraveling of French Indo-China from
1954 onwards was about as catastrophic as the
1956 Suez Crisis but on a much more massive scale.
I saw the Suez Crisis from Malta where we were
escorted to school on coaches with the risk of
being fire bombed. My father saw it aboard ship
from Port Said, Egypt.
The Hungarians were also uprising against
Soviet rule in 1956.
September 4, 1964 UK: Opening of the Forth Road Bridge, Europe's longest bridge.
I had spent an earlier summer holiday at North
Queensferry watching the winding of the
suspension cables. My aunt and uncle had
retired there from twenty-five years in the
education service in Sierra Leone.
November 25, 1964 London: Eleven nations loan Britain £1,080 million to stem the
slide in sterling's value.

April 2, 1965 Paris: Wilson and de Gaulle meet for talks on Vietnam.
(Covert US funding had empowered Vietnamese
who would later turn on the hand that fed them
and side with the communists.)
April 18, 1965 UK: Police are on the alert as Mods and Rockers converge on
seaside resorts; 56 arrested in Brighton.
April 27, 1965 European protest at Vietnam grows.
May 4, 1965 France: Common Market finance ministers endorse Britain's
application to the IMF for a £500 million loan.
June 3, 1965 First US astronaut takes a walk in space.
The Space Race was started when the "beepbeep"
signal from Russia's Sputnik satellite in
1957 prompted the Americans to accelerate
their rocketry under Wernher von Braun's
direction. President Kennedy spoke of America
landing a man on the moon within ten years.
Russia chose to put their efforts into an Earth
orbiting space station and satellites to other planets.
June 29, 1965 US troops are sent into battle in Vietnam.
July 27, 1965 Edward Heath is elected as Tory Leader.
July 28, 1965 Another 50,000 US troops to Vietnam.
October 4, 1965 Havana: Castro reveals that Che Guevara has left Cuba "to
fight imperialism abroad."
In October 1962 my father had been on thirtyminutes
standby to get to Portsmouth naval
dockyard and raise steam for a Royal Navy force
to head for Cuba to assist the US in containing
Kruschev's missiles heading for Castro's Cuba.
October 6, 1965 London: Heath says he will take Britain into the EEC if he is elected.
October 7, 1965 Tallest building in Britain is opened, 620-foot Post Office Tower.
The countryside was gradually being covered
with a network of transmitters for relaying
communications about the country.
October 14, 1965 London: Bertrand Russell tears up his Labour Party card in
protest at British support for the US in Vietnam.
December, 1965 Quote of the year: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Mao Tse-tung, from "Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung", 1965.
It was hard to imagine the monstrosity of the
campaigns set in train by his thoughts and The
Little Red Book soon appeared in translation.
It was uncomfortable watching arm chair
communists in Finland exchanging Mao's sound
bites while tens of millions of peasants starved
to death in China.
The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, translated in
several volumes, are virtually incomprehensible.
In contrast the Confucian Analects are easily
accessible as are, to a lesser degree, the
writings of the Legalist School and the Taoists.

February 9, 1966 London: The government announces plans for a proto-type
fast-breeder reactor at Dounreay in Scotland.
No strategy for dealing with nuclear waste
appears to have been formulated. But the genie
is out of the lamp. Or is it prettier to say that
Pandora has opened the box? Certainly the
white marble sculpture of a nubile Pandora by
Harry Bates at Tate Britain is more attractive.
Science runs ahead of its morals. Perhaps
Professor Lynda Nead would agree?
April 5, 1966 UK: Shell says a recent oil find off Great Yarmouth is of
"considerable importance."
The promises of self-sufficiency proved to last
hardly forty years. Time to re-open the coal
seams and build clean, modern coal-fired
power stations?
April 8, 1966 Vietnam: The US begins to evacuate Americans from Da Nang
April 8, 1966 UK: Figures show that the number of illegitimate births in
England and Wales has nearly doubled in the last ten years.
The beginning of the end for the family and the
start of feral childhood and life on the street in gangs?
April 8, 1966 Brezhnev becomes top Soviet leader.
April 19, 1966 Australian troops fly into Vietnam.
June 1, 1966 UK: Philips Petroleum is reported to have made the richest
North Sea gas strike yet.
June 1, 1966 Folk's a'changing: Dylan goes electric (Royal Albert Hall)
His 1963 song "The Times They Are A Changin'"
becomes an anthem.
We should have adopted it during the Sit-In
instead of whimpering echoes from the valleys
of the Internationale!
June 28, 1966 London: Wilson names communists who, he claims, are using
the seamen's strike to gain power in the National Union of Seamen.
This is the standard procedure. What was the
other NUS, the National Union of Students
doing? And LSE? Was funding from Moscow?
Check the records at Kew in 2038.
June 30, 1966 US bombs hit Hanoi for the first time.
July 3, 1966 London: 31 people are arrested during Anti-Vietnam war
protests in Grosvenor Square.
These named participants took part in the protests (not the
31 arrested): Vanessa Redgrave, Joao Monjardino, Gordon
Coxon, John Mosley, Donald Fraser, Phil Evans, Hattie,
Bronwen Davies, Mike Davis ­ Hornsey student and Sue,
Mick Jagger, Richard Folley, Jim Tomlinson, Annabelle Harle,
Geoff Wolfe, Chris Morris, Mick Farren, Tariq Ali to name but
a few who were in the square.
July 21, 1966 Welsh Nationalist MP takes seat in House for first time.
August 13, 1966 Mao proclaims a Cultural Revolution.
Millions of Chinese suffered humiliation and
death at the hands of the Red Guards.
September 15, 1966 UK: The Queen Mother launches Britain's first nuclear
submarine, HMS Resolution, at Barrow.
There were only to be three, armed with
American Cruise missiles. A phenomenally
expensive boat often in dock for a refit. Parts
supplied at massively inflated prices.
October 21, 1966 UK: Over 130 people, mainly children, are buried by a coal slag
heap at Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil.
The rescue effort was shown on television and was very traumatic.
Some of my ancestors in Scotland had been coal
miners in the 1860's when it was close to serfdom, in Carriden.
November 23, 1966 UK: BP says it has struck the best gas-production areas yet in
the North Sea, 40 miles east of the Humber.
November 25, 1966 Washington: FBI chief J Edgar Hoover says all evidence
suggests that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy.
Conspiracy theories abounded.
November 30, 1966 London: Wilson urges building up the European economy to
avoid US economic denomination.
December, 1966 Arts: something strange is happening, but is it really art?
Happenings in New York staged by Robert Rauschenburg.
John Cage, EAT ­ Experiments in Art and Technology, using
video tape, lasers and computer programs.
At Portsmouth in 1964 we were encouraged to
paint up sheets of plain colours on sugar paper
and collage and tear them, like bill-posters
stripping walls to replace torn posters.
Something of an anti-Albers influence
borrowed from Rauschenburg.

January 11, 1967 "Cathy Come Home" sparks housing row.
Some years later I lived in another part of
Clapham in South London not so far from where
the film had been set.
January 31, 1967 London: A porter dies of a heart attack as students break into
a meeting calling for Rhodesian Walter Adams to resign as
head of the London School of Economics.
Rhodesia had made a unilateral declaration of
independence ­ UDI ­ on 11 November 1965.
Adams apparently promulgated the Rhodesian
government's apartheid policy.
March 13, 1967 London: LSE students stage an all-night sit-in to protest at the
suspension of two students (David Adelstein, Marshall Bloom.)
Clearly this is the precedent for the format of
the Hornsey College of Art sit-in of 1968.
Marshall Bloom; LSE graduate student and
President of Student Union. In 1967 he moved
to the USA, Washington and then New York and
in 1968 on to a farm in Montague,
Massachusetts. He committed suicide on 1 November 1969.
March 19, 1967 Hunger strikers at LSE call off their fast but sit-in goes on
We didn't need to have a hunger strike at
Hornsey, we were thin and starving always!
May 10, 1967 Rolling Stones in court on drugs charges.
June 1, 1967 UK: The Beatles' LP "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club
Band" is released.
A landmark in graphics by Peter Blake.
July 9, 1967 Hong Kong: Four die in clashes between police and Communist rioters.
July 14, 1967 Abortions are to be legal in Britain.
July 15, 1967 Canada: De Gaulle arrives in Quebec.
Makes a speech proclaiming "Quebec Libre!"
July 16, 1967 London: 5,000 attend a "Legalise Pot 1967" rally in Hyde Park.
July 18, 1967 Britain withdraws from East of Suez (by mid-1970's.)
July 23, 1967 British cyclist dies on Tour de France (Tommy Simpson.)
July 27, 1967 London: The Sexual Offences Bill becomes law.
October 9, 1967 Argentine- born "Che" Guevara dies (b.14/6/28.)
November 19, 1967 The pound is devalued (14.3% - $2.80 to $2.40.)
November 27, 1967 Paris: De Gaulle vetoes British entry into the Common Market.
December 1967 Michaelangelo Antonioni's film "Blow Up" huge success.
A film that made the life of a photographer look very attractive.

March 8, 1968 Poland: Police clash with students demonstrating for greater freedom.
Against Soviet government and repression.
March 16, 1968 Washington: Johnson decides to send between 35,000 and
50,000 more troops to Vietnam.
March 17, 1968 Violent anti-Vietnam war demo in London.
April 12, 1968 West Germany: Thousands of students riot following
attempted killing of student leader Rudi Dutschke.
He came with his family and studied at
Cambridge but later Ted Heath expelled him as
an undesirable alien. He lived in Aarhus, Denmark.
April 26, 1968 London: Police seize LSD worth £1.5 million in Britain's biggest drug haul.
May 5, 1968 Paris: 500 are arrested and the Sorbonne closed as French students riot.
Not the catalyst for the Hornsey Sit-In.
May 7, 1968 Paris: Rioting students battle against police.
May 21, 1968 France: Workers back students with snap strikes.
May 22, 1968 Paris: Premier Georges Pompidou survives a vote of censure by 11 votes.
May 24, 1968 Lyons: The student unrest claims its first victim when a policeman is killed by a lorry.
May 30, 1968 Paris: De Gaulle strikes back.
May 30, 1968 London: Students "Sit-In" at Hornsey college (28 May.)
Political power grew out of the barrel of a
single microphone. Control of the news media
did not necessarily present either a democratic
voice or the truth.
May 1968 How the "month of the barricade" shook France.
June 3, 1968 New York: Artist Andy Warhol is shot and seriously hurt by
Valerie Solanis, an actress in one of his films.
Since 1964 I was interested in his Brillo
artworks when Portsmouth College of Art sent
us out to Woolworths to sketch. I sketched a
Brillo logo in red and blue by pure coincidence.
In 1998 an early self portrait by Andy Warhol
was on temporary show at Tate Britain and I
produced a replica and a portrait of my daughter.
June 5, 1968 Los Angeles: Robert Kennedy is shot in the head at rally.
June 11, 1968 London: French student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit arrives for a short visit.
June 12, 1968 Paris: De Gaulle bans open-air demonstrations.
October 18, 1968 UK: John Lennon and his girlfriend Yoko Ono are arrested on drugs charges.
December 16, 1968 Bristol: An 11-day sit-in at Bristol University ends.

An oral history

From Hornsey Archipelago to Sit-In Diaspora!

5 It was clear, in 1965 within just one full week of attending Bowes
Road, the Graphics Department of Hornsey College of Art,
that the facilities and staff were not going to satisfy the
ambitions of the students from their diverse backgrounds. I
saw them as, first, those who had already attended Hornsey
for Pre-Diploma or Foundation Studies, whatever the course
was called, and those who came from elsewhere. Locals
already knew what the facilities were while we from elsewhere
had been conned by the glossy prospectus. All the
prospectuses were full of stylish photographs, vacuous
prose and undeliverable promises whether in
Ravensbourne, Central, Chelsea, or Hornsey.

6 I had studied for one year at Portsmouth College of Art, rather
than Bristol. Portsmouth was in a brand new, custom built
facility with a few odd workshops down in an interesting part
of the old harbour area by the civilian dockyards; coal,
chains, anchors, ships, deep anchorage sea water.

7 By contrast Hornsey had a ramshackle number of insignificant
second hand premises in the northern suburbs of London
which would do justice to the Gulag Archipelago and was run
with a parallel mentality. If the doodle-bugs had not fallen
randomly in 1944 they might have missed the Rose Window
behind the organ at Alexandra Palace and blitzed Crouch End
Hill instead; and history, including our Art History, would
have been something else! Perhaps in German rather than
just English with a German accent! (My grandmother had a
low German accent!)

8 I don't care to remember much about the whole student
experience except I had to make a very quick decision on my
own whether to stay on the course. My father had delivered
me by car to my digs and handed me a £10 note until my
grant came through, the first and only tenner as it turned
out. I had what was called a major award that was paid
promptly by Bath City Council though I had come via the Pre-
Diploma at Portsmouth College of Art.

9 What was that about means testing and parental contributions?
Oh yeah! My brother was repeating a year at university and
my sister was studying also, then at some stage my father
was required to be at both Portsmouth and Chatham in naval
dockyards on business. With two home addresses, one
owned, the other rented, and on one income there was no
spare money about. And when a Danish seaman stole the VW
Beetle off the front drive and left it hot-wired in Great
Yarmouth there was even a while when another old banger of
a car added to the expenses. Bent Christiansen was on his
way home to Esbjerg and had stolen the car but my father
had to take a train all the way there when the police phoned
asking him to come and collect it to drive it back. Thanks
Bent, very Christian of you, son.

10 The amount of money in a major award was absolutely the
minimum upon which a human being could survive in
London, about £325 a year ­ not even a pound a day, or just
half the national average wage. Hence the Gulag reference,
slave labour. I don't remember the exact amount but with
about 36 weeks of study per year, I seem to remember
having a little more than £9 a week to live on including rent,
so it was all the more important to get a really cheap rent in
London. I hadn't learnt about the ways of squatting or flatsharing,
and living in a bash on the streets was out of the
question. Sometimes I thought living in Finsbury Park in a
tent might be a solution.

11 When I got the housing list from the college I went up to London
and looked at the cheapest room on the list at £1.16s.0d per
week and took the room straight away. (Imagine, in the three
years I lived there the rent only went up once by a few pence!
Not that my grant went up at all of course, and inflation was
rampant.) After rent I was traveling by train from and to
home three times a year, eating, heating, clothing and
studying for thirty-six weeks for less than about a pound a
day. There must have been a coin-meter in my room for the
electricity. Working with less than a 60 watt bulb wasn't an
option if I was to do artwork and care for my sight. I think the
man who owned the digs was working locally on the railways.
He was wearied and bowed by his efforts. As I recall the
house in Beresford Road, Haringey, it had a front room with a
telephone where my parents could get through to me on a
Sunday, but I couldn't phone out to them. Then I lived in a
single room with a bed, a chair, a wardrobe and a chest of
drawers and a cream painted, rusty Baby-Belling electric oven
and hot plate over a small cupboard.

12 The north-facing, green-painted, wooden sash window was
jammed and couldn't be fully closed so in the winter the
water in the jug and bowl in which I washed and shaved
would freeze over with ice by the morning. That prompted
me to buy a battery powered shaver seen at the Design
Centre in Haymarket. Gifts of Old Spice or duty free Dunhill
after shave were an annual luxury. Sad isn't it!

13 The electric bar heater smelled of burning carpet dust. The
bathroom next door on the landing was shared of course. I
seem to remember another lodger was from Africa but I had
no contact with anyone except the landlord when, once a
week, I paid my rent and it was dutifully recorded in the rent
book. I can't remember if I had to pay rent through the
vacations. Maybe not. The weekly bath resulted in the grey
dust and muck on the walls progressing down towards the
bath. It was appalling. It was a race to be cleaned before the
muck reached the bath water. I managed to simultaneously
do all my weekly clothes washing in the bath in a bucket so
segregating the sudsy muck from the bath water.

14 The first year I ate tinned food as I had no refrigerator. It was a
lousy diet including baked beans in curry sauce with raisins.
The second year I moved on to food in glass jars, maybe it
was even cheaper. And the third year I tried to live on fresh
food though I think sardines on toast was about all the Baby
Belling was fit for. I had been reduced to eating windfall
Cox's apples at 3d to 6d a pound or thereabouts obtained
from a shop on the North Circular Road and I lived on sips of
neat Rose's lime juice fearing that I would succumb to scurvy
or worse. The daily diet was bolstered with West Indian fruit
loaf ­ a heavy, brown coloured bread spiced with ginger and
raisins. It was so heavy on the stomach that I could spread a
banana on it and get enough energy to go one or two days
without feeling hungry and trick myself into believing that I
was doing alright.

15 In Portsmouth where I had also spent some time in digs I was
always later for dinner than the science students and the
landlady barely cooked the breakfast bacon long enough to
turn the fat from translucent white to cooked. In fact, along
with the overcrowding, the bed bugs and the exploitation,
that place was black-listed and no students were allowed to
live there. It was taken off the approved lodging list, that's
how bad that place had been. Two fine art students had been
evicted because the landlady didn't like oil paints and
turpentine in the bedroom. They were replaced by science
students who wanted a lounge where they could have a sea-
water fish tank with shrimps and smelly things they collected
on the beach at Southsea. One of the students was a reclusive
Quaker. It's a shame, I liked the idea of a quiet gathering and
speaking out, but he wanted a bedroom on his own while the
other three of us shared. Nasty.

16 Back to Bowes Road. So there was the local clique and the rest of
us and within the rest of us the few with whom I worked and
chatted. I remember Wendy Smith from Wimbledon who
complained of being groped in the crush on the tube or the
escalators each morning. Then there was a fair-haired lad
whose name I have forgotten.

17 And there was Gudrun Finnsdottir from Iceland. She was quite
shy and had a hard time I think. But she was a lovely person
and I liked her very much. One of the visiting lecturers,
Kenneth Lamble, who worked at the Design Research Unit on
the British Rail corporate identity account invited us to make
simple decorations for the Art Directors Club in Bond Street
or whatever/wherever it was. 'Fish out of water' comes to
mind!

18 Of the locals at Bowes Road there was a girl, or woman should I
say, with long dark brown hair pulled back in a pony-tail. I'm
ashamed to say I can't remember her name but one day in a
moment somewhere combining equal portions of desperation
and optimism I flippantly asked if she would marry me. Of
course it was ignored, but then we, the outsiders, were
generally ignored. Maybe I was just being unnecessarily
provocative. But there were a few others, Fiona MacGregor,
Carole Rainbird and Piers Hartley.

19 I was invited to a party at Fiona's house over at Swiss Cottage. I
think I walked all the way from Haringey via Seven Sisters
Road to Swiss Cottage. It was a revelation. Wine, cheese,
music, friends. I had none of that on an everyday basis.

20 In the Autumn of 1969 when I was searching for work in London
I stayed overnight with some of these kind people: a hard
night in New Oxford Street on Wendy's kitchen floor, an
uncomfortable night in Chalk Farm on a damp and springless
sofa at Piers' house. In the end I got a job in West London
and rented a room from an Irish navvy who fried liver and
bacon for breakfast seven days a week, for himself, not for
me. Who needs an alarm clock with the kitchen smells of liver
wafting under the door?

21 In the three years I was studying at Hornsey, mostly I just got on
with the task in hand. I walked to college and between
buildings if necessary. There was a once a week visit to
Crouch End Hill for all the visual research and
complimentary studies including art history and in my
case film criticism. Then on one occasion I ended up in
some sort of film or photography laboratory in Alexandra
Palace. Compared with the space allocation at Bowes Road
the fine artists' facilities were literally palatial.

22 But most of the time we were in the incredibly small building at
Bowes Road. The main studios were on the first floor, two
that could be opened up as one, and a third above the
photography labs, and the exquisite typography workshop
below on the ground floor. In a number of tiny rooms
adjacent to the North Circular were darkroom facilities and
in a concrete air raid shelter in the courtyard a large process
camera. All my shirt cuffs got rotted away by the chemicals in
the darkroom; developer and fixer. I spent many hours in the
darkrooms because the photographic resources were free. I
blamed the skin irritation of my hands on the biological
detergent used in clothes washing but I expect the photo
chemicals had something to do with it ­ who can see you are
not using tongs in a darkroom?

23 I had bought a Halina 35X camera in Portsmouth for £11.13s.6d.
That was some sort of Hong Kong cheap imitation of a Leica
camera. But it worked somehow and even produced halfframe
negatives, or slides, so was economical to run.
Goodness knows what a real Leica would have cost. The
American Moon missions were equipped with adapted
Hasselblads and it just seemed astonishing. Somewhere near
Carnaby Street I bought a light meter which I still have. I
don't use it or need it but it's part of the clutter of nostalgia!
Maybe I should take it to Antiques Roadshow.

24 At that time Carnaby Street was also a source of second hand
tartan trousers, ex-theatreland - sold by Lord Kitchener's
Valet, and fashionable shirts and shoes though I'm not sure
that anything went with the tartan. Design was available at
the Design Council in Haymarket or later in Nova magazine.
(Later still there was Biba in Kensington.)

25 The great debate amongst graphic designers (perhaps more a
monologue in my own head) was whether drawing and
illustration was necessary since photography was so
predominant. In France illustration in advertising was still in a
painterly, illustrative tradition but in Germany incredibly
precise large format technical photography was common.
America was brash compared with clean Swiss graphics.

26 I was attracted to typography and very minimal copywriting
usually with a play on words. One of the lecturers, Martin
Leman, was upset by this approach. We were set really dull
projects for food mixer instructions, or promoting London
Zoo. This was probably just about the time that pandas were
being allocated around the world by China for breeding
programmes. Somehow I worked on a poster with an
American sportsman illustrated in it and I took a reference
from the Sunday Times. Later on when a prospective
employer saw this piece of work he really laid into me about
composition. And at another interview someone with an
account for cars was so narrowly prescribed by the trade
norms that he wasn't interested in the random dot screens I
had been developing with Vincenzo Ragazzini. Then there
were obscure client names which clearly were lecturers
fishing for ideas for their own clients. I thought they had
already sold their souls to the devil of high street commerce.

27 There was more imagination and revolution afoot in studying art
history and that's a pretty desperate state of affairs. With
experience of electricity and transport strikes in Paris during
the Picasso exhibition, I had no sympathy with ripping up
cobble-stones and burning cars ­ unless they were 2CVs!

28 But I have always wondered how many of the art historians had
ever drawn or painted anything. They all seemed to be
academics without even an ink stain under their fingernails.
I'd rather be operated on by Leonardo da Vinci who had a
good understanding of anatomy than an art historian who
had studied Galen where half the body parts were in the
wrong places or came from completely different species.

29 Remember also personal computers and Adobe PhotoShop had
not yet been invented. Drawing as a discipline, training the
hand and the eye, had its place which is pretty much ignored
in modern media studies. Letraset had been invented but socalled
concrete poetry was not expressed by typographers,
more the sphere of performance readers. I had learnt how to
paint Roman letterforms with a sable brush or chisel them in
wood in Art GCE at school so I was not impressed by rubdown
lettering done by those with no eye for letter-spacing.
And with advertising agencies playing with tracking the whole
rhythm of typography disappeared to be replaced by graffiti.
How bad can the logotype and symbol for the 2012 Olympics
be!

30 Illustrators usually had their own autographic style and were
painstakingly slow but brilliant at it, like Wendy Smith. I was
impatient and I preferred photography on the whole but
could do a fair enough journeyman's job at drawing and
technical illustration had an appeal. I couldn't see illustrators
as a class of artists in their own right but as merely
representational commercial artists, while the other fine
artists at Alexandra Palace were supposed to be doing
avant-garde things like conceptual art and events or
happenings. Of course most of them weren't. They were
plodding along in the furrows of pseudo-modernist art, or
still imitating Sir William Coldstream perhaps.

31 Because of the distance between the institutions of the Hornsey
archipelago it was in fact quite rare to meet fellow inmates
except at Crouch End Hill. I don't remember anyone having a
new vision that would become a movement. Op art in fashion
and graphics and Bridget Riley's geometrical abstracts
didn't seem to invade Crouch End Hill. Peter Blake in the
sixties was in a class of his own, and still is forty years on. I
bought my sister a print called Babe Rainbow, which has
stood the test of time. Luckily it's an offset litho print on
tinplate. In true working class style she has it hung on the
outdoor toilet door. They still have them where she lives.

32 I don't remember many of the staff, except their names are in
the prospectus. I didn't worry about the shortcomings much
as I made the best of the situation and got on with things as
much as possible in my own way.

33 Only one lecturer at Bowes Road got drummed out by the
students. I remember we started tapping the floor with our
feet in unison until he got the message. He ended up at
Central School of Art about a decade later still no use to man
nor beast. Some others were not impressive either, one had
to learn her typography from her husband the night before
she tried to teach us. It was better to buy a typography
handbook, like the one written by Ken Garland, just for
reference. Besides, there wasn't all that much to it! Another
lecturer was doing work for Safeway (now Argos) on Seven
Sisters Road and had a terrible problem searching his back
pocket all the time for a pack of cigarettes. Then there were
projects that we put our heart and soul into only to see
elements of them turn up in corporate identity projects in
external studios. That was common then and still goes on
pretty much everywhere I suppose. Plagiarism Rules o.k. Man!

34 At Portsmouth I had been encouraged by a Mr Westmoreland
who introduced us to glass fibre and polyester resin,
probably the first place in the country. Even my mother
bought a fibreglass sculpture from a student there who had a
terrible schizophrenic fear of losing his hands. I still have
that sculpture on my wall.

35 We also did calligraphy at Portsmouth which was my main
interest into graphic design. I entertained myself with Old
English Gothic and Fraktur calligraphy at school after a
serious road accident. The class sent me a book token while I
was in hospital with a fractured skull and I bought a book on
calligraphy to occupy myself while I was recuperating at
home ­ I was by then too well to be amongst the dying
moving towards the door in the hospital ward, but too fragile
to be at school awhile. I don't think they wanted me having a
brain haemorrhage in front of the class, or to play rugby. At
Portsmouth College of Art I had found an interest in the
calligraphy of Irish half uncials. Then at Hornsey I was keen
on typography and type design: Gill Sans, Helvetica,
Microgramma, all sans serif.

36 While I was at Hornsey I was invited by Portsmouth College of
Art students to travel to Paris and see the Picasso exhibition.
The lad I shared a hotel room with was as poor as me and
spoke no French at all so I had to talk for two on most
occasions, not that my French was up to much! I had found a
pen pal through Radio Luxembourg who lived somewhere in
the southern suburbs of Paris but her father wouldn't allow
her to continue writing in English and so I stopped with
French and went on to Swedish instead. (Eva Lena Wivatt,
where are you now!) Besides, de Gaulle was already being
obstructive in Britain's attempts to join the European
Economic Community. I think it was in part the way we
treated him during the Second World War, sinking French
naval ships in African ports so the Germans wouldn't get
them, without consulting him.

37 It was very quiet in Paris. It was a dire experience because there
was an electricity strike and a Metro strike throughout the
whole of our short visit. Life in a very cheap hotel on the Left
Bank in the Latin Quarter with only candlelight. (Interesting
that the workers were striking, but the students were not yet
involved ­ wait for 1968 when rôles are reversed.)

38 We ended up eating bread, cheese and wine in the street cafés in
daylight where we could see what we were eating. With no
transport we ended up walking all the way to the Palace of
Versailles and back. I hadn't much interest in gold encrusted
palaces with wonky gilded mirrors used as the venue for
World War peace treaties.

39 I wasn't moved by Picasso's work either. He seemed to have a
small repertoire of icons that were repeated over and over
again; clowns, bulls, nudes, portraits. Many years later in
Barcelona I had the same reaction. But Leonardo's Mona Lisa
at the Louvre was impressive compared with the tiny black
and white photos so often seen in reading Gombrich's
History of Art. The brushwork was so delicate. It also made
me appreciate Van Gogh's contrasting texture of paint.

40 Paris then wasn't so much better architecturally than the derelict
post-war state in the film "Le Ballon rouge" by Albert
Lamorisse (1956) so all I can remember is the peeling posters
for Dubonnet with the tag; Dubo ­ Dubon ­ Dubonnet
designed by Cassandre in 1932 but still going strong in the
sixties. Les Halles were still a food market then, like Covent
Garden, and Galeries Lafayette was better than Harrods. It
inspired me to design a transparent plastic shopping bag
with screen printed typography interspersed with product
motifs. The typography could be seen reading forwards and
backwards with the illustrations, and like stained glass.

41 With the few francs I had left at Le Havre I bought a bottle of
Graves white wine ­ delicious - and chatted to a Portsmouth
lass who wore a yellow trouser suit on the ferry back to
Portsmouth.

42 The Hornsey College of Art days spent at Crouch End Hill were
in studios with projects using coloured lights shone on still
life objects, or stripes of light contouring naked life models,
or structural geometry with visiting lecturers like Keith
Critchlow and one big eight-hour talk by R Buckminster
Fuller. I can't remember exactly what Stuart Brisley taught
me, if anything, but he seems to have allowed me to think for
myself. I thought his Americanisms in an English accent were
odd, full of quiet, laid-back pauses interrupted with odd
observations interjected with "You know ( - what I mean)", an
abbreviated form of what I heard a decade later in New Jersey
as "Like man, hey, you know what I mean Man, you mother
fucker?" ­ ghetto speak in Asbury Park just before the race
riots. The brothers in the 'hood went on a rampage and
whole blocks of houses were trashed and burnt. My family
there moved further out, from the neighbouring Neptune
City, towards Washington and the Carolinas. When I visited
them in New Jersey they wouldn't allow me to walk even five
houses down the road but would shuffle their cars around
and drive forty yards. Maybe I never did know, man! (It wasn't
so far from Lakehurst where the Zeppelin 'Hindenburg' burnt
in 1937.)

43 Down in Atlanta some years later at a conference the hosts
chastised us (Victor Herbert and me) for walking downtown
before we had presented our papers to the delegates at
Georgia Tech. My American relatives understood that and had
all sorts of weapons and ammunition in lockers under their
beds! About the same time my uncle was living in Sierra
Leone, sleeping with a handgun under his pillow. But I got
diverted, back to Crouch End Hill.

44 Marc Vaux was into colour theory but his work seemed to have
been built with off-the-shelf elements by industrial robots. I
never understood Marc Vaux as he seemed to come from an
academic, university background and he intellectualized or
verbalized colour, as if we cared!

45 It was worse than Bauhaus German logic because it was in
verbose English full of hypothetical imaginings of no practical
use. Not that I ever found the Bauhaus much to offer on that
score either. Words about words more than about the
exhilaration of colour whether in the paint or light mixing or
in the wild in nature. There was too much talking and
theorizing and self-agrandisement.

46 Then there was art history and film criticism. I used to go to
the film society and watch Fellini ­ how sexy can a modern
Italian orgy be? - and Buñuel ­ how shocking can an eye
being sliced by a razor be! - Hitchcock ­ how boring can a
shower curtain make a murder scene - and Bergman ­ no
wonder Sweden was the suicide leader of the north - ,
Kurosawa ­ the beauty of the country and its history - and
Wajda. Miles better than Disney and Hollywood!

47 Then I would spend hours at the Academy Cinema in Oxford
Street watching films on a Saturday, out of the rain and in the
warmth of a huge green armchair, making critical notes
about acting, filming and direction and back in my room
write up the experience on my grandfather's old red-
enameled metal, portable typewriter with the red and black
ribbon. When that deteriorated beyond repair ­ it had maybe
served from about 1919 in the Baltic right through the
Second World War - I somehow graduated to a sleek grey
plastic Olivetti portable. I never got as far as the over
designed red one ­ too prissy and fragile!

48 The film of the moment in 1966 was "Blow-Up" directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni, which told the story of a
photographer's study of his chance photos of a murder
scene.

49 Forty years on I followed a real murder trial where I had
witnessed the threat to kill, life is stranger than fiction!

50 For my art history paper I wrote something or other about "The
universality of graphic symbols in primitive societies, the
evolution of alphabets and the application of symbols and
icons in modern graphics." Probably a bit shorter than that
but who can remember all the details after forty years?
Presumably the majority of students put pen to paper as how
else could they graduate. It must have been a drop-out
minority who either failed outright or diverted their energies
full time into student politics?

51 I wish I'd put a carbon paper under the original type-script
because I didn't get that paper back, just some one-liner
response and a grade for the final assessments perhaps. And
that was in the days when Tippex was about all that could
correct an error, no Microsoft Word to invisibly and
miraculously clean the whole thing up with, and whole pages
sometimes got retyped just to add a line here and there. In
fact some pages got cut and pasted with Sellotape until the
so called manuscript was fit for presentation. (Don't worry,
this one is more from the school of 'stream of consciousness'
than academic discipline!)

52 There had been some good ethnographic exhibitions at the
north side of the Royal Academy which in those days was
part of the British Museum and I scraped together the
money for some other reference books from Foyles. I tried
not to read too much and mostly flicked through the sources
for pictures and came to my own conclusions. The central
heating in Foyles was so hot it was attractive to go and read
the books there that were too expensive to buy and too
modern for a lending library. That made it a bit more difficult
to exactly quote my sources in an academic manner, so I
pretty much busked it. It was something more like standing
on an escalator watching the course carry you along than
actually getting intellectually engaged with these dull grey
men in tweed jackets. They didn't seem to be creative so they
were pretty much disregarded along with the administrators
and pure politicos.

53 And here we get to the social activities. Most of the time there
were none. I couldn't afford anything. If I bought a
newspaper on a Sunday then it was likely to be at the
expense of a meal. Endless cups of sugary black Assam tea
staved off the hunger until the morning. The classical music
concerts at the Wigmore Hall were the cheapest in town and I
even stopped going to those. I left my Dvorak 'New World
Symphony' album, and the Bob Dylan album in Hampshire
and bought the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper album as a present
to take to Finland.

54 When I was invited to join a sailing club somewhere up the Lea
Valley I couldn't afford to travel that far and the walk was a
bridge too far, on this occasion the Lea Bridge rather than the
Arnhem Bridge. Anything the other side of the North Circular
was a foreign country to me! Living on the Piccadilly Line was
a reassurance that I could escape the country for Finland in
less than an hour. Some years later I cycled to Finland though
the cost of food alone was more than the price of an air
ticket!

55 Every holiday I took work wherever I could get it, harvesting
work in Hampshire for a farmer who had the contract to
gather the wheat from around a mental hospital near
Southampton. I was up at four to walk miles to the farm and
travel to the harvest site before seven when the police would
be likely to intercept a harvester traveling illegally on the
road without a permit. The farmer, Mr Heath, let me do oxyacetylene
repairs to the Massey-Ferguson combine harvester
on the farm at Clanfield and kill rats with his shotgun, or set
out traps. I don't know what those were for! Down at the
high-walled mental hospital we were already sweating and
humping illegal two-hundredweight sacks of grain when the
inmates of the hospital would be walked, in a long gang
holding hands, past us while the last man would shout at us:
"You don't know what a real day's work is!" He was probably
a burnt out share trader, a 'capitalist running-dog', from the
Stock Exchange shouting at the peasants, anarchists, and
down-right commies who were like Burgess, McLean and
Blunt, or Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull or John Lennon
and Yoko Ono. It was the era of Reds under the Beds and
Hippies and Flower Power and drugs.

56 But I saw none of that with the exception of Bob Dylan's live
concert at the Albert Hall. I enjoyed the concert but stopped
buying singles and long-playing records thereafter. It was all
part of the consumer addiction brainwashing promoted by
Top of the Pops. So long as I was pouring money down the
drain on records I would never be able to afford a place to
live. I could manage without a record player, a radio and a
television. At the pittance I was being paid I certainly knew
how hard and unrewarding the work was and about
exploitation. Then there was the National Insurance
deduction, a stamp bought at the post office and stuck in a
card like Green-Shield stamps, the tax didn't yet come into
the equation at a subsistence wage, but with an alcoholic
mother taking a big enough cut for board and lodging at
home during the holidays there was little enough left. In the
Winter it was Christmas post delivery, again up at five or
earlier, walk a mile in the snow to the sorting office, sort and
bag the mail and ride a bike in the snow delivering it until
about midday, on a bad day with double loads and four bags
even until mid-afternoon without overtime. Some rounds
were worse than others. The regular postmen sat in the tea
room at the sorting office and sent the student idiots out in
the ice and snow. But they had fifty other weeks in the year to
pay for it trudging up paths to finger-snapping letterbox
flaps. Then Easter holidays, either the farms again or a saw
mill down at Portsmouth at one end of a wood planing
machine tying bundles of skirting boards by the dozen, or
worse, on the ship in the dock with massive loads of rough
cut planks from the overloaded decks and holds of the ships
from Scandinavia. Better though than the laundry where my
brother saw the detritus of sordid local hotels; fleas, pubic
lice, excrement, blood, condoms and all. Or the bakery
vacuuming flour dust as the roof had been blown off by a
flour explosion. Once the explosion risk was dealt with there
was the loading of dough into the bread tins on the oven
conveyor. When they saw you could keep up with the running
speed they just upped the speed again and again. Human
robots.

57 Soon enough at Hornsey I realized that I was better off leaving
the country at least during the Summer vacation. In 1967 the
jobs on offer were grape harvesting in Spain, but I wouldn't
go there while Franco was in power, or rebuilding derelict
castles in Germany as hotels, or was it hospitals ­ it didn't
seem much fun, so I took a great job in Finland ostensibly
teaching English on a farm in the middle of Finland. That
saved my life. Free board and lodging and generous pocket
money with no time to spend it.

58 The farm owner was an artist named Erkki Hirvelä, speaking
Finnish and German, and his wife Inger, a mother, a linguist
speaking Swedish, Finnish, English, French and soon to be a
politician so over the years adding Russian, German and
Spanish. They had three young boys, Viktor, Joonas and
Tuomas who learnt a tiny amount of English while I learnt
German from the painter, Swedish from his wife, Finnish from
the farm hands, French from a visiting grandmother, Russian
from a musician, and so on. Everyone learnt English from me!
They also had a newborn daughter, Katarina, and that gave
me early training in baby-sitting. On top of all the farm work
which started at dawn and ended after sunset, something like
seven in the morning until ten at night, there was an amazing
housekeeper named Ilmi who baked fresh bread including
cinnamon coffee bread, and we worked on through the night
in the atelier painting in egg tempera, listening to the
Beatles' album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
On Friday evening the sauna sweated off the harvest dust, the
muck and manure from the dairy shed, the muscle aches
from the combine harvester and the horse and cart. During
the day you spent your time killing the nesting mice breeding
under the hay stooks, and by evening repairing the mouse
eaten grain sacks in the grain-drying silo shed.

59 Then there was the social life, the country dances, the Pitkävuori
ski jumping tower coffee shop where I met Toini Kiiski, and
the visiting designers such as Ben af Schulten who worked for
Artek and Antti and Rita Hassi. Antti was an architect or
interior designer who designed their incredibly modern
house, Rita was a silversmith or jewellery designer and textile
artist. Now I had an escape route from the Hornsey
archipelago and London. On the farm I had been given a
small Finnish-English dictionary and Toini and I struggled to
communicate for quite some time. She posted me a length of
blue cotton printed with a purple potato print she had made
at school and my sister made it up into a shirt.

60 Every time I returned to the farm, Summer, Winter or Spring, I
was well fed, hard worked, but very, very happy. Imagine, we
took just four weeks to build Erkki's elderly mother a
beautiful summer house down by the lake on days when the
rain stopped the harvest. There was continuous conversation
about art and design and society, about the big neighbour
the Soviet Union, about communism.

61 Inger stood for local and regional elections for SKDL ­ Finnish
People's Democratic League - and I designed a lapel sticker
for her campaign. She won the seat and went on to a long
career in the Finnish parliament including Europe and Latin
America. Most places I went in Finland I was the first English
speaking person they had ever met and they were quite
interested to meet someone from London. Why would anyone
from a major capital city bother to go all the way to their
northern lakes and forests, the land of the Kalevala?

62 From my frugal means I couldn't compete with these
landowning, established artists and designers and I never
understood their sympathy with intellectual communism as
anything that could be compared with my grandmother's
traumatic experiences around 1917 in neighbouring Estonia.
She had been working in the Estonian government tax
department in exile in Helsinki while Estonia was
progressively devastated by communist forces from mother
Russia and opposing forces from Germany.

63 Her family were dispossessed of their business as Baltic German
trading folk in the Hanseatic trading city of Tallinn and her
sister, by recent marriage, had ended up in Warsaw. Her
brother, though having married an ethnic Russian woman in
Tallinn, appears to have disappeared forever into the real
gulag archipelago or Hitler's concentration camps, whichever
came sooner, or both.

64 My grandfather married Lucie Rehmann on board a Royal Navy
submarine supply ship HMS Lucia stationed in Tallinn in
August 1919. Certainly after 1939 there was no further
correspondence from Tallinn and little from Warsaw. Hitler
and Stalin did their secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to carve
up eastern Europe between them and how many tens of
millions did they kill between them? Nearly all my relatives it
seems and there were already few enough of them. Real
Communism, the Cold War and the Iron Curtain saw to that.
What was this petty Hornsey union nonsense all about?

65 In Finland, while trying to both survive and to find my roots, I
experienced at first hand the quality of life and aesthetic
stimulation in continental modernism; Aalto's architecture,
textiles, ceramics and glass by Kaj Franck ­ in 1969 he kindly
became my professor - Vuokko Eskolin Nurmesniemi for
textiles and fashion, Marimekko also for textiles and
fashion, Tapio Wirkkala's knives, Timo Sarpaneva's
casserole and so much and so many more inspirations.

66 The Finns never uttered the word Bauhaus ­ they really hated
Germans - though they knew of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as a
fellow Fenno-Ungric, from Hungary.

67 Back in drab, foggy, grey, dull, Victorian style London I was
confronted by Hornsey again. In Foyles I found an English
translation of the Kalevala, in two volumes, and read them
day and night until I had completed them.

68 In Helsinki I had found a book about Estonian birds and another
of contemporary poetry and I gave them to my grandmother
but it had been nigh on fifty years since she had heard or
read Estonian in England.

69 The Film Society, interesting in the films that were available,
appears to have been run by a couple who ended up diverting
the profit into a trip to East Africa.

70 The rugby team were wanting shirts. The main social events with
bands, while spending on top bands and having early lighting
effects including coloured oils and water or even pubic hair
projections, provided by the Light-Sound Workshop, didn't
make getting profit back to the union account any easier.

71 With the union elections, probably down at Hornsey Town Hall,
they had few enough candidates and it was little more a
rubber stamping exercise. This was not good for democracy,
but complete apathy isn't either. I reluctantly stood for
treasurer and made a short speech ­ the voice of the silent
majority - to the effect that there should have been more
candidates and that all activities would have to be fully
accountable. Having run the film society at a profit for the
previous year and knowing that money was too willingly
diverted into other activities I had marked a line in the sand.

72 The union meetings were in some tiny office at Crouch End Hill
and unbeknownst to me there was already a considerable
bureaucracy around and about to monitor union spending. In
fact, long after the event, through reading "Hornsey 1968" by
Lisa Tickner, it seems that with Pudney in the college and
even an additional external treasurer monitoring at the
council, there was plenty of scrutiny of students and more
interestingly the principal's expenditure. I was only over at
Crouch End Hill one day a week, excepting social activities
like the film society and the dances and the union meetings.

73 On one day when I went to see Pudney he was wanting my
signature on the union cheque-book, for which we were cosignatories,
I got the impression that something was afoot. I
don't remember the exact circumstances. I do remember that
the bank required signatures to be lodged at the bank, so
that amount of regulation was in place.

74 And I knew of the idea that the president of the union wanted to
take a sabbatical. I don't remember anything about his
student activities, whether he was a diligent designer.

75 And I don't recall much about the NUS except a weird trip to
Margate where we ended up walking in the sea with a very
shallow tide. The debates were completely boring, all
motions and procedures and it was good to get some fresh
air away from it all.

76 Back at Hornsey then there had been a social activity with a
poster for the Ball and Chain Dance featuring The Action
and the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation. (Both can be found on
the Wikipedia website!) I designed that poster and screenprinted
it with gloss lacquer on black paper at Bowes Road.
The chronology of all these recollections is all mixed up
along with the Anti-Poly demonstrations outside Haringey
Town Hall. (If anyone remembers where the Microgramma
typesetting was done I would love to hear from them.)
Certainly that Anti-Poly event was a year before the Sit-In.
More like a dry-run for later manipulation.

77 In the meantime there was the pressure of preparing for the
diploma shows and the application for the Royal College of
Art and in my case also applications through the British
Council for scholarships to Sweden and Finland.

78 Somewhere in that I was required to window-mount twenty
pieces of work and after three days and nights without sleep I
trimmed the tip off my left thumb with a scalpel or Stanleyknife
running along the steel ruler. Since it was the middle of
the night I wrapped the bleeding thumb up in a towel and
had a short sleep until I could walk to the hospital A&E. They
were furious when I strolled in with a bloodied towel wound
round my fist and gave me a tetanus jab in the backside!

79 Into that mix must be scheduled the World Design Science
Decade activities promulgated in America by R Buckminster
Fuller but introduced and co-ordinated by Keith Critchlow
then at the Architectural Association.

80 There is an edition of Gravy magazine which documents part of
that, an inflatable population distribution globe made by a
team of students including Pilar Saizar from Argentina, Elisha
Manasseh from Israel, and Mohammed Y Ahmed Mus from
North Borneo, Piers Hartley and myself. I dashed off a simple
handbill for the exhibition and got it printed at Bowes Road
but there was some agro about using a litho plate, ink and a
ream of A4 paper without authorization. Too late, the ink was
drying!

81 We also constructed a folded cardboard dome. This dome
making of folded card really was exploitation as we just
worked to calculations done by someone else. The exhibition
ran from 10 to 22 July 1967 in Bloomsbury Square. It was
reported in the Guardian on 12 July and a glossy magazine a
month later.

82 Then somewhere, maybe even during the Sit-In, Victor Papanek
spoke about his vision for product design in an African
context. I thought it was just cultural and dollar imperialism
and when I heard it all again in Gothenburg in the Autumn of
1968 I asked him a barbed question to that effect and was
afterwards interrogated by his wife. I got the impression she
was part of the Hoover FBI generation. Now I was one of her
reds under the bed!

83 But still during my time at Hornsey there were interesting
visitors such as Vincenzo Ragazzini who was a photo-mural
designer from Italy. His English and my Italian were each
minimal! I spent some time in the concrete process-camera
darkroom making all sorts of geometrical and random grain
screens for him, myself and the department.

84 With some photos I had taken in the winter in Finland I did a
photo-collage of Katarina Hirvelä with a random dot screen
and then with a time-lapse photo of Belisha beacons on the
Green Lanes, I did some posterisation prints in black and
white. There was a small colour printing lab at Bowes Road
but I never got round to using it. Every minute counted and I
was in a hurry. The year after I left, one of the screens was
used for the prospectus cover, though quite badly as the
centre of the screen was fairly inaccurate.

85 While still at Hornsey, at the weekend in Covent Garden, in a
cellar premises, there was an art event called Middle Earth. I
participated along with a number of other students including
Jim Singh Sandhu in a group called The Draft directed by
Stuart Brisley.

86 These were the early days of events, installations, happenings
and conceptual art as well as robotics. Since the facilities at
Bowes Road harked back more to Gutenberg and the handsetting
of type than forward to photocomposition beyond the
striking, unionized, Linotype hot-metal typesetters of Fleet
Street, it was refreshing to get out of Hornsey even if just to
smell the fresh fruit and vegetables then being delivered,
unloaded and stored all around the area. Bananas in the
cellars of Floral Street, Spanish peaches in the Piazza.

87 The artists who came together put on some memorable events
using robots, neon lighting, white meals, full size female
figures made of fruit and jelly, light effects, music, dance,
and much more.

88 I didn't get a place at the RCA as I wanted to do a crossdisciplinary
course, which the Interior Design Department
couldn't accommodate. At the interview I realized I was
already quite a distance from the establishment. Some years
later I discovered some fashion students at the RCA regarded
the Interior Design Department to be full of 'hair-dressers' as
they all seemed to be well enough supported to spend
Daddy's money and go to the hair-dressers.

89 I suspect the ex-graphics head at Hornsey, Jack Shaw, wouldn't
have had too fine a reference to offer for me from his
promoted position as Vice-Principal.

90 Anyway, I got two half-year scholarships awarded nationally
purely on merit, first to Gothenburg and then to Helsinki.
That was a perfect outcome for me.

91 I don't remember all the details of the chronology of events
between the Sit-In and leaving the college. Some things are
very clear though. Since I was treasurer of the union and Nick
Wright had been trying to fund his sabbatical with union
funds, I wasn't surprised at the initiation of the Sit-In.

92 Personally, I don't recall seeing the prepared agenda of activities
including the viewing of films for entertainment. Bowes Road
was so isolated it seems most of the decisions were made at
Alexandra Palace or Crouch End Hill, or even in private
dwellings.

93 I was in the audience two-thirds of the way down the hall
watching all the activity being presented but disagreed that
we interrupt the discussion of the college courses and
academic content just for a film. What we were doing was too
important to stop for an entertainment break. I heckled the
stage about this and it was about then that the audience
divided into those who wanted to stay seated and watch the
films and those who went upstairs to a large studio to
continue the debate.

94 Perhaps it was at this point that the so-called sympathetic staff
actually hi-jacked the Sit-In and imposed their systematic,
quasi-democratic methods for debating the state of
education nationally, networks, aspirations, intellectual
content, academic respectability of the courses and
qualifications and so on. And so the debate continued for
several weeks.

95 I think I was the only Year 3 Graphics student to take part fulltime
in the activities but somehow I went one weekend to see
my parents and explain what was going on, then to East
Sussex to the University, inland from Brighton, perhaps to
share experiences.

96 Then amongst all this I put on my end of course display, which
under the circumstance had not been in a hall open to the
public as in normal years but in the studios at Bowes Road. I
was required to present my work in person to Romek Marber.
To my recollection he was quite a quiet and an insular Polish
man, more an external assessor or consultant than a lecturer,
though his wife had taught us too. Anyway, in the event it
was a matter of getting his opinion. As a student with tons of
work to show, but having spent all that time away at Crouch
End Hill during the Sit-In, I have to wonder that some at
Bowes Road weren't keen to pass me.

97 In the end there were maybe seven of us who got an honours
pass. That was a bumper crop. I think Fiona MacGregor was
one of the seven. Romek Marber as I recall it looked at what
I had displayed across my three panels and asked
ambiguously something like, "So, (pause) what?" He hadn't
much to say at the best of times but was completely neutral
and impartial. It was probably somewhere between: Chuck
him out or give him an A, why can't you see for yourself and
make up your minds on what you are looking at? Since I had
done plenty of work on structures at Crouch End Hill it was
completely beyond the normal brief at Bowes Road.

98 By then I wasn't too fussed. I already had my scholarships from
the British Council and they knew that. How could they
squeeze sour grapes on me? Back at the Sit-In of Crouch End
Hill the whole procedure was grinding to a halt. The Hornsey
archipelago had withered to a single island populated mainly
by career communists and union members.

99 Some of us went to UCL and spoke to a professor about our
aims. Maybe it was Professor Richard Wollheim we saw in the
building just south of the Slade School of Fine Art. Whoever it
was, he seemed to listen happily enough and there was
reference to Summerson and Coldstream Committees.

100 Then of course the whole circus ended up at the ICA Gallery
in Pall Mall, didn't I go there too? But I don't remember the
Roundhouse events. I was probably on my way to Sweden by
then.

101 About the last thing I did at Crouch End Hill was throw a pot
on a wheel in the ground floor ceramics department. I glazed
the outside in black and the inside in white. About dawn one
morning I opened the door to the garden and there was
standing a blue uniformed man with an Alsatian dog on a
lead. I just quietly closed the door again and raced round to
let everyone know! Besides the previous matters of having
the gas, water and electricity cut off by the council in the
hope to flush us all out, and then reinstating them all since
we were not doing anything more than working lawfully in
the premises, we saw out the end of term when the council
deemed that our studies had ended and we should all go
home.

102 It all ended with a whimper rather than a bang. No, we hadn't
done anything like shoot the guard dogs! Maybe the sit-in
was just one long drawn out whimper all along.

103 By that time my home was in Rainham in Kent and I left my
digs in Haringay and found a graphic design job in Rochester
for the few weeks before I sailed from Tilbury for
Gothenburg. That design job was a disillusioning experience
but from my earnings I bought a cheap suit in Prince of Wales
check to head for Sweden. (Later my Swedish girlfriend, Lotta
Johansson, disapproved of the check!)

104 The UK economy was so bad that there were currency export
restrictions and I could only carry £50 sterling in cash for the
whole year ahead. The scholarships abroad had been about
twice as generous as my major award and I had been able to
travel to Oslo and Copenhagen to talk about events at
Hornsey to the Scandinavian Design Students' Organisation
meetings. They were far, far ahead socially and
democratically.

105 In Gothenburg at Konstindustriskolan a free or massively
subsidized canteen pretty well ensured full attendance!

106 In Helsinki I met 'poorer' students but made great friends.
Marica visited Erkki Hirvelä's art exhibition in Helsinki with me.
Ben af Schultén put me up for a few days while I got a small flat.
But that period deserves its own chapter.

107 Eleven months after leaving from Tilbury I returned to the
same quay, arriving in London, and to travel on to Hampshire
with all my Scandinavian 'designer' possessions. I had just
one pound left in my pocket. It was quite a shock to arrive
back at Tilbury. I didn't want to get off the ship but stay
onboard and head straight back to Gothenburg. Instead I
headed temporarily home, now in Hampshire, with that little
money - my one pound - and no job. Angry before leaving.
Angry after returning. Still quite angry forty years on. So little
we strived for has been continued and bettered.

108 Later I tried to apply my understanding of design in research
work at the Royal College of Art, in the Textile Research Unit
with photographic anthropometric work related to a preshaped
garments project. The sponsors' patents sealed that
away for 30 years.

109 When again the British economy failed in the mid-1970's I
spent two years in Hong Kong writing and implementing a
design course. Now those were the days, my friend, we
hoped they'd never end!

110 By 1997 they certainly had. Hong Kong was returned to China
despite having been a British Colony with territories leased or
ceded 'in perpetuity' even if through unequal treaties. Now
six million British passport holders of Chinese ethnicity found
that just 65,000 would qualify for right of abode in Britain.
These went to government functionaries, police, and the
wealthy. But that's another chapter.

111 Subsequently I have bumped against the education world as
my daughter has gone through her schooling, and on to
university, and also in trying to apply my ideas about design
and technology at secondary education level, but no progress
there. Over-prescriptive teaching methods, little idealism and
certainly too much consumer addiction has put paid to that.

112 Bio-fuels have increased the price of basic foodstuffs. Fossil
fuels might teach us to be more environmentally conscious.
The truly Green Revolution is on its way.

113 In the end I have found more satisfaction working for clients
from Hungary and elsewhere whose continental perspective
on society and business concur more with my aims and
ambitions than opportunities in this country.

114 Forty years on we are talking about the needs of society, the
resources of the country and our role as designers ­ just as
we were in Hornsey in 1968. Now the potential of North Sea
energy has been exhausted, frittered away completely by
twenty-three million petrol-heads, and we have an
intellectually bankrupt system of government and a lawless,
aesthetically illiterate society that imports its culture from
Hollywood and dissipates its own creative potential day after
day.

115 Too much talking about art, design and education; not
enough humanism, community and respect for the world
environment. Hornsey, LSE, Paris 1968? Sadly it was little
better than all hot air then and they are spouting pretty much
the same tepid bunkum now.

116 Actions speak louder than words. Don't think controlling a
microphone is democratic. Democracy shamocracy. And
running a Gestetner is simply boring everyone to death with
the printed word. From Hornsey Archipelago to Sit-In
Diaspora over 40 years, and still only a couple of miles away!

email Brian Marsh 5.10.2008