In the Days of Shorts and Hardbake
by
Richard Jones
1958 - 1963

For those of us born during or just after the War, the trek from the black and white austerity of its aftermath into the digital age of today and tomorrow has been a varied and fascinating one. Arguably no generation has covered such varied and challenging social, cultural, spiritual and political territory within what has been, in historical terms, a very brief period of time. The 1950s were, in many crucial ways, as remote from the 1960s as were the days of Queen Victoria. And the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s were decades each with their own strikingly distinctive characteristics. So there exists within our generation a sense of having been rushed through the latter half of the 20th century with barely the time to absorb each mighty shift in perspective before the next has come along.

For me Wennington was the environment, social, cultural, spiritual and political, within which I emerged from that smoggy, uncertain era that followed the War - a time that belonged almost entirely to our parents’ and teachers’ generation – into a new, exciting era, one that belonged to my generation. And my principal consciousness of that time is of fierce resistance to those changes from Kenneth and Frances and the paradoxical conflict that faced ‘progressives’ who found themselves no longer in the vanguard of change and innovation.

So my experience of Wennington is underpinned by that friction and I perceive my five years of education there entirely within its context. But, they were, by and large, a very positive five years. The conflict, far from being enervating or distracting, was of great educational value. Although I frequently found myself squaring up to both Kenneth and Frances, the lessons learned in pragmatic withdrawal and subsequent reflection were invaluable. I discovered that the sparks that were sometimes struck between my teenage quest for freedom and Kenneth’s demands for order ignited more substantive ideas and values that took root and remain with me now.

This evolving of raw adolescent rebellion into something altogether more considered and structurally sound was due in part to the robustness, even aggression, of the Barnes’ beliefs and practices. Kenneth spoke and wrote with passion and eloquence and his utter sincerity and consistency was unimpeachable. Nor would many of us have quarrelled at that time with his fundamental liberalism and the humanity of his world view. But where his sometimes dogmatic certainty, impatience and even insensitivity rubbed many of us up the wrong way, there were others within the community whose flexibility and capacity for humour and tolerance provided a less abrasive experience. Were it not for Brian Hill’s altogether broader articulation of progressive philosophy and Roger Gerhardt’s cosmopolitan interest in the world beyond our fences and fields, the ideological environment would have been much the poorer. I suspect that Kenneth was well aware of the benefits of the leavening presence of those two men, in spite of the conflicts that I feel sure must have sometimes taken place between himself and them.

Times have changed greatly since the early 1960s. Much of the raw material of rebellion that so excited some of us at that time has now become 21st century protocol – revolt into style, as George Melly so succinctly phrases the phenomenon. Much of the optimistic dynamism that drove so many of us to march to and from Aldermaston has atrophied into the very acquisitive cynicism against which Kenneth spoke as a socially aware Quaker. But at the time that material captured our imaginations and persuaded us of the possibility of new worlds and we marched and sang and leafleted and campaigned.

I remember a mock general election one year in which, amongst the grey predictability of Conservative and Labour, I devised with, I believe, Richard M., a political party that would sweep all before it in a tidal wave of socialist renewal. I called it the New Left Front and I pursued its vague and rhetorical policies with vigour, seeing myself as a combination of George Orwell ( in the photographs of him fighting in the Spanish Civil War ) and those firm-jawed, muscular workers who, in socialist-realist posters, stride towards red suns rising over the wreckage of capitalism. Sadly, my proletarian thunder was stolen entirely by Andrew B. who stood as an anarchist protest candidate. So convincing were his arguments against the varicoloured patchwork – from pale pink to deepest crimson - that constituted the manifesto of the NLF that I ended up voting for him along with everyone else. But for all my chagrin at having my revolution firmly spiked, I absorbed thoroughly certain principles and perceptions then that doggedly persist today. Whilst I no longer throw the curtains back eagerly in the morning to check whether the anarchist uprising has occurred overnight, I still can’t take seriously the promises of politicians; I still rail against an education system that has no interest in children; I still view the manoeuvrings of big business with mistrust and disgust. ( If Andrew B. ever reads this, I would be fascinated to know whether for him the principles and policies that he proposed so long ago still have substance. And I’ll happily buy him a drink for turning my political head at that time ).

Continued...