LITMIR.BIZ

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of al Qaida. Sitting round our campfire near the British embassy on our third night in town, smoking marijuana and most definitely inhaling, we thought all was well with the world.

      The Khyber Pass, on the other hand, had a distinct presence of the old world disorder: bandits. ‘Passage only between dawn and dusk: military escort mandatory’ read the notice at the bottom of the pass. We decided to divide our buses into convoys of five, with military vehicles between each. It took so long for us to wind up through the Khyber that dusk had turned to absolute darkness for the last stretch. From time to time we would stop while scouts up on the escarpments looked out for bandits. We could hear the Pakistani army and the bandits calling to one another across the valley.

      It had taken us five weeks to reach Pakistan, where we travelled past the bustling arms and drug dealers of Peshawar on to Rawalpindi and the seething streets of Lahore, ending up pony trekking for a day in the Murray Hills to the north of the country.

      India arrived gradually, its approach reflected in the evolution of the bread through our journey – upright Hovis in Britain, giving way to lower, rounder breads in France, flatter still by Turkey and Iran, until we reached the chapatti and the nan in India. She was to prove an inspiring climax.

      This was one of the last periods in the drift to disorder when such an overland trip could be undertaken relatively safely. Our first stop was the sumptuous, and in those days peaceful, Kashmir. Land of mountains, lakes and wildflowers, and to this day one of the most beautiful places to which I have ever been. Thence to Nanithal, an old British hill station possessed of the most spectacular views of the mountains leading to Everest. Sikh waiters served us tea and cucumber sandwiches on the lawn of the Nainital Rowing Club.

      By the time we reached Delhi we were feted as if we were the Beatles. A hundred thousand people packed the main city arena that night to hear us in concert with local Indian musicians. We were mobbed, our hair pulled, our ears deafened by the screaming.

      Our final destination, however, was not the Indian capital, but the University of Benares. Benares, the Hindu burial centre of the Ganges, was teeming with people. The funeral pyres burnt brightly on the banks, the mourners cascading into the water, boats bearing yet more pyres. Bodies were carried head-high for incineration. Unfortunately, by the time we reached it the University of Benares had been closed by the police after riots on the campus. It was an odd anticlimax to so spectacular an adventure. Three weeks later we had raced back across Asia and Europe to return to Liverpool for the first day of my second year.

      In our absence, man had walked on the moon, Vietnam had suffered another massacre, and Nelson Mandela had passed his sixth year in jail on Robben Island. We were angry, stirred by injustice, shaken by other people’s wars. We could afford to be: there was full employment in Britain then, we didn’t lie awake at night wondering how we would earn a crust when we left university. However, our anger was but a bit-part player in the larger anger that still raged across campuses from the London School of Economics to the Sorbonne in Paris.

      In some senses, in the autumn of 1969 we were actively in search of the issue with which to confront the authorities at Liverpool. Students at Warwick University had discovered secret files kept on the politically active; doubtless the same thing was happening at Liverpool. Nasty Nixon still had some years to go before his defenestration from the White House, and Vietnam simmered on, but that did not involve either the British or university authorities. Indeed Prime Minister Harold Wilson had wisely, and somewhat courageously, refused active British involvement on the American side.

      It was Peter Hain, subsequently a Labour Cabinet Minister, who finally identified our cause. Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had spent the previous months preaching ‘change through economic engagement’ with the South African apartheid regime. Wilson and others had gone soft on economic sanctions, and the apartheid state was consolidating its hold amid calls from Nelson Mandela’s beleaguered African National Congress (ANC) cohorts to black South Africans to burn their passbooks. British culpability and collusion with apartheid were clear, but what was Liverpool’s connection?

      Even in those days, the presence of the great Tate & Lyle sugar empire on the Liverpool dockyards was unmissable. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. Hey presto! We had our cause. ‘Disinvest from South Africa’ became our clarion cry. The only bank on campus, Barclays, with its notorious presence in South Africa, became a target too. The sheer size of my overdraft rendered me embarrassingly unable to withdraw my funds to join the protest, but join I did, with my Barclays chequebook festering in my back pocket.

      Liverpool at the time suffered from a kind of staff/student apartheid which meant there was no provision for resolving such issues through dialogue. The students had no representation on any of the university administrative or governing bodies, which meant that before we could demand disinvestment, we had to demand access to power and representation within the university itself.

      These were heady days, when students of every political complexion and none would gather to plot and manoeuvre. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the Politics Department, one day to become a Labour MP, later to host the BBC TV daytime sofa show Kilroy, later still to be sidelined from it for making allegedly racist comments about Arabs, and still later to rise again as an anti-Europe Member of the European Parliament. But in those days no one was more enthusiastic in his support of the students; no member of staff talked more earnestly of delivering revolution in their ranks. Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary.

      In November 1969 Peter Hain, himself South African by birth, came north with his ‘Stop the Seventy Tour’ campaign. The South African Springboks rugby team were already in Britain, while a cricket tour was to take place in the summer. Hain’s ultimately hugely successful campaign recognised that sport was very close to the heart of the apartheid regime. It was the public, competitive and white face of South Africa. We might not be able to spring Mandela from Robben Island, but we could at least stop his jailers from playing sport in our green and pleasant land. Hain’s target was the Springboks’ match at Old Trafford in Manchester.

      ‘Come on, Jon, we need you over there today.’ The call came from Dave Robertson, the Prince of Darkness, eternally turned out in black. He was the most articulate student operative on the left, the leader of the university Socialist Society, well to the left of anything I could have subscribed to. Nevertheless, I was flattered that he wanted me along for the ride to Manchester. Dave is now Professor of Politics at John Moore’s University in Liverpool, but in those days he regarded me as ‘a bloody public-school pinko liberal’. Several hundred of us hit the East Lancs highway bound for Old Trafford. Our job was to try to prevent that afternoon’s match from taking place at all. I noticed some of our number carried less than discreet spades with them.

      Old Trafford was set for war. There were police and demonstrators everywhere. Hain stood on a flatbed truck outside the ground together with other luminaries urging a peaceful protest. The men with the spades were already worming their way into the ground. It didn’t take long for things to turn nasty. The police started trying to corral us into sectors further away from the gates, so that spectators could get in. The idea that someone had taken the decision to come and watch the match delineated them for us as out-and-out racists and supporters of apartheid, which in a discreet kind of a way I guess they were. Fights broke out. The police charged, and I felt a knee thrust hard into my groin. I thrust back, and within seconds I was pinned to the ground by three Mancunian cops and carted off in a paddy wagon to Old Trafford police station. ‘Jonathan George Snow, you have been arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer.’

      ‘Damn me,’ I thought, ‘that’s my law career up the spout. No more barristering for me. Is this a criminal record I see before me?’

      ‘Have you anything to say?’

      ‘Not guilty, sir!’

      It was six in the evening when I was taken down to the cells. The police wanted £100 bail for me, and I had no money to get back to Liverpool. I counted eleven others in my cell, and one bucket in the corner. There must have

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