1968: I was there

Last month we published this photograph of the March 1968 anti-war demonstration in Grosvenor Square and asked readers if they could identify themselves in the picture. Jon Henley recounts the stories of the four people who did, while others recall their part in the protests that rocked the world
Jon Henley
The Guardian, Wednesday May 21 2008



Were you there? Police and protesters clash at Grosvenor Square, London on March 17 1968. Photograph: Mirrorpix

On March 17 1968, there was a big anti-Vietnam war rally in Trafalgar Square in London. Afterwards, 8,000 mainly youthful protesters marched on Grosvenor Square, where Vanessa Redgrave delivered a letter of protest to the American embassy. The crowd, though, refused to disperse, and a fierce battle ensued between demonstrators and riot police. Protesters hurled mud, stones, firecrackers and smoke bombs; mounted police responded with charges. The violence of the struggle, in the cosseted heart of Mayfair, shocked everyone. By the end of the afternoon, more than 200 people had been arrested.

It is, perhaps, not particularly surprising that some of you should have been there, or at the similar protests that took place that year from Paris to Prague, Chicago to Mexico City. What is remarkable, though, is that no fewer than four G2 readers should recognise themselves in the grainy black-and-white photograph of the Grosvenor Square riot that we published last month. In fact, 58 readers from round the world responded to our request for memories of May '68. And on the whole it seems the passions that burned so fiercely 40 years ago have by no means been extinguished.

"I am right in the centre, with the spectacled face," says Joćo Monjardino, who was barred from a medical career in his native Portugal because of his opposition to the Salazar regime and settled in London in 1961 to do cancer research. "I remember the day well. I remember the strength of feeling of the demonstrators, and the strength of action - brutality would be a better word - of the police." Does he still count himself as a militant? "I am as strong an opponent of the war in Iraq today as I was of the Vietnam war then," he writes. "At least at the time Britain was shamed only by its association with the US, but had the wisdom not to send troops to assist them. Not this time, regrettably."

There is some confusion as to who, exactly, is the young man with a beard, floppy hair and spectacles to the left of the flag, with both Donald Fraser and John Mosley believing they recognise their younger selves. Fraser, then a postgraduate student from New Zealand and now a retired lecturer in English at Strathclyde University, is convinced it is him. He recalls "somehow being fairly near the front, where I was surprised to find a number of people in the crowd urging us to rush forward and storm the embassy steps. The rumour was that US Marines armed with machine guns were behind the doors and would fire live ammunition, so I was pretty reluctant!

I also remember feeling sorry for the police horses, as there was talk of throwing ball-bearings under their hooves."

Fraser may have been a rather reluctant rioter, but he firmly believes the events of May 1968 and after "helped force the US out of Vietnam. They really did mean something, I'm convinced of that. I'm not one of those who jeers at the 60s. I'm not a heavy-duty activist and I wasn't one then; I couldn't bring myself to chant 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh' or 'Victory to the Vietcong'. But 1968 was a hugely significant moment. Even in this class-ridden country, life - socially, culturally, politically - just opened out."

Mosley also thinks he might be the man with the specs and centre parting. "Behind me, almost full face to the camera, is Phil Evans. Why he is standing so much higher than me must be due to the crush of the crowd bending me down, while he is pushing himself up. We were both members of the International Socialist Trotskyite group in Leeds. Phil was an arts student and I was on the shop floor in an engineering factory, one of the few 'workers' in the Leeds group."

Gordon Coxon is quite sure who he is. "The slightly spooked-looking dude in the flat cap towards the left of your pic is, I'm astonished to conclude, 17-year-old me," he writes. "And the hand clasping the crook of my left arm would belong to my then girlfriend, Hattie." For Coxon, who was still at school at the time, "This must have been the first big demo I'd been on. I recall marching down Oxford Street, putting anti-war stickers on to cars and shop windows. It had certainly kicked off by the time we got to the square. It was quite scary being caught up in the crush. I actually fainted."

May '68 "had a big impact on the outlook of many of my generation, and on the political culture we inhabited," he feels. But then, he wonders, "What do I know? I ploughed my way through my Marcuse along with the best of them, [but] pretty soon after I was living in a commune in south London, consuming large quantities of pot and playing drums in a rock band. Then came the hallucinogens - and the world really changed."

Many did not spot themselves in the photograph, but recall the day no less vividly. "I was in there somewhere," writes Bronwen Davies. "I was 17 years old, still at school, and outraged by British support for US foreign policy. I was young enough to be very shocked that the police were being violent towards the demonstrators, and remember crying and trying to pull a policeman off someone who was being held on the ground. The event made a very deep impression on me. Today, my politics haven't changed much. I am still an internationalist and socialist, but also a fervent feminist, a concept with which I was not familiar in 1968. I remain committed to the struggle for social justice. But it's a long time since I've been on a street demonstration."

From Durham, Mike Davis, then a student at Hornsey College of Art, writes that he "attended the demo even though I didn't much like crowds, and I didn't think invading the US Embassy was likely to be very productive. After the event, Sue, one of my fellow students, said that Mick Jagger had lifted her out of the way of a police horse. 'Mick rescued me,' she sighed. The 1960s started for me in 1964, when I left school, and they ended in 1968. A year which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, followed by the election of Richard Nixon, certainly felt like the end of something."

Richard Folley, now 61, was living in Mevagissey, Cornwall, having just started his first job as a chemist after university. "I was keen to add my voice to the anti-Vietnam war demonstration," he writes, "and heard of a minibus from St Austell to London being organised by the Cornish anarchists. The bus turned out to be an old windowless van in which we travelled overnight; the smell was awful as someone had been sick. It seemed like the whole world was [at the demo]. I was some way back, but I saw the violence developing and decided to get out. Today, my politics have changed little. I still attend demonstrations when I think it appropriate."

Jim Tomlinson, now the Bonar professor of modern history at Dundee University, "was arrested at the demonstration as a 16-year-old grammar school boy". Much of what was said and done in 1968, he now accepts, "was naive and unsophisticated. But on the issue of the war, I still believe we were right." Annabelle Harle, who "could be any one of numerous McGowan-haired young women in Grosvenor Square", was a 17-year-old protest veteran by May 1968, "but that was the first time I came up close to police horses, and I still find them intimidating and an unwise choice for crowd control. I have remained an activist, and my political views have not changed. My grandmother fought to have the vote, and I'm glad that my family instilled in me a respect for the democratic process and a willingness to stand up and be counted."

Finally, Geoff Wolfe reckons that he could "write a few thousand words about that day, 1968 and its effect on my life and politics". He was probably "within 20 or 30 feet" of the scene, with a girlfriend "who had not been on a demonstration before and was upset by the horses." Chris Morris photographed the Grosvenor Square riot for an Italian news magazine. So did 1968 achieve anything? It was a year, concludes Morris, that "showed what was possible. Forty years on, I still feel outraged by governments duping voters and ignoring their feelings. Far from becoming more conservative with age, I feel more leftwing the more I'm patronised." For Wolfe, "capitalism is good at absorbing protest. Most of the protesters went on, like me, to have good white-collar jobs." It is easy to be nostalgic, he reckons, but "every generation must find its own 1968."

Ellie