RAMBLINGS PAST

"Paul, Paul come and meet my dancing partner". Peggy Middleton was holding a garden party in her home in Kidbrooke Park Rd, Blackheath for a very important guest from America. It was the summer of 1959, one of those long hot summers we all remember but, for some strange reason, despite global warming never seem to happen any more, at least not in Sowerby Bridge. Peggy Middleton was a fairly important person herself at the time. She was a Labour Councillor destined to become The Mayor. She died a few years after and The London Borough of Greenwich named the new DSS building after her. Peggy would have liked that. Peggy Middleton House stands today in the busy metropolis of Woolwich complete with car park beneath.

By the summer of 1959 I had been working in the West End of London for nearly 12 months. My atrocious stutter had become slightly more controlled and was now simply a bad one. I'd learnt to use the telephone. This may seem a strange thing to say in 2002, but in the late 1950's few houses had telephones and I had never needed to use one. Most of my friends, most of whom also didn't have telephones, lived within one mile of me, so if I needed to contact them I could run there in five minutes. I could run back in five minutes too. I was busy developing a "Superiority Complex!" It was still a long way off mind you, but I had quickly realised as I threw off my school mantle that due to my stutter I had an inferiority complex, which was indeed justified. I was inferior! So changes had to be made.

But as 'Paul' strode over to meet me I realised that I was going to have to summon all my most vital powers of self control to speak to him. It was a daunting thought, but in the last twelve months or so I had learnt a few tricks. I found that if I started every sentence with the word 'Actually' I could get a fair way into the conversation before breaking down again. So I might often say something like "Actually I'm going down the actual street to the actual shops because what I actually want to buy is a pair of actual football boots". It might sound completely stupid to you, but it was a revelation to me. I had also learnt the fine art of suddenly at the last second substituting another word for the word I was going to say without losing the context of the meaning. This worked fine most of the time although I do once remember bringing a 'blind date' back a glass of sherry from the bar when she had actually ordered a gin and tonic! But this was a minor problem and as I never saw her again after that evening it's an event of almost inconsequential proportion.

"Paul, Paul come and meet my dancing partner". Paul Robeson was striding towards me! Now let's get this into perspective. Paul Robeson was walking over the lawn to meet me. Not the other way round. Paul Robeson had been summoned to my presence! What on earth was I going to say to him? "Hallo Paul. Actually isn't it actually a lovely summer evening", was not going to be sufficient. But we had one definite thing in common by now, our love of American folk music. I had already purchased a number of Pete Seeger and Weavers records. The Weavers had appeared at The Royal Festival Hall earlier that year with Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry supported by my other favourite folky, Rambin' Jack Elliott. A concert that incidentally I thoroughly enjoyed. The Weavers had come without Pete of course because he had left the group and was performing solo again, but there were rumours he would be coming to England later in the year. So I had something to talk with Paul about. Peggy suddenly disappeared into the maelstrom of a 1959 garden party leaving me on my own to talk to Mr Robeson. Whether Peggy summoned Paul to meet me because she thought the meeting would do me some good, or whether she did it simply to escape my somewhat lurid form of jiving is still unclear. I never asked her; but I would like to think it was the former.

I had Paul to myself for about 10 blissful minutes. We discussed Pete Seeger of course and he told me about their travels together. I asked him about the times in 1948 when they were campaigning for Governor Wallace and we discussed the McCarthy era that was at the time coming to a close. The Wallace campaign was a very much a touch and go proposition. Many people thought that it was possible that Wallace would be assassinated so Paul and Pete were right up there in the firing line. The police allowed the Klux Klux Klan to get away with throwing rocks, stones tomatoes, eggs etc but mercifully no guns were used. The sight of white and black people travelling together in the same car incensed crowds especially in the South. Robeson, Seeger and Wallace shared this vision of an America of rustic virtue, where people helped strangers and their union brothers, where black and white sat down together in the same restaurants and churches. But in 1948 I was only seven years old, so I knew nothing of this - but I was learning fast.

So here I was with Robeson who had just got his passport back. The American government had stripped him of it in 1952 when the Communist witch hunt, which had started in the 1940's, really got underway. Paul had campaigned for human rights and the dignity of the Afro-American. His songs and speeches also implied that all men were created equal, which the majority of Americans at that time still disbelieved despite the words of one of their most famous presidents some hundred years earlier. McCarthy was an evil man without doubt, who lived in what some folk call a completely evil era. He was the kind of human each country throws up every so often. McCarthy would have enjoyed a relationship with Adolph Hitler I'm sure. Fortunately he never made the presidency himself and few tears were shed when a decade or so later he went to meet his maker. Robeson like Seeger was blacklisted. Without a passport they were unable to travel to other countries to work, no radio station of any consequence would contemplate playing their music and no theatre would undertake the task of booking them to do a concert. Television was completely out of the question. There was obviously the odd radio station that risked the wrath of the authorities and people like Oscar Brand should be applauded for their guts and dedication. But in the main being blacklisted in America in that time meant that you simply did not work. Seeger found employment in the colleges where unbeknown to him he was building up a huge following that would come to flower in the 1960's'. Robeson, being black, found it even more difficult. Robeson managed to do the occasional outdoor concert on farms that adjoined the Canadian Border, where makeshift stages were erected and where the police were in sufficiently low numbers not to disrupt matters. Canadians came across to see him work and sympathetic Americans joined them. But on the whole they were extremely lean times. All the while however he was speaking up with that beautiful eloquent vocabulary that was his trademark wherever and when ever he could. Looking back it is amazing that some white lunatic failed to assassinate him.

Paul probably told me a lot of other things as well that evening but regrettably they were lost in a haze of adulation that we simple people suddenly experience when talking to someone with whom we are completely out of our depth. Robeson was a big man in every way possible, not only did he seem to tower above me in height (and I'm six feet four inches tall) he was one of those human beings who leave you exhausted with respect when they leave you. So Paul eventually wandered on but appeared again later in the balcony of the first floor window of this large Victorian house to sing about six or seven songs to the party-goers below. I can only remember Joe Hill and Old Man River among a bunch of spirituals. But for me it was a spiritually uplifting day that I would remember forever. Well you would wouldn't you?

And so it was that I first saw Pete Seeger, (again with Ramblin' Jack Elliott), at St Pancras Town Hall Theatre on October 4th 1959. Pete had also just got his passport back. He was still under the sentence of 20 one year jail terms that were heaped upon him by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the brain child of McCarthy and his cohorts. In America Seeger had become an odd form of celebrity, only the tiniest proportion of the population knew his music yet he had started a growing cultural movement. In a way the HUAC was the making of Seeger. He seemed to enjoy right wing attacks upon him as a perverse tribute to his effectiveness. I was of course already a folk music enthusiast, but this performance by Pete totally locked me on. I remember I had a seat next to the gangway and I heard a fellow walking past me during the interval saying in a very posh voice to his friend "This fellow's terribly good, but you know he's absolutely painted red." Seeger the catalyst, Seeger the idealist, Seeger the friend, has surely been the inspiration for many performers. That day in St Pancras Town Hall he lifted me out of my seat and into another plane of thinking. To me he is the Godfather of Folk Music. Perhaps the biggest thrill in my career was travelling across the Atlantic in April 1995 to do just one concert with the man. But that is another story and another chapter in my life.

To be continued.

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