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The Guardian
27-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Caroline O'Reilly obituary
My life partner, Caroline O'Reilly, who has died aged 71, was a fearless community activist and socialist. In the 1970s, when I first met her, Caroline was active in Southall, west London, helping to establish Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and was with her friend Blair Peach when he was killed by police in 1979. Later, having moved to Hackney, in east London, she organised against the poll tax. Caroline was a member of the Socialist Workers party from 1977 until she died, and was fond of paraphrasing Rosa Luxemburg that 'revolutionaries are the best fighters for reform'. In 1985 she toured South Africa on a covert solidarity visit, and in 1990 worked in Johannesburg with accountants who assisted 'struggle organisations'. In 1998 she and I moved to South Africa on a permanent basis. Caroline was involved in implementing the government-funded Community Work Programme, which, by 2012, employed 93,000 people in the most marginalised parts of the country. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Caroline played a pivotal role in the two most successful organisations to emerge from grassroots activity, the Community Organising Working Group and #PayTheGrants, both based in townships and informal settlements. Born in Cork, she was the oldest of the six children of Frank O'Reilly, a bank official, and Anne, a housewife; she went to school there, and, later, to schools in Carlow and Bundoran. She attended University College Cork, where she was involved in starting one of the first women's groups in Ireland, but at the end of her second year she moved to Britain. She worked in a canning factory in Lincolnshire, and then a pub in London, and from 1973 was employed by the Allied Irish Bank in the City, where she was a union representative. Seeking to develop herself intellectually, in 1990 she began to study information and communication at the University of North London. Later, while working for Christian Aid, she completed an MSc in development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. For most of our 27 years in South Africa Caroline and I lived in the Johannesburg suburb of Brixton, where she was part of the Community Forum. Before our return to London in 2024, she was honoured with a quilt made by community members. Caroline was adventurous and courageous. She stood up to violence, was shot at by soldiers in Belfast, ran out of breath on Mount Kenya, was charged by elephants in Botswana, was caught in sudden snow blizzards on the Cairngorms and in the Drakensberg mountains, and coped with me coming out as transgender. She could stun with one sentence, but was funny and warm. She made you laugh at yourself but you never felt ridiculed, just grateful for her advice, support, friendship and love. She is survived by me, and by her siblings Michael, Mary, Conor and Sally.
The Guardian
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Johnny Green obituary
In footage of the punk band the Clash as they pile onstage at Rock Against Racism in Victoria Park, east London, in 1978, there's a glimpse of the road manager Johnny Green and his two young daughters Acorn and Goldy. In his 1997 book A Riot of Our Own: Night and Day With the Clash, John wrote: 'I felt quite proud that my kids had come to see Daddy at work. A guy in a silk tour jacket [a roadie from another band] said, 'Who let these kids up here?' I said, 'I did. So what?'' Three decades on, at the first Latitude festival in 2006, John reacquainted himself with an old compadre from punk days, John Cooper Clarke, and before long had become the poet's 'gentleman travelling companion'. He remained so for 15 years, reprising his Clash role of cutting through the bullshit and ensuring smooth passage to places such as the Baths Hall, Scunthorpe. But John, who has died aged 75, was not just a road man. As often as not he would be up on stage himself, riffing with Cooper Clarke or reading from A Riot of Our Own (written with Garry Barker), his inside track on days with the Clash. Born John Broad in Chatham, Kent, to Margery (nee Tall) and Jack Broad, both primary school teachers, John spent his early years on the Twydall estate in Gillingham then went to Gillingham grammar school. On leaving he sold Gandalf's Garden and International Times in Medway towns, then worked in wholefoods collectives in Yorkshire and Snowdonia with Richenda Watterson, the mother of Acorn and Goldy, whom he had married in 1969. He graduated from Lancaster University with a degree in Arabic and Islamic studies in 1977, but, his marriage dissolved, a chance conversation led to him travelling to Belfast to help out with the Clash tour. He stayed with the band – who supplied the Johnny Green moniker – for two years. He was known for letting waifs and strays into Clash gigs without paying, but on tour in the US in 1980 he felt the pure moment of punk had evaporated, and left. John moved to Lubbock, Texas, worked with the country musician Joe Ely, and married a designer, Lindy Poltock, with whom he had two sons, Earl and Dirk. Both she and Dirk died of pneumococcal meningitis in 1983. Rudderless for a while, John ended up back in Kent. At teacher-training college in Canterbury in 1985 he met Janette Border. The pair married and settled in Whitstable in 1991 with Earl; two daughters, Polly and Ruby, followed. John taught RE in north Kent secondary schools before taking the same gonzo modus operandi employed in Riot to cycling, for Push Yourself Just a Little Bit More (2005), his irreverent backstage account of the Tour de France. I had the pleasure of editing John's books. He was a brilliant raconteur: thoughtful, astute and hilarious; everything – from Rimbaud 'the original punk', Eddy Merckx's perfect hair, the life and times of Gillingham centre-half Barry Ashby, life in Yemen – was processed through the Broad/Green filter, to emerge in needle-sharp prose on the page, the stage or in everyday conversation. John is survived by Janette, his children, and four grandchildren.
The Guardian
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Resistance review – a captivating century of protest and photography
Taking us from the founding of the suffragette movement in 1903 to the vast demonstrations against the Iraq war in 2003, Resistance presents us with a century of protest in Britain, of causes and gatherings and acts of defiance. A hundred years of reasons, of inequalities and wrongs and rights, of marches and riots, of peaceful sit-downs and kiss-ins, of fortitude and dissent and things kicking off. Things can get ugly. A fire bomb in the road, marbles under the horses' hooves. Not resisting is uglier. Resistance also presents us with 100 years of photographs. Filled with incident and detail, personal shots and anonymous press images, documentary series and photographs found in archives and culled from collections, they range from journalistic assignments to surreptitious surveillance images, pictures by famous photographers and by anonymous agency ones. Conceived by Steve McQueen and curated by Clarrie Wallis, it is a show of fractured continuities and swerving vantage points. All the images have been scanned in black and white and hung in black frames. There are a few sepia-toned photos but no colour images. All the prints are relatively small and invite close looking. They gather and disperse and they march around the walls of the Turner Contemporary. The images home in and they pull back. We see crowds on the move and groups of the unemployed lying in the road to disrupt the traffic on Oxford Street. Protesters occupy tree houses high above the proposed Newbury bypass and they dance on the missile silos at Greenham Common. We find ourselves in courtrooms and cells, marching among millions and watching Arthur Scargill on the telly in someone's sitting room in the north-east of England. There's disenfranchised lassitude and the amazing creativity of the squatters who occupied scaffolding towers and netting above a row of houses to prevent their eviction. A couple dance wildly at an early Caribbean carnival in St Pancras Town Hall in 1959, sound systems are rigged-up in Notting Hill and anti-Iraq war activist Brian Haw begins his 670th day of protest opposite the Houses of Parliament in 2003 (his vigil lasted a decade, until his death in 2011). There are riots in the Bogside; Tom Robinson performing at a Rock Against Racism carnival; anti-racists blocking a National Front demonstration in New Cross; and Humphrey Spender documenting the Great Depression in 1936, photographing kids playing in a derelict street in Jarrow and unemployed Tyneside workers on the Newcastle quay, the Tyne Bridge looming behind them. Images such as Spender's, published in the popular Picture Post, gained enormous currency. Subtitled How Protest Shaped Britain and Photography Shaped Protest, the exhibition ends at a point when social media and advances in smartphone technology began to irrevocably change our relationship with images, as well as the relationship between photographs and videos and truth. The exhibition is compelling in all sorts of ways. As social history, as documentary, as eye-witness report and as remembering, whether it is of the unemployment marches of the 1930s or the protests against the overwhelming silence surrounding the deaths of 13 young people in a house fire in New Cross in 1981. Resistance is more than a parade of markers or a timeline of dissent. Well-known protests such as the Grunwick Dispute in 1976-8, in which a group of mostly Indian female workers from east Africa walked out of the film processing factory in west London where they suffered low wages, intimidation and exploitation, or the demonstration against the poll tax in 1990, the battles for gay liberation and against Section 28, also meet largely forgotten protests here; members of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds protest 'against the use of egret feathers in hats' at a demonstration in London in 1911, and blind people march from cities around England and Wales to London in 1920, petitioning for 'Justice not Charity'. In the early 1990s, disabled protesters hold a 'Piss on Pity' campaign challenging ITV's patronising, celebrity telethon appeals, and 30 years on we have 'crip rights' and protests. It is easy to get caught up in the incidental details. The policeman wheeling his bike behind the Jarrow marchers. The kid, knock-kneed, hands in the pockets of his shorts, staring at the photographer Christine Spengler while she's taking a picture of a young British soldier on a Belfast corner in 1970. I do a double-take. The kid's wearing a weirdly comical mask, his own resistance to the presence of soldiers on the streets. The young unemployed sit on the floor and lean at the counter in the dole office, in Tish Murtha's 1981 series Youth Unemployment. From the same series, kids leap from a high window on to a pile of old mattresses in a wretched, partly demolished housing block. An onlooker in the image is holding a ventriloquist's dummy, which looks back out at us, a sort of bug-eyed rejoinder to our looking. John Deakin, then working for Picture Post, took a group of portraits of delegates at the 1945 Pan African Congress in Manchester. These included Jomo Kenyatta, future president of Kenya, and Jamaican Pan-African activist Amy Garvey. The photographer's close friend Francis Bacon called Deakin the greatest portrait photographer since Nadar and Julia Margaret Cameron. We meet individuals as well as crowds here; Tony Benn, speaking in Trafalgar Square during the Suez crisis, and Bertrand Russell, at an anti-nuclear missile protest in 1961 ('Bertrand Russell – King of the kids!', my father used to shout, whenever the aged philosopher appeared on the television). Oswald Mosley, in ridiculous jodhpurs and riding boots, exchanges a fascist salute with his blackshirt followers at a 1936 rally, and here's Mosley again, rallying a postwar crowd. He's ditched his absurd uniform of strongman leather belt and the boots by now. Mosley's pre-war antisemitism gave way, by the 1970s, to the National Front and broader attacks on immigration and the Black and Asian population, leading to mass demonstrations and shows of revulsion against them. Sometimes resistance has to go on and on and it must never stop. An anti-fascist protester is led away after a mounted police baton charge during the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and a week later fire runs in the gutter on another East End street. There are flashpoints and long-terms protest, hunger strikes and a picture of a 'dirty protester' incarcerated in Belfast's Maze Prison, smuggled out in 1979. We find covert police images of suffragettes, and another of them in court (the camera hidden in the photographer's hat). The stories bolster the images and keep the whole thing alive. The exhibition and accompanying book – with numerous essays by Gary Younge, Paul Gilroy, Baroness Chakrabarti and others, and including first-hand accounts of protest movements and acts of resistance – has been several years in the making. McQueen's highly personal introduction recounts his going to a Saturday school, one of several set up by Black families to help children who were being failed by the education system. It was here that McQueen learned to draw, and to gain confidence. Eventually he went to art school. The first demonstration he went on was against the introduction of student tuition fees in 1988. He knows he could not have gone to art school if he'd had to pay. 'My own resistance started with me loving myself,' he writes. 'My resistance was my courage to dare and push my ability.' Resistance is inspiring. Resistance is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, from 22 February to 1 June
