MB Reed

Author and mathematician

 

Footnotes for 'Events of 1968', Chapters 5-13


Chapter 5: Insemination

  1. In our world it was in 1974 that the Conservative Party (under Edward Heath) narrowly lost the general election, resulting in a hung Parliament.

  2. The description of a dismal pre-1968 Britain uses my own memories. I was told that in Northern Ireland, Council workers used to chain up the swings in the playground on a Sunday to satisfy the Protestant churches. I heard the anecdote about the Mount Snowdon Railway on the Terry Wogan Show on BBC radio.

  3. Benares was the old name for modern day Varanasi.

  4. The University of East Anglia was one of the new universities created by Harold Wilson’s government - called plate-glass as distinct from the old red-brick ones. The University Plain was built from scratch in a river valley outside Norwich, as a massive concrete Teaching Wall across the valley, with the Schools connected by walkways. The different Schools were known by TLAs (three-letter acronyms): MAP, EUR, SOC, etc. The student accommodation was in the Ziggurats, five-storey semi-pyramids. In my first year I lived at Pipers Lane, a former RAF base, but in my final year I was in a ziggurat. If you see the final episode 13 of the Kenneth Clark BBC TV series Civilisation, 40 minutes in, it shows UEA as the brave new world of the future, making student life look like a Club Mediterranee - which it was. Here’s an aerial view of the Plain in 1968.

  5. I know about the 38th July Movement at UEA because I and a group of friends invented it.

  6. UCCA has now become UCAS (Universities and Colleges Admissions Service).

  7. Check out Tariq Ali and Bertrand Russell on Wikipedia. The chant Jo - Jo - Jomo K! refers to Jomo Kenyatta, who fought for Kenyan independence. In my day we chanted Ho - Ho - Ho Chi Minh!

Chapter 6: Exhilaration

  1. King Edward VIII had some shady friends. Baron Granville resembles Kenneth de Courcy who worked to get Edward restored to the throne. In 1964 he was jailed for seven years for fraud. But at least Edward didn’t mirror our current Royal Family’s association with paedophiles.

  2. The glider flight was the best and most memorable experience of my school life.

Chapter 7: Information

  1. Baron Granville’s speech in Downing St was copied in our own world by Margaret Thatcher when she entered No 10 in 1979.

  2. Horst Wessel was a Berlin Sturmführer of the Sturmabteilung, the Nazi Party’s stormtroopers. After his killing in 1930, he was made into a martyr for the Nazi cause by Joseph Goebbels. (Wikipedia)

Chapter 8: Conversation

  1. Little Lord Fauntleroy: A person who is spoiled, conceited, and characterized by a pompous air of decadence, intellectualism, and moral superiority. (thefreedictionary.com)

  2. The Walking Buddha in the British Museum is pictured here.

Chapter 9: Unionisation

  1. The Schools Democracy Union is based on the Schools Action Union, formed in 1969. It organised a national school strike in 1972. It soon became dominated by Maoists.

  2. Prince George was the youngest of King Edward’s brothers. In our world he died in 1941 in a plane crash while on a mysterious wartime mission. In Tommy’s world hostilities had ended the previous year, so George survives and is tipped to succeed Edward when the King dies. He has a major role in The Hammond Conjecture.

  3. Arthur Scargill led an unofficial miners strike in 1969.

  4. The International Socialists became the Socialist Workers Party in 1977.

Chapter 10: Intimidation

  1. The Paedophile Information Exchange was a British pro-paedophile activist group, founded in October 1974 and officially disbanded in 1984. It was indeed affiliated to the National Council for Civil Liberties now known as Liberty. Its members hotline was answered from within the Home Office, and it is alleged to have received Government funding.

  2. At this time, Germaine Greer was an assistant lecturer at Warwick University, appeared on TV with Kenny Everett, and wrote for Oz magazine and Private Eye.

Chapter 11: Conflagration

  1. The features of the General Strike, including the Office for the Maintenance of Supplies and the phrases in Granville’s and the king’s speeches, are taken from the events in the General Strike of 1926.

  2. A three-day week was introduced in 1973 by Edward Heath’s Tory government, in response to a crippling miners’ strike.
  3. Anarcho-Syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society (Wikipedia). The link shows the anarcho-syndicalist flag.

Chapter 12: Confrontation

  1. For the Angry Brigade and to read its communiques click here.

  2. The dinosaurs are in Crystal Palace Park in South London. They were created in the 1850s and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert visited them several times. They are still there today.

  3. Tony Blair famously referred to Diana as ‘The People’s Princess’ when announcing her death.

Chapter 13: Initiation

  1. For more details of the divided city of Paris, see the description of Hugh’s trip there in The Hammond Conjecture.

  2. Ecaf (face) and omi (man) are words from the Polari gay slang language, popular among London homosexuals in the 1960s and brought to public attention by the characters of Julian and Sandy played by Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) in the radio show Round the Horne.