IT - Where were you born and brought up?

MW - I was born in Glasgow in I950 and I was there until I was 18. I first came to London in 1969.

IT - Did religion or politics play any part in your life at all when you were growing up?

MW - Religion didn’t, really. Politics? I suppose when I was about 15, 16 or 17 there were various influences from people in my school. Basically Left, socialist, communist influences. When I went to Glasgow University for a year at 17 or 18 I joined the Communist club there. Round about that time l first came to London, about I967, on the anti-Vietnam war march. That was the first time I came to London. At that point I had met a lot of Scottish socialists from all sorts of groups. I suppose when I came down to London at the time I was coming out to myself. At some point I wanted to leave Glasgow so I came to London. Basically l suppose l came to London as a way of coming out in a sense. Getting away from things.

IT - Going back slightly. Did you have any brothers and sisters?

MW - Yes, a brother and a sister.

IT - Did they actually stay in Glasgow or did they move away.

MW - My brother did come to London for a little while. He stayed for some time but went back to live in Aberdeen. My sister still lives in Glasgow.

IT - What kind of jobs did they have.

MW - My sister is a teacher. My brother left school quite early and went into being a shipping clerk.

IT - What work did your mother and father do.

MW - My mother for most of that time was a housewife but she did work part time as a secretary, as a shorthand typist. She played piano and did actually do some music teaching in schools for a bit as a peripatetic. A stand in for other teachers.

IT - Moving from school to school. A supply teacher.

MW - Yes, that’s it. She did a bit of that and she taught piano at home. To 8, 9, 10, 11 year olds, that sort of age range. My dad was an electrician who worked on the docks for various companies around Clydebank.

IT - Was he involved in any politics at all?

MW - Not really. He probably was in the Electricians’ Union but he certainly wasn’t an active member.

IT - So you came to London in 1967/68.

MW - I came to live in London in 1969 but I came for a visit in 1967. I think it was through the Young Communist League contingent. We came to the 1967 demo which marched passed Red Lion Square. The anti-Vietnam war thing which was enormous. About 100,000 or something.

IT - So when you came to live in London did you actually know someone there.

MW - Someone I knew at school came down here and went to live in Bayswater. I came down and he had this bedsit for 6 months until we got a bigger place. A tiny bedsit. Then after 6 months we got a basement room which was quite big. In the same house. There was another anti-Vietnam war demonstration and this friend of mine called ‘Ginger’, he was called Tom.

IT - Ginger Tom.

MW - Because of his ginger hair. He was arrested and the names of people who came up in court were in the newspapers. The landlady and landlord of this building in Bayswater ordered us to be evicted because he had been arrested on an anti-Vietnam war demonstration. They were called Mr. and Mrs. Winter-Evans. I went to the rent tribunal to protest it and they were saying “Well we think they are communists.” Appalling really.

IT - So they tried to evict you for your political views.

MW - We were evicted. They gave us two months to find another place. He (Ginger) was just arrested for running down the street away from the American Embassy.

IT - That was Grosvenor Square.

MW - Yes. So that must have been about 1969/70. As a result anyway we had 2 months to find another place and we did. I think somewhere in Holborn.

IT - So by this time you were obviously involved in Left politics.

MW - Yes, mostly through the Young Communist League. I was fairly involved then in meetings and things. I lived north of the river (Thames) then. I think it was about 1974. Then I moved to Clapham. That was 1973. I think by then I had met John Lloyd through the Young Communist League and he brought me to Brixton. “Come and see what I have found. The Brixton Gay Community Centre” (1974). I think from the first time I went there I was practically there every day. It became habit forming.

IT - Were you involved in any gay politics at all up to this point?

MW - Not at that point, no. Well, only in as much as John and I were brining up gay politics at YCL meetings.

IT - So you met John before I974?

MW - I think I must have met him about 1970.

IT - As long ago as that?

MW - Yes, because he knew me when I lived in Holborn. Yes so it must have been about 1970/71.

IT - So he brought you south of the river.

MW - No. I'd moved to Clapham anyway. I had got a bedsit on my own. I was there for about 6 months before he took me down to discover the Gay Community Centre in Brixton. At that time I think he might have lived at Tradescant Road (Vauxhall) with Eric. French Eric. Eric the Lost.

IT - So when you first came to the Gay Centre you were still living in Clapham? After that did you move into one of the squats on Railton Road?

MW - No. I stayed in Clapham until 1975. Then I moved to Warwick University campus for 10 months and then for my second and third year I lived in Coventry. A rented house. About ten pounds a week for 3 of us. I did a course on Psychology.

IT - Was that connected to Glasgow. You said you did a year there?

MW - Yes. That was natural Philosophy. That was Physics.

IT - That’s the old name for it isn’t it?

MW - Yes, they called it Natural Philosophy even in 1968. I did a year there. That’s when I had my first love affair. I fell in love with this straight man. He was bisexual I think. So in coming to London I suppose I really wanted to get away from all that as well.

IT - So you went to Coventry for how long?

MW - I was there for 3 years. I used to come down to Brixton during the breaks when I was in Coventry. Up to that point I had always had rented accommodation. I came down at Christmas and summer breaks and all the people I then knew were connected with South London Gay Liberation Front - Alastair (Kerr) and various people in the gay community squats which during the 3 years I was in Coventry had expanded to about 12 houses. Alastair said ‘come down and live here.’ I wanted to come back. I had about £50 left of my grant, in my bank account. I came back to London and I really couldn’t afford anywhere to stay. I didn’t really have any choice but to squat. I did up a damp basement in one of the houses. The room next to it was half full of trees and rubbish and plaster and cement and garden earth. That was the basement of I55 (Railton Road). I lived there for about a year before I moved up onto the ground floor of 157. It was so damp the 155 basement. It was dreadful. It had wet rot on the floors. I had to dig up the floorboards to get rid of the wet rot floorboards and fill it up with cement. Cover it over. I had to replace a broken window and put the electricity in and the gas fires. I had to do a hell of a lot of work and I managed to do it on my £50 and then basically I was unemployable in that period.

IT - When was that and how long for?

MW - That was 1978 when I actually lived in squats in Brixton. I think at that point the Centre had closed. I think it closed sometime between 1975 - 78 didn’t it.

IT - Well it was back in action in 1976. Alter the eviction we moved back in again but I think after that it went downhill. There is no definite closing date really but sometime in 1976 it would have closed.

MW - Yes, and what seemed to have happened by the time we moved back in again was....the more....some of the bisexuals had taken it over. This was the thing. They’d written slogans on the side - PEOPLE NOT POLITICS - with two ts. Do you not remember that? They used to call the old management committee of the Gay Community Centre the ‘high karate’ (hierarchy). Remember that? It was quite inventive of them I thought.

IT - Yes, there were all those arguments about who uses the Centre and who shouldn’t. All that kind of thing.

MW - Yes. It seems to be happening again and again. Even this year’s gay pride has to be gay, transsexual, transgender and all the rest to it. It‘s ridiculous. But all the people living in the squats in the gay community had lost interest in the Gay Community Centre and were moving on and doing street theatre. Brixton Faeries. They moved on from the Gay Centre to making points through theatre.

IT - When you were in 155 who else was with you?

MW - Crikey. In 155 I think Stephen Gee and John Lloyd were upstairs. It’s difficult to remember when there were such communications between....the back doors were always open. You could wander around the back gardens.

IT - There was a lot of squat hopping wasn’t there?

MW - There was a lot of squat hopping. People had been to other places or wanted to move down to the basement or into a better space. I think even Bruno lived in that house at one time. Not while I was there.

IT - I was there at some point. I started off in 159 then I zipped over to 152 Mayall Road and then over to 155 or 157. I don't know which. Actually it may have been the other way round.

MW - I can’t remember if you were in that house when I was in it. Can you remember‘?

IT - God knows. There was so much hopping around.

MW - Weren’t you in 153?

IT - Yes. I was there as well because I lived....Jim Ennis lived there at one point.

MW - Didn't Terry and Jeff live there?

IT - Yes. I think I was there when they were. I am sure I was when Jim Ennis was there. I moved through at least 3 or 4 different squats.

MW - Well I was in two. 155 and 157 for about 7 years. I think it was 6 years in I57. That would bring me up to I985. Then I move here in 1985 or 86 (Milton Road ). That means I have been here about 11 years. It was during that period when the squats were being taken over by Brixton Housing Coop. The Brixton Gay Community Housing Coop merged into BHC.

IT - It was at that point that the houses started to become converted to single person flats wasn’t it?

MW - Yes.

IT - In the squatting period were there any expectations from you in terms of building a gay community or anything like that. Or did you think about just living together as a household. Some people had quite definite ideas about making a gay community whereas others basically just needed a place to live which was just as legitimate.

MW - Well, people brought themselves there for different reasons. Often is was homelessness. It was to do with housing shortages. But also the idea of living together with lots of other gay people appealed to others. Some people made a community within a house and others moved around and related to two or three houses. Everybody had different patterns of interaction.

IT - There were different clusters of people. I remember Alastair always referring to 159 as ‘Purity Ashram’ (Piety Ashram?). That was one of his vitriolic names for people he didn’t like. Drippy hippies.

MW - 159 was kind of separate from the rest of the community. They had their own little house community. It was an experiment in communes in a sense. I saw it as that....Expectations is an interesting point because everybody came with their own expectations. They all had different expectations of what a gay community was or should be. I hope that it would be a place where people could freely interact and come out of their back doors. That it would all be one house. A much larger house. But there were some houses I didn’t want to go into myself and didn’t. There were others I went to repeatedly. I spent a lot to times in those days in 152 and 146 (both Mayall Rd). I was rarely in 159. Very rarely. I was there once for a Christmas do we had. My god, I remember that. We all put £2 in....is this interesting?

IT - Yes, it is.

MW - We all put £2 in for a Christmas do at 159. Aunty Alice (Alastair Kerr) had organised it. Jamie Hall was absolutely, totally 100 percent against it. It was like saying we were celebrating Christmas instead of saying we were celebrating Yuletide away from nuclear families. We had a really slap up meal. For £2 a head it was an enormous amount of food. We stuffed ourselves and gorged ourselves and Jamie Hall went to Barnardos as he did each Christmas time to feed the homeless and the down and outs. The first day we had a fabulous meal. On the second day there was so much food left over that we were able to repeat it. Jamie came in that day and joined in. But he gave us all such a fucking guilt trip. I had the worst headache I had ever had in my whole life. Too much wine as well. I had the most splitting headache. The tensions between someone saying it was much better to go and feed the down and outs than to greedily indulge in a yuletide, winter, stuffing-your-stomachs festival. To stretch your stomachs for the next three months of horrible winter.

It did fulfil some sort of function. Stuffing yourself at that time of year because the next three months are going to be cold. So you need to eat more in the winter. So I could see a very good reason for doing it and as far as I was concerned I was not repeating the Christmas meal. It was completely different being surrounded by other gay people. I can‘t remember all the people who were there. There was about ten of us.

IT - All from the squats?

MW - Yes. I remember Alastair and Jamie Hall because the tension was between them. It was a big issue you know. To think about it now. At £2 a head it was fuck all. It might be £10 now or even £20 we spent in todays’ monetary value. That must have been around I980 or something. Round about then.

IT - A big feast.

MW - Yes, but it wasn’t like Henry and Andreas’ one which I think was in summer.

IT - Have you any idea when that was?

MW - It might have been Henry or Andreas’ birthday. Summer or Autumn time. I979 or ’80. It could have been early on. In fact I was going to move in to 148 Mayall when I came down from Coventry but Henry and Andreas moved in before me....I actually did stay in Alastair’s room one summer (146 Mayall) when he went off to Canada. I also stayed above the Gay Community Centre when Alastair went away for three months. He was living above the Gay Centre as caretaker and I did it for three months. I looked after floats for tea and biscuits and things like that. It was absolutely incredible that period. I couldn’t have done it for longer than three months. But it was amazing. I mean Alastair did it for about three years. I also stayed in his room when he moved to I46. Between ‘75 and ‘78 after the Centre was closed and it was adjacent to Henry and Andreas’ chicken coup on the other side on Railton Road because at that point they weren‘t in 148 they were in 151 or I53 Railton.

I remember waking up one morning when the sun was shining through thin curtains, round about sunrise, hearing this reed music in my head; flutes, clarinets, oboes and chor anglais playing. I came really slowly to consciousness and this reed music panned into a whole gaggle of clucking hens. What I‘d heard in my dreams were the hens but it had sounded like this beautiful reed music. The woodwind section of an orchestra playing music. I came too and realised it was the hens clucking. I will never forget that. It was a wonderful experience having the hens clucking becoming this beautiful music....that (for me) before I actually moved in was what made those back gardens, what we called Brixton Fairyland, a unique place. Quite a wonderful place in the middle of a city. I suppose an experience like that, which wasn’t a human interaction experience, was like a good ‘vibe’ from the place as well as the people. 146 back window was certainly used as a back door. It was level with outside.

IT - Can you remember any of the theatre stuff that we did?

MW - I think Brixton Faeries had street theatre didn’t they? Mr. Punch.

IT - That was in the Gay Centre but also round the comer from there at Effra Parade Primary school I think. They had a local fair in the playground and we did little extracts from it.

MW - That was between ‘75 and ‘78. I didn’t see that one. I missed that one. In fact by the time I came along you had done two or three different shows.

IT - We did ‘Out of It’ after that and then we moved on to the Jeremy Thorpe one - ‘Minehead Revisited’.

MW - I was involved in that one.

IT - And ‘Tomorrow’s Too Late’ which was a sort of sketch about WH Smith after they’d banned Gay News. But you were in the Jeremy Thorpe one.

MW - I can’t remember.

IT - Yes you were. You were one of the gay norns.

MW — Oh, yes of course I was. How could I forget that.

IT - Because we had that element from Macbeth in it.

MW - Yes, with the three ugly sisters.

IT - The three witches which I think Stephen Gee insisted should be gay Norns and not the three witches. Allusions to Wagner.

MW - Three gay norns, yes. I had loads of make up on and carried an incense stick and wore a long green cloak. The weird sisters.

IT - That’s right there was you, Jim Ennis and Julian.

MW -They wore drag as well didn't they. I was in sort of hot pants and Knee-high purple boots and a green cloak.

IT - Brilliant.

MW - I mean the three of us looked like our costumes were designed by three completely different designers with no knowledge about what part we were playing. Weird. Then we did some street theatre things on Shakespeare Road.

IT - Yes we did....Julian and the tree....I think you were in that.

MW - Yes I was. That was in the school. St. Jude’s school in Regents Road (Railton Road) We did something there for the old age pensioners and the girl guides. That was a a result of doing a street party with a big dragon that Henry had made. Do you remember that. I was the rear end of a dragon. St. George and the Dragon on Shakespeare Road for the residents and children. It was some historical occasion. Jack Thompson I think organised it and got us to come along to a street party. Don’t you remember that one?

IT - I do not.

MW - The dragon was sort of made out of plastic hoops and nice, pastel coloured material. There was someone in the front end of the dragon holding the frame and someone at the back with an umbrella that held up the back and I was the rear end of the dragon. The dragon had a song which Stephen Gee wrote and Colm Clifford murdered by getting the notes wrong....All the kids heard was ‘I’m a dragon and they say I’m bad, they say I’m crazy and they say I’m mad, but I’m okay ‘cos I’m pink and gay, dragons rule okay....tra...la..la...lala (repeat). I think it was a Johann Strauss waltz that Stephen had chosen in our little rehearsals in the back gardens. When we actually got on to the street and the dragon came to sing its song Colm was leading it. When he came to sing the song the words were okay but it came to sound like ‘Im a lumberjack’ from Monty Python. It was hysterical. But anyway we got away with singing these words in a street party with all these straight families. It was quite outrageous and we were giving sweets away to the kids. It was a fun day. We had little competitions for the children.

There was some controversy over Jack Thompson’s wife’s hat. Everybody had costumes and things and she’d made a hat. Julian was slapped up to the nines in all sorts of garish colours. Jack Thompson’s wife had a hat and she’d cut out children from a catalogue. These clothes and fashion catalogues. Mail order. Shed cut out all these children’s faces and put them round her hat and every single one of them was white. At least half the kids in the street were black. She was walking around with this hat. People were a bit. ...I didn’t actually see anyone challenge her but I think somebody did point it out. Then after that Jack got us to do the Old Age Pensioners show.

IT - You must have been a hit then.

MW - We were a hit. With an openly gay song sung to the wrong tune. Yes we were asked to the OAP’s and the girl guides. We did various sketches. There was Andreas in a blond wig doing the ironing. There was Julian and the Tree and you read Henry's poems didn’t you.

IT - I can’t remember.

MW - Yes, you read it. Henry had written these poems in rhyming couplets wasn’t it. About Julian and the Tree and the Tree Fairy. I remember Jack Thompson sitting in the back row with the school headmaster, and Julian when he came out of the tree, was wearing a white leotard. Part of his genitals were protruding out of the side and were pirating around all over the place. Jack Thompson and the headmaster were making comments about this should not be displayed in front of the girl guides. Then there was ‘Salome‘. We actually plagiarised from ‘Bloolips’. I played the head of John the Baptist.

IT - How did you do that.

MW - Well, they cut out a tray and put silver foil around it. They stuck an apple in my mouth. I had the tray around my neck and that long green cloak hiding the rest of me. So somebody carried the tray and I looked like the head on the tray.

IT - How did we get away with it

MW - Then we did the money thing with large seven-sided 50p coins, seven septagrams. One side was painted black and we arranged our dance routine so that when we turned them round it read ‘Increase Old Age Pensions Now’ then we placed them all together.

IT - Did we do the Banana song (Bloolips)

MW - Oh, yes. (he sings part of the Banana Song):

B-a-n-a-n-a-s, bananas,You can eat them in tuxedos and pyjamas,

We love them here, we love them there,

We even love them in our hair

So share....a banana with a friend.

B-a-n-a-n-a-s, they slide down,

They spread with perfect ease, they simply glide down,

We love to hear you shout ‘Ole’ if your banana is okay

‘Ole’....a banana rules the day.

It‘s weird I can remember some of that.

IT - That’s excellent because part of the problem with the play scripts is a lot of the songs are missing.

MW - I can tell you another one that Alastair did. Do you know the Teddy Bears’ picnic. have you got the text of that.

IT - I don’t think I have.

MW - He sings it:

If you go down in the woods today you’re sure of a big surprise,

A fee or a fine or a life in the nick if you haven’t got family ties.

For every gay that ever there was is persecuted simply because

they don’t conform to the hetero norm of loving.

Picnic time for heteros

those little heteros are having a lovely time today.

See them as they bash the queers

dispelling all their fears there little ones might tum out that way.

See the big wigs freaking out

to wipe the gay world out is their aim and they’re so obsessed.

At 6 o’clock the gays in the dock will be safely locked away....

OR WILL TI-IEY....

IT - Yes I remember that. Because that came from Bradford’s play ‘Present Your Briefs’ but we changed the words slightly. To heteros rather than magistrates. There are quite a few songs missing from Mr. Punch but perhaps Stephen Gee or John Lloyd will remember them. But that’s excellent about the Dragon song from the street. That is something new for me to think about.

MW - Yes, I got my toes trodden on that day. I was wearing these open-toed sandels and the children kept chasing the dragon. Matthew Jones who had the dragon’s head kept reversing backwards at rapid pace and standing on my toes. The play didn’t start until we had been walking up and down the road for about 3 hours. So by the time it started we were knackered. Colm took over the dragon’s head from Matthew.

IT - With ‘Minehead Revisited’, the Jeremy Thorpe play, can you remember when we actually did that and where. There was one occasion at the Waterloo Action Centre which I think was part of a Gay Pride Week do.

MW - They also did it in Brighton.

IT - Was that a CHE conference?

MW - Yeah. Fucking hell. We went there with it and there was big controversy over whether the....the gay norns had to say some lines like ‘come out on the streets with us and riot.’ Jim Ennis wanted to jump off the stage at that point. Who was directing? Was it Stephen‘? Well he didn’t want us to jump off the stage. I can’t remember what we did in the end but we had 200 as an audience. The biggest audience we had ever had. Julian got a van to take these three enormous doors that were hinged together. It was the heaviest fucking set we had. We got that set all the way to Brighton and set up. I mean it was a real feat. An absolute nightmare. I swore I would never do it again. But I did end up going years late up to the Edinburgh Festival with the Vauxhall Kunst Theatre.

IT - Is there anything else that you find memorable from those times?

MW - God, there’s loads of stuff.

IT - You did quite a lot with the Vauxhall Kunst Theater didn’t you?

MW - Yes. The all-male version of ‘Dido Queen of Carthage’ (based on 'Dido Queen of Carthage' by Christopher Marlowe) which we took to the Edinburgh festival. We met Bloolips there at a party that we went to afterwards...

I mean, I remember things about the Gay Community like Brixton Housing Co-op taking over the houses and everybody wanting to buy them to keep the garden communal. I went to a public meeting by the council (Lambeth) about the site for a proposed health clinic and family planning centre that they were going to build on that area.....that complex that they wanted to build from I51 to I59 Railton Road. I remember going to Myatts fields to a councillors meeting to raise objections about it. We wanted them to build it from I41 to I51 Railton. Where it currently is now. If they had built it the next block up it would have destroyed those gardens between the houses. So I was instrumental....I went along to Kings College Hospital Area Health Authority meeting. I went on my own with some other straight guy from a local residents association to get them to try and relocate the site further down. Eventually they did agree. But they ran out of the million pounds for the family centre so it was only the health clinic that got built. The rest of the houses then remained squatted. When Brixton Gay Community Housing Coop joined the Brixton Housing Coop they purchased the houses. They also bought the Mayall Road houses and in the design of the flats I was also instrumental in pushing for single person units...