In the The Last Interview in 1987/88, Ewan MacColl recounts "one the best pieces of literature I've ever encountered" it was graffiti on a wall facing Bondi Beach in Australia where in eight foot high letters someone had scrawled `Demand Everything'
This statement and attitude just about sums up Ewan MacColl's raison d'etre for the working class to `demand everything' meant equality of opportunity, equality of art, equality of justice and equality of life. He spent his life `demanding everything' from hunger marches to the fight for a theatre of the people. And he wasn't disheartened along the way...
"If one worried about backing a loser one would not take part in politics" he explained in a documentary for Granada TV in 1985 "Anybody who has ever been involved in political struggle, particularly in working class struggle, must accept the fact, for the major part of their life, they're going to be involved in losing battles, on the losing side in battles. If I'd have been afraid of that I'd have packed it up after I joined the YCL in 1929 and spent my time, with a lot of other people, trying to alert people to the dangers of Japanese imperialism when they entered Manchukuo...
"...I'd have given up in 1932 when we were trying to alert people to the dangers of Hitler coming to power, I'd have given up during the Abyssinian War when Mussolini's bombers were bombing Ethiopians, I'd have given it up at every single stage of the struggle ever since" he added "One goes on fighting because not to go on fighting is to prove that you're no longer alive."
It was a theme Ewan MacColl returned to in The Last Interview, when asked about his song Lament For The Death Of A Nobody...and the lyric `asking for too little was his crime'...
"It was a song about a man who spent his whole life serving the bosses without ever once resisting them" he explained "Yes I'm angry with such people...It takes a hell of a lot more energy to put up with that than it does to fight back. To fight back is a release, it's a statement that you are human, it's a statement of identity; that I am somebody...I'm not just a cipher, I'm not just a play figure to be moved around...not just a pawn on a chessboard...If you don't fight back they've succeeded in dehumanising you..."
And the things Ewan MacColl was fighting back against and the methods of communication haven't changed much today. The Battle of Bexley Square at Salford Town Hall was centred around cuts to welfare benefits, unaffordable energy and wage cuts in the public sector (see Part 1).
The words that he wrote about the 1931 protest in his autobiography, Journeyman, could have been written now...
"One attacks the enemy at his weakest point and that point is the three-million unemployed and their families. So let's have no more of this human dignity claptrap. And let us hear no more about equality of sacrifice or grinning and bearing it, or how we British can take it. Don't bother trying to conceal your contempt for us and we won't try to conceal our hatred of you."
The protest was publicised by chalking slogans and announcements on walls around Salford using `cheap and effective' blue mould - `the porous, chalk-like substance which housewives use to brighten up their window sills and doorsteps'...Now we use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter walls.
Ewan MacColl was part of the pioneering movement that used new methods to inform working class people of what was going on from performing agitprop plays on the streets, precincts and outside factories, to persuading trade unions like NUPE to record songs about struggle... "as the unions started to come under attack from the renascent Tory Party they began to say...`We must have more ways of hitting back than the traditional ones', and they decided that songs could be a way'..." He worked with everyone from miners to bin men and engineers to `hit back' through song. Something which the NUPE successor, UNISON, did brilliantly recently with Nxtgen's Andrew Lansley Rap
Ewan MacColl's life was about `demanding everything', and encouraging ordinary people to `demand everything'. The secret of MacColl's success was that he was born and bred in the conditions of the working class...from Lower Broughton, Salford. And he never forgot it.
Ewan MacColl 25th January 1915-22nd October 1989
"To fight back is a release, it's a statement that you are human, it's a statement of identity; that I am somebody...I'm not just a cipher, I'm not just a play figure to be moved around...not just a pawn on a chessboard...If you don't fight back they've succeeded in dehumanising you..."
See also:
Ewan MacColl Centenary - A Salford Tribute Part 1 - click here
Ewan MacColl Centenary - Dirty Old Town - Part 2 - click here
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
(3).jpeg)
.png)
(1).JPG)
