Part of the introduction from 'The Conspiracy of Good Taste' by Stefan Szczelkun published by WORKING PRESS 1993 9.95 pounds sterling. ISBN 1 870736 69 9. THE STORY OF HOW THIS PERCEPTION DEVELOPED. In 1971 I was in The Scratch Orchestra* when it was visiting Newcastle and the North East to do its 'dealer concert' series. These became notorious through the media sensationalising Greg Brights piece 'Sweet FA'. The local papers reported that the well known composer Cornelius Cardew had written 'fuck' on scraps of paper and handed them to children. At about the same time I was preparing my study of basic shelters, later to be published by Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton as 'Survival Scrapbook 1: Shelter.'. Unicorn Bookshop, with the beat poet Bill Butler at the helm, had itself recently been taken to court in one of the rash of obscenity trials at around this time; I think it was for selling 'The Little Red Schoolbook'. We were camping just outside Newcastle near the village of Overton. Just across the river was a brightly coloured settlement of about fifty 'shanty' houses. These intrigued me. They were startlingly different from the normal speculative, council or vernacular housing. Many were based on an inventive adaptations that had grown from a basic van or shed. Their improvised collage of found or cheap materials had a direct parallel in our activity in the Scratch Orchestra and I took a morning off to photographs them. Later as I travelled about the country I discovered more and more of these shanties. Although they enjoyed a minor architectural vogue at the time and I wrote short articles for Architectural Design Magazine and Radical Technology, it was to be almost twenty years before the full implications of my fascination with these structures would become clear to me. The realisation was first intimated through an unpublished thesis by Phil Wren at Hull School of Architecture where I had a part time job around 1983. In this he pointed out that the growth of British shanties was a product of the urban populations successful struggle for increased leisure time. So the shanties were a product of proletarian culture! Although there were clear influences at work, such as the colonial chalet with veranda, the architectural language also incorporated much that was unique. I realised that my attraction was based on a deep recognition of my own cultural heritage. I empathised with such structures more strongly that with, say, a conventionally beautiful Palladian villa. Phil Wren also mentioned Clough Williams Ellis as one of the principal critics of the shanties, which during the twenties and thirties had grown into scale of activity, which could compete with the mortgage ethos, as a method of creating homes. Ellis, a gentleman socialist, had pronounced the shanties as "Englands most disfiguring disease". He and his cronies led various campaigns against them culminating in the 1947 Town & Country Planning Act. From the published accounts that I looked up in the RIBA library in Portland Place, London it seems they were not aware of the violence implicit in this closure of an important form of working class culture. A year after Phil Wren had written his thesis Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward published a comprehensive study of the whole phenomena, 'Arcadia for All, subtitled 'The Legacy of a Makeshift Landscape', but I didn't see a copy until I ordered it from the publishers years later. The next chance event that influenced this line of thought was when I came home in the middle of a TV programme that was showing how the revered William Morris's Arts & Crafts movement had helped to create a romantic myth about the British countryside, This had contributed to the formation of a modern English National identity in preparation for the first world war. Unfortunately I didn't find out the name of the programme or its director, as the implication of what I had seen sank in only slowly. Basically the great socialist hero William Morris, whose goodness was always meant to have been beyond reproach, was creating a notion of Englishness which was based on highly romantic, unreal and sanitised picturing of the culture of the 'typical' rural person of some hundred years ago. This 'roses-round-the-porch' interpretation of rural working class heritage was presented as quintessentialy English; And well worth dying for. Millions obliged in the next two world wars leaving its inevitable wake of terror and horrification. William Morris the immaculate socialist hero ! The person every young artist with a social conscience is directed to study... That enemy of imperialism... So sensitive to human suffering and beauty...so appreciative of the work of craftspeople...could this person really have contributed to the horrors of modern nationalism! Could this person have so misrepresented working class history? My suspicions mounted, another gentleman socialist who seemed to be involved in the repression of proletarian cultural autonomy... Soon after this I went up to Luton, to see Grahams Harwoods mural in a youth club which was derived from his work in IF COMIC 1. In the youth club dustbin I found a couple of copies of the Folk Music Review in which was a review of Pete Harkers book 'Fakesong; the manufacture of English folksong from 1700 to the present day. This argues that Cecil Sharpe, a major figure in defining English Folk music, had been yet another well-bred gentleman socialist, who had been busy misrepresenting working class culture for the common good. Obviously there was something going on here... Three in a row deserved further investigation...it seemed that the key to my own cultural alienation might reside here... After several discussions with Howard Slater, the picture was becoming clear; As the cities grew and people, living poorly and in harsh conditions, were in greater concentration than at any time in the past. Inevitably these new conditions would give rise to new cultural relations; culture which would give expression to the potential of this new intensification of human community. In the sheer numbers there was power. Power for a political overthrow of the class system that had never existed before. The French Revolution of February 1848 had signalled the end of the European aristocratic monopoly of power. On the 10th April of the same year the Chartists, known for their quasi autonomous and co-operative cultural forms, gathered on Kennington Common, in South London*. The Chartists demonstrated the power of the organised proletariat. The threat of their march on Westminster had caused the aristocracy and middle classes to unite and stop them by force of arms. From then on the threat of the new urban classes was taken seriously...with subsequent programmes of repression. The realisation of direct, unmediated political power depends on the ability of everyday culture to express, channel and evolve social needs. The upper classes sensed this and the importance of control in the cultural arena. In his book, 'Worship and Work' published in 1913, Samual Barnett, the philantropist who set up Toynbee Hall;* "...was convinced that the classes had become segregated in their pleasures, and that the poor were developing their own style of life which would eventually render them antagonistic to all established authority." Worship & Work Letchworth 1913 quoted Waters P.68. I then met John Roberts, the art critic, which led me to the discovery of the book by Chris Waters, 'British Socialists and the Politics of Popular culture 1884-1914' which validated these thoughts with a mass of historical material. At 29 pounds odd the book itself was beyond my pocket so I obtained a copy from the publishers by arranging to do a review for Variant Magazine. Apparently, middle class philantropists, do gooders and socialists had been at work since the 1850s to ensure that the working class were denied culture at all.. Ellis, Morris and Sharpe were just some of the more charismatic examples of a mass of middle class enthusiasts who led us well and truly up the garden path. This suddenly went a good way to explain the lack of culture that I had been born into. The vacuity I felt. 'Socialism' had been led or taken over by a series of well heeled leaders who interpreted the 'elevation' of the working classes only in terms of their own values. Values that they of course assumed were universal achievements and represented objective standards of excellence. If you were a Socialist you wanted to redistribute this civilised culture to all less fortunate members of humanity. For what intelligent person would not welcome the benefits of civilisation! If they weren't grateful it only proved they were deficient or irretrievably damaged by poverty. One more reason for strong leadership from the class 'born to lead'. In the middle of the most violent repression they were quite convinced of their generosity, They were doing people a good turn. In fact their vile victory was to persuade the majority of the people that their betterment only existed in middle class terms. At the same time their own incipient urban culture was so inferior, it was something to be ashamed of; something to be hidden; to be discarded; to be denied. The environmental mess left by the first flush of capitalism concerned the social awareness of the first philantropists; Sewerage, paving, industrial regulations and municipal government. .But after the Chartists, the middle class do-gooders began to extend their investment into civilising the lower orders. >From the 1860s philantropists tried to engage the working classes in their newly won leisure time with what came to be known as 'Rational Recreation'; choral singing, walks in the country, going to art galleries, reading books and that sort of thing; orderly pastimes in which little emotion is physically expressed. Whereas there is nothing wrong with any of these activities in themselves we have to look at the characteristics of the package of culture on offer. A package that represents the values you must embody if you are ever to rise to better things, to do well in life, become respectable, a good citizen etc. The lack of emotionality, the good manners (with its sub-text of self control.), the clean and 'healthy' aspects, all communicate the upper class distaste of 'getting your hands dirty' and its disengagement from production and physicality. The specifically socialist 'self improvement' schemes shared these characteristics. They mainly succeeded in splitting of those who 'became socialists' from the majority of working people. "self imposed exclusion from the conviviality of the cup was often accompanied by forms of cultural elitism and the failure to reach those who held very different values." Waters P96. Ventures such as Leonards Holiday camps, the Clarion cycle clubs and the Vocal Unions tended to cultivate exclusivity and rejected those who failed to share their members aspirations. Socialist Clubs did not lead the working class in any open way but created little islands in which those seeking a claim to a more respectable status could congregate. The concept of 'respectability' was a very powerful concept in class oppression. All in all emergent socialism was characterised by an alienation from working class culture, rather than an integration. Socialist culture was "narrow, corporate, defensive and marginal. Respectability and decorum was required in the music halls. And by 1914 the socialists were attacking picture palaces as vociferously as they had attacked music halls a generation earlier." (Waters P96 check..) A couple of years ago I accompanied a group of kids from the local adventure playground on one of their holiday trips to the local cinema to see 'Karate Kid'. I was impressed by their response to the film. As Karate Kid wins his victory over the bully boys the whole audience rose up with wild and joyous scream of approval. This was the response of the early cinema-goers until the requirements of decorum got the better of them. The working class activities that couldn't be suppressed were commercialised. Although this encouraged shallow diversions and perverse fantasies and restricted direct expression of working class oppression, it seemed to offer more scope for the expression of working class desire and identity than that offered by the dry prescriptions and repressive moralism of the socialists. Waters book is a mine of information but I was struck by one important shortcoming which many of these sources of information shared. The academic frame within which such rare work exists requires a cool detached and 'objective' style. The result is that these books do not reflect or communicate the violent reality of class relations and by that lack they reflect those same values of detachment. They do not register the outrage appropriate to the crimes they are discussing. For the working class reader this engenders a strange aura of unreality. But further I would say that such knowledge can never be entirely objective. To hear an oppressed people speak for themselves is information that cannot be replaced with statistics and death counts. The denial to people of their own culture is an act of extreme violence however 'nicely' it is done. However little bloodshed is apparent. Reconstructing the story of working class culture is a bit like making a jigsaw up from found pieces.The next piece turned up when an old friend turned up at an exhibition I was having in an empty shop in Soho, organised by Alternative Arts. He brought a philosopher friend with him called Howard Caygill. Howard had written a book 'The Art of Judgement' which apparently had a section on the history of Taste, although it mainly focused on Kant, the first half of the book was taken up with a historical survey of the development of the philosophy of Taste in Britain and Aesthetics in Germany. Two different traditions which Kant apparently tried to compare in order to transcend the bias of Judgement. Only problem was the book was about 30 quid so I had to wait for interlibrary loan to get it. It was a difficult but exciting read as it seemed to validate a lot of my previous thinking as well as provide good information on the historical formation of British Civil Society and to show how central concepts of taste were to its foundation and operation. Finally I forced myself to buy the 1955 first edition of E.P.Thompsons 'William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary', from a second hand book dealer. In fact in spite of its 900 pages its very readable, if you've a few weeks to spare. In spite of the authors besotted attitude to Morris it is an essential source of scholarship on the man and his times. Later editions are shortened and apparently leave crucial bits out. From this and other sources I attempted to reconstruct the arguments advanced in that 'lost' TV programme. Finally, OK , there was no actual conspiracy. But the repression of working class culture is so concerted that it appears as if there is. What appears to have provided this tight co-ordination of the forces of oppression seems to have been nothing but Good Taste. "The struggle for liberation is above all an ACT OF CULTURE" Amilcar Cabran Footnote; This introduction serves both to give a broader context to what follows both historically and to embed the text firmly within my own life. Footnote: Kennington Common is where I'm typing this at present and is the site of the crumbling squat in which Working Press has its address. (the house was built in the 1880s for servants of Buckingham Palace.) After the Chartist meeting of 1848 the authorities acted quickly.... "By 1850 the condition of the common had become such that the vicar of St Marks promoted a scheme to turn the area into a 'place of resort for respectable persons'. Powers were obtained and, with the support and encouragement of the Prince Consort, Kennington Park was created, opening in March 1854." The Duchy of Cornwall, Ed Crispin Gill. 1987.