Brighton Come the Revolution

Brighton come the Revolution

When the Revolution hits Brighton there will be no more estate agents, no more luxury holiday flats, and homelessness will be a thing of the past. Empty lots will become free adventure playgrounds, the seafront’s amusement arcades will be bulldozed and replaced with sandy beaches, and toys will be shared collectively – or so argues Brighton Voice, the radical local newspaper in circulation 1973-1989 (making it one of the longest-running alternative papers in the UK).

Protesting at property development

Back issues of Brighton Voice are available to browse at Brighton History Centre, and offer a fascinating insight into Brighton’s alternative and campaigning scene in the 1970s-80s. The paper, illustrated with satirical cartoons, includes real-life stories of local residents suffering injustice at the hands of landlords or prejudice in the workplace for being gay. It gives readers the ‘tip-off’ on where to get hold of Indian wraparound skirts (knock on the purple door down a side-street off the Lewes Road), reports how the local Women’s Lib group infiltrated the 1973 Miss Brighton pageant, and names and shames landlords and public officials suspected of misbehaviour or corruption.

Satirical cartoon on the closure of ‘battered wives’ refuges

‘Don’t wait around for the Revolution to happen elsewhere’, argues Brighton Voice, ‘make revolution happen in Brighton through local protest and local action.’

The paper was an advocate of Squatters’ Rights

Some of the successful featured campaigns include the fight to turn Queen’s Park Spa into a nursery instead of a proposed casino, saving Brighton’s historic railway station, and stopping a flyover that would have demolished the heart of theNorth Laine. Less successfully, the paper backed the campaign against theMarina development.

Objections to proposed roads through Brighton

Happily, some of the newspaper’s ‘utopian’ dreams that have been realised in the city include bus lanes, toy libraries, ‘clean paddling pools and open air swings’, and free nursery places.

Advertising Brighton Women’s Day c. 1974

Established in 1973, the original team of two staff grew to over 50 at its peak. The paper ran as a collective, printed in an anarchist vegetarian café on Victoria Road, and sold on the street and in outlets throughout the city (including Kemptown Books and Infinity Foods). Many of its writers went on to work in national mainstream media and one became a peer and Chief Whip in the House of Lords. Brighton Voice is only one of a range of alternative local newspapers available to read at Brighton History Centre.

Brighton Voice delivered

Anna Kisby, Brighton History Centre

Olympic Display

References to the Olympics seem to be everywhere at the moment, some cropping up in the unlikeliest places! Searching recently for an exhibition catalogue from the 1950s, I discovered details of an Olympic Games Philatelic Exhibition held here at Brighton Museum in October 1959. Present at the Museum Opening Ceremony, among other dignitaries, was Count Vittorio Zoppi, the Italian Ambassador in London, representing the host nation for the Games to be held the following year in Rome.

Official souvenir catalogue

The collection on display belonged to Ernie Trory, a local man who was a member of the British Olympic Association and of the Brighton and Hove Philatelic Society. According to the exhibition catalogue, his idea was born soon after the London Games in 1948, and he quickly built up a significant collection of stamps, postmarks, postal stationery, seals and vignettes dating back to 1894, when the International Olympic Committee was established. Trory wrote an award-winning book, A Philatelic History of the Olympic Games, and won worldwide recognition – and many medals – for this fascinating collection, which included a set of commemorative stamps issued for the Games in Athens in 1896.

A keen local historian, Trory had previously published A Postal History of Brighton, 1673 – 1783. In our technological age, it is difficult to imagine a time when the post didn’t just appear on a daily basis, but Trory described the early, unsuccessful attempts to move mail from one place to another. His research also tells us that the earliest postal services to and from the town, were advertised in the London Gazette on 24 May 1686; they amounted to deliveries to Sussex towns, including Brighton, leaving London on Monday nights, and returning from the same places on Tuesdays.

Trory himself was a committed communist who joined the Party in 1931, at the age of 18. He took part in a hunger march from Brighton to London in 1932 (described in his book Between the Wars: Recollections of a Communist Orgainser) and visited Moscow in 1936. He founded a publishing company, Crabtree Press, and in 1946 wrote The Sacred Band: A Contribution to the Social History of Brighton, which he dedicated to ‘those members of the [trade union] movement who regularly attend their branch meetings’.

The sacred band

Politics and philately were not his only interests, however. He swam in the sea throughout the year, often enjoying a dip on his birthday in January. A Pathe news clip captures one such occasion in 1954; watched by crowds of men and women in their winter coats and hats, Trory and a group of similarly hardy Brighton swimmers run down a snowy beach to the water, enjoy an invigorating swim, and then return for a celebratory slice of cake.

And, perhaps even more unexpectedly, he discovered in middle age an aptitude for weight-lifting. Entering his first competition at the age of 50, Trory won many veteran awards and continued lifting weights into his seventies. Baron de Coubertin would certainly have been impressed.

Kate Elms, Brighton History Centre