Beer and Politics 3

Dave the Puma’s contribution ran like this:-

There was a brief period when the greatest disparities in income and ownership of wealth were reduced.   It ran from the end of the 40’s to the 70’s.. Remember that?   For most of us, that was your childhood , youth and early adulthood, that was.  It was based on hard lessons learned in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s, and in two world wars.  Basically, these were: we are all in this together, certain goods should be provided collectively, e.g. health and education, and progressive taxation is good. Oh yeah, and that did not stop people having material progress, and quite a few getting fairly rich in the 50’s and 60’s: Lord Rayne (Max Rayne) made stupid amounts of money re-developing central London, for example; so you can’t complain that it was all Stalinist and there was only one kind of knickers available, see? Of course, the improvement in household economic equality wasn’t quite enough; I (we?) wanted personal liberation and other kinds of equality as well, so it wasn’t the desired end state, either..

During that magic time, in the words of one commentator, the bottom three quarters of society ganged up on the top quarter and made them behave themselves, for once. More equal societies are, on the whole, happier (see “The Spirit Level”, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Picket, pub. Allen Lane, 2009, if you want an argument). Of course, the Tories hated it, and will do anything to get rid of the vestiges.  Blair/Brown didn’t do enough (much?) to reverse what That Woman started. However, Cameron will try to finish the job.  Currently, the distribution of wealth is back to what it was in 1937, I believe. 

(That was addressed to members of Slim’s List, most of whom met each other at the end of the 60’s/early 70’s, and now look on the current situation in mild horror.  A fair number lived in, or knew of University College London’s Max Rayne House, funded all or in part by Rayne; hence the reference to him)

Slim Rhodes and the Photographs

I decided to write this stream of consciousness/gravy because of an evening spent in various pubs in London in January, 2009, with about forty or so friends, most of whom I met between 1969 and 1975, and most of whom were connected in one way or another with University College London.  The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the death of Slim Rhodes (Blaise Alastair Rhodes 1950-1999).

In a fit of mis-placed nostalgia (“Waiter!  Have I left a fit of nostalgia here somewhere?”) I committed myself to compiling a collection of our photographs.  This was to be based on our combined set of albums and old shoe-boxes of photographs, with some added commentary on the huge number of people who knew or just met Slim between 1968 and 1999.  He was a sort of over-weight pole around which so many others found their orbit. 

The collection of photographs are on a private Yahoo site, called somewhat unsurprisingly, Slimslist.  Anyone who wants to see them will have to ask me, until the fifty or so current members of the Slimslist group decide that all the photos and tales of debauchery and lay-aboutness are fit to release on an unsuspecting public.  They are photos of us having  fun (well, most of the time); this is no  sombre memorial or obituary (in fact it is downright irreverent in all the right places) but simply an opportunity to put things down on record on the Internet. 

Though the photos and stories are not posted here at the moment, I am going to post a list of all the people  I can remember who met him or knew him.  That way, anyone not on the original Slimslist who is absent-mindedly Googling the night away might chance upon a name s/he recognises, and can make contact if interested; others could come up with yet more names of people who were around at the time.

Next: the great  list.