The journalist Dave Widgery was to British socialists what Hunter S. Thompson was to US radicals. His writing expressed, with greater brilliance than any of his contemporaries, the sense of hope that millions felt in the epoch of the Beatles, Bernadette Devlin, and the Miss World protests.
Too few people remember Widgery today — in part because he died desperately young in 1992 following a freak accident at home; in part because the causes to which he dedicated his life are ones that contradict the fashions of our moment. Widgery was for the workers always, for socialist revolution without conditions or excuses.
Born in 1947 to a Quaker family, Widgery contracted polio at the age of nine. For months, he was trapped in hospital without friends of family, the children crying themselves to sleep, the nurses in tears “at their inability to comfort us.” He had a wheelchair, afterward calipers, then thrilled to his “first pair of shop-bought shoes.”
For the rest of his life, Widgery walked always in difficulty and often in pain, even at the hundreds of demonstrations that he joined. He acquired a lasting belief in the virtues of socialized health care.
Dave Widgery was to British socialists what Hunter S. Thompson was to US radicals.
Widgery was a teenage supporter of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and a fan of Charlie Parker’s music and the novels of Jack Kerouac. To read the latter, he recalled,
when you were 15, scrabbling through the Ks of Slough Public Library, was a coded message of discontent; the sudden realization of an utter…
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Auteur: David Renton
