{"id":75,"date":"2013-04-22T14:09:14","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T14:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/?p=75"},"modified":"2018-09-14T04:47:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-14T04:47:42","slug":"golfball-revolution-the-life-and-death-of-britains-alternative-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tim-dawson.com\/?p=75","title":{"rendered":"Golfball revolution: the life and death of Britain’s alternative press"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Bartlett had interviewed dozens of witnesses and victims, obtained five affidavits from abused boys and combed over his story with one of London\u2019s foremost barristers.\u00a0 But as the magazine carrying his biggest ever story came back from the printers, his heart was still in his mouth.\u00a0 \u201cEverything that I owned, even my house was a risk \u2013 it would have finished a less secure marriage than mine\u201d, he remembers.<\/p>\n

It was May 1979 and on the eve of a general election. \u00a0Bartlett and his co-author John Walker\u2019s story accused Rochdale\u2019s sitting MP, Cyril Smith of abusing a succession of boys in a children\u2019s home that the Liberal front bencher had helped to found.\u00a0 Bartlett and Walker were not trained journalists \u2013 both earned their living lecturing at a local FE college – and the Rochdale Alternative Press (RAP) that they had founded eight years earlier, held editorial meetings in pub and was laid up in a cellar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the magazines arrived, everything went crazy, taxis descended on us from all over Manchester with people looking for copies\u201d, says Bartlett.\u00a0 \u201cWe had already briefed a couple of national newspapers, so we were expecting the story to make waves\u201d.\u00a0 Reporters from all the major papers arrived in the Lancashire town in a frenzy.\u00a0 And then Smith issued the monthly magazine with legal papers.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the only writ we received in thirteen years of producing RAP, but it killed interest in the story stone dead\u201d, says Bartlett.\u00a0 \u201cOur barrister advised us that it was a gagging writ, and it certainly never went to court, but Smith was returned at the next election with his majority increased by 4,000.\u00a0 Rochdale\u2019s voters loved a child abuser, is one interpretation of those events\u201d.<\/p>\n

It is a remarkable story (you can read the original in its entirety here)<\/a> and unusual in that only now, in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal, is it being followed up \u2013 but it is one of thousands that were being produced at the time by a burgeoning alternative media sector.\u00a0 By 1979, as many as 100 papers and magazines were being published by collectives, co-operatives and less formal groupings, all trying to provide a perspective on the news that differed from mainstream offerings.<\/p>\n

From the Aberdeen People\u2019s Press to the Exeter Flying Post, via the Hackney People\u2019s Press and Alarm in Swansea there wasn\u2019t a major conurbation in the UK where have-a-go journalists were not trying to produce up a different kind of news.\u00a0 There were also a few titles like City Limits in London and Spare Rib that served an even broader constituency.\u00a0 And yet despite the surge of imagination, enthusiasm and cow gum that drove this DIY publishing boom, by the mid-1990s, after a decade of attrition, the scene had almost entirely evaporated.\u00a0 It begs the question, what killed the alternative press, and does it have a modern counterpart?<\/p>\n

Bartlett and Walker in Rochdale had set up RAP as an antidote to the boredom.\u00a0 \u201cWe were loosely Marxist and wanted to do something about social change at a local level\u201d, Bartlett remembers.\u00a0 \u201cWe met once a week in a local pub and asked along anyone in Rochdale who was interested join us\u201d.\u00a0 Despite undertaking delivery to newsagents themselves as well as editing and managing the magazine, Barlett and Walker\u2019s RAP sold as many as 8,000 copies an edition; pretty good going in a town of 95,000.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>RAP\u2019s \u2018bottom-up\u2019 approach to news was one shared by much of the alternative press, says Tony Harcup, then a mainstay of Leeds Other Paper (LOP), now senior lecturer in the University of Sheffield\u2019s department of journalism studies and author of the recently published Alternative Journalism, Alternative Voices (Routledge \u00a324.99)<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201c(We concentrated on) going to housing estates and talking to people, writing down their comments and making articles from ordinary people\u2019s lives.\u00a0 Not many, but some of the \u2018ordinary people\u2019 would even come along to meetings and get involved in discussions.\u201d<\/p>\n

listen to \u2018Interview with Tony Harcup by Tim Dawson\u2019 on audioBoom<\/a><\/div>\n