Tony's Life and Times

When we arrived in Angola, the civil war that had been raging in that country for about 30 years had just ended with the shooting to death of Savimbi – the leader of one of the three waring factions, (UNITA) and a sort of uneasy peace was being observed by all the various parties to that terrible war. The end of Savimbi, and thus of the war It had started as a war of independence against the Portuguese who had colonised the country in the late 19 th century, and then once they had gone, it turned into yet another of those wars in which the USSR and the USA fought each other using surrogate armies. In this case it was the Cubans being the strong arm of the Russians, and the South Africans doing the USA's dirty work for them. The net result of all of this was a country that had an estimated 17 million land mines scattered around and endless shot up towns and villages, and a more or less totally destroyed infrastructure. Vast numbers of war injured people and an inte...

Way back in the late 50's of the last century (my God that makes me feel ancient!!!) I became involved in the Ban the Bomb movement in a very active way, which led to one or two rather curious and in one case, deeply disturbing experiences. I attended the inaugural public meeting of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) which took place at Central Hall Westminster I seem to recall. The organisers had hoped for a reasonable turn out for this meeting, but the numbers who pitched up caught them completely off guard. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there, way too many for the hall, so it was all held up for a while as they hurriedly arranged a big PA system so that the overflow outside on the street could hear what was being said inside the hall. Anyhow, one of the decisions taken in that meeting was to adopt what is now universally recognised as the Peace Symbol, the circle with the upside down “Y” inside it, and also to set up an annual march between Londo...

Life at the Roundhouse was never dull, as we experienced at first hand the hassles of Rock and Roll concerts and  how to cope with the rather strange world of British Royalty. As I have written, at the Roundhouse we had rock concerts each Sunday.  These were quite large events, which ran from about midday to midnight, and typically had audiences of around 2000 people (we removed all the seats from the auditorium for these concerts) and of course attracted not only the main audience, but all the peripheral hangers on of the world of Rock and Roll - drug dealers, groupies, fans, fast food sellers, ticket touts and so on.  Some of these were a problem for us, others not.  I have already talked about how we dealt with the drug dealers but I thought you might be amused to read about how we dealt with some of the other groups of people who such concerts attracted. Groupies: As is well known, Rock and Roll attracts groupies, what might be less well known is that ...