This Much Is True

I don’t look back on the British Empire with any sense of pride. We were taught at school that the Empire was marvellous, giving India trains and cricket and saving the savage Africans from the eternal fires of damnation and all that — and that was simply wrong. Some British people don’t like facing the truth of our colonial past and that’s part of the problem; they don’t want to be re-educated about our long history of exploitation and cruelty. Those people have always thought of England as the best country in the world. Well, it isn’t. It was cruel and greedy and unjust, much like the rest of the world, and the aftermath of Empire has given rise to a hateful legacy of racism.

The English are not open to the outside, or to outsiders.

My parents were good people, but they were conservatives. They believed in Winston Churchill and thought Ernest Bevin was a terrible man — they thought he was an antisemite, and that may have been true. They weren’t extreme right-wingers but always voted Tory. They brought me up to be a good Tory too.

After spending so much time in the company of Liz Hodgkin’s large, vociferous and opinionated household, I challenged my parents — although I knew they wouldn’t change. As soon as I could vote, I voted Labour and with only one exception, on which more later, I’ve been a Labour voter all my life.

I engaged in politics when I was at Cambridge. I was active in the Anti-Apartheid Movement, even more so than in nuclear disarmament, which was the major ‘cause’ of my generation. The appalling injustices and deliberate cruelty white South Africans imposed on their black countrymen was what first ignited my activism. Even my parents agreed with me about that. Our cousins from South Africa had stayed with my grandparents before Mummy got married. She remembered the way they threw their clothes on the floor, expecting a servant to pick them up.

I have always felt an outsider — as did my parents, and they passed it on to me; it’s one of my most powerful emotions growing up. I felt I knew well what it would be like to be black and to be shut out from the world that everybody else was enjoying. The unfairness of the apartheid regime enraged me and that’s why I volunteered to work in the campaign office in London and went to demonstrate outside South Africa House, something I did many times. Many years later, after Mandela had been released, Antony Sher and I were invited to a function at South Africa House; it was strange to be walking as a guest into the place that had become a symbol of everything I hated.

After Cambridge, as soon as I got my first professional acting jobs in theatre, I became a member of the actors’ union Equity. When I first joined the BBC Radio Drama Repertory Company, I was elected to the audio committee and served on it for over thirty years. Eventually, I was elected to the Council. Since then, I have always been an active and vocal participant in my trade union.

At that time, in the late sixties and throughout the seventies, Equity was sharply divided on how best to fight apartheid. A growing list of international playwrights, including Daphne du Maurier, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Muriel Spark and Arthur Miller signed a declaration through the Anti-Apartheid Movement in London, refusing performing rights for their plays to all theatres in South Africa where discrimination was practised on grounds of colour.

I agreed, I felt that artists and sports people should refuse to work there — we had to name and shame the South African government by boycotting all commercial artistic engagement in the country.

As an Equity Council member, I attended all the meetings. Vanessa Redgrave was never a member of the Council, but she and her brother, Corin, regularly spoke at the annual general meetings with fire and fluency — both superb speakers without notes. I first worked with Vanessa in 1972. Ted Heath was in Number 10; in Equity likewise, the right wing was in power: people like Marius Goring and Nigel Davenport and Leonard Rossiter. Leonard was a bastard: a good actor, but a nasty, spite-driven man. With all those right-wing actors flexing their muscles, the Workers Revolutionary Party faction were the great opposition, and so Vanessa became an important element in the deliberations.

Vanessa was quite retiring, except when there was anything political going on, and then she would harangue you from morning till night. I didn’t know her well but, intoxicated by her articulate conviction, I started to join her at the WRP meetings.

When you were interested in politics in those days — and I suppose for some people it is still the case — you had to go to meetings. You wanted to stand up and be counted, and I was no different. I soon became a signed-up member, though whether I joined the WRP literally because of Vanessa, I don’t know.