Time with Welfare State theatre 1972–1973.

(photo credits requested)

Most of us are now, I suppose, agents in the internet shadow world and haven’t you met ghosts from former lives hung up in digital suspense? The detail you put up online might be just what someone else was looking for. Does that take the edge off self-indulgence? A little bit.

A memoir used to be what it said — only what you could remember, a way to pass the time in prison. Then in came letters and workbooks and shoeboxes full of bus tickets and restaurant receipts. I have a date and place stamped series of Post Office Savings Bank books from 1983–1985 that I will stand up and walk into memory soon.

The piece below is patched with Quant search results. Factcheck, lucky strikes, unimagined openings. Some people talk about mining but to me it is more like an ever expanding chamber whose odd shaped walls flex and bend as you tap tap here and there and sometimes the information wall resists and you move on and sometimes it gives and you enter in.

As writing, I wanted to see if starting with a spine of memory clumps I could build out into a shape that wasn’t just a list. Here is the background as expressed in two papers,

1. …given its longevity alone, it would be difficult to overstate Welfare State International’s significance in relation to the histories of performance art: alternative, experimental and applied theatre and participative forms of practice. Between 1968 and 2006, this collective of artists, writers, musicians, performers and engineers pioneered site-specific multimedia theatre and processional street performance, and developed new models of community art. Rooted in the radical countercultural contexts of the 1960s, their ambitious events combined large-scale spectacle and popular theatre, attracting international acclaim and directly spawning a wide range of other experimental theatre companies and performance groups. As Baz Kershaw remarked, in relation to events such as the iconic Parliament in Flames (1976), first staged in Burnley with an audience of over 10,000 people,’no-one else was producing carnivalesque agitprop on this scale’ (Kershaw, 1992,212). By the 1980s, consolidated in the publication of Tony Coult and
Baz Kershaw’s co-authored book Engineers of the Imagination, The Welfare State Handbook (Coult and Kershaw, 1983), a DIY guide to basic techniques aimed at sharing their ethos, skills and practices with others, they had developed new forms and prototypes of vernacular arts and theatre. Celebratory theatre, secular rites of passage, such as ‘naming ceremonies’, and lantern festivals were all signature Welfare State practices that were widely adopted by other companies and arts organisations through the 1990s and beyond.
GillianWhiteley 2019

2. … the Welfare State was one of the most influential group of artists working in Britain during the last third of the 20th century, though you might not think it from reading art history. It was influential in carving out a territory for art in the midst of life (and sometimes death) reclaiming it for everyone from the Enlightenment’s hold. It was influential in creating new forms, such as the lantern parade and the fireshow, and in finding materials and techniques to make them possible. It was influential in defining a visual and performance aesthetic that was rigorous and beautiful but owed nothing to those most valued in mainstream art. It was influential because it showed that you could make work that was complex, original and authentic with regard only to yourself and the people you were working with and still survive in a funding environment that wanted only what it already had.
François Matarasso 2018

I cannot help thinking there are ways and means above our heads. In 1971 I had put in for two positions: post grad film student at the RCA and newsreel cameraman at Butlins Holiday Camp, Minehead. I got the latter. In 1972 I again put in for two positions: trainee producer at Greenwich Cablevision and film maker with Welfare State. I got the latter.

I had read about Welfare State in Time Out, the London listings magazine. They were to perform at Surrey Hall in Brixton, also known as Oval House energised by Peter and Joan Oliver and their press release included a look forward to a tour of the West Country … a silver suited despatch rider will rush film of each days happenings…

I was knocked out by the audience immersive production. It was like being in a hallucinatory souk — Jamie Proud was giving the prototype of his working class hero Lancelot Quail, black gowned princesses in torment drifted within inches, a wavering stutter of saxophone drew my mike, I had a cassette recorder hugged to my chest and at the end I found my way backstage and gave somebody the tape and my phone number. By the way (I said) about that despatch rider — I have a Honda 50. It worked, I was on the team.

The road to the West Country from London had been part of my life in a series of yearly, summer jumps. Now I’m a toddler, now I’m a teenager, now I’m hitchhiking, now I’m driving. Now, elbows out head bent down, Bolex strapped onto the pillion zzzzzing across Salisbury Plain. I am exulting, I have engineered myself a place. It never got much further than that, I exulted but did not profit, I was never sure what the matter in hand was. I was one of the odd-bods, an outrider, muddled in his own agenda, lapping up as much of the present as possible.

I met up with them (Glastonbury was it?) and sprayed my bike silver. I was photographed wearing a creaky asbestos lined aluminised fire suit but I don’t believe the character was woven into the performances. It was circus with a difference. There was hard physical labour but also fits of marijuana giggles. There was the odour of subsidised grease paint but also the thrill of manoeuvring concrete poetry into the stream of 1970’s provincial life.

chewing it over somewhere in the West Country 1972

Music was a big part. A Brummie called Dave Holland was the chief generator, John Fox led with his clarion saxophone and we all learnt to drum on scrap. Dave, short in a dark coat and hiking boots was very sharp, we’d confabulate on milestones and he’d break off and glance sideways at me to see if I’d got the import of his soft Brummie patter.

A curiously aristocratic youth known as Spiney who often wore a suit of rubber fingers intrigued me with his soft spoken intelligence. In 1988 I found him tenanting a Scotch baronial on the way to which I’d driven thru the still warm debris of the downed Boeing 747 at Lockerbie — spectacle had by then been taken out of the hands of dramaturgists however wild.

I think there was a glowering guitar player with red eyes and a mane of black hair and big, bluff noisy Nigel (Leach) who often made the dame. There was a duo of Leeds hardmen chiefed by Ged, shoulders hunched, arms ending in spanners — a whisper of malice in his smiles and handsome Shabby who tinkered, teased and towed the bus, the lorry, the landie, the vans all painted solid yellow (just off the AA shade).

These types were new to me: the vulgar, punchy north. I took to them. I learn’t they were built from the ground up, not from the head down and that it was rare for them to be caught out in inconsistencies. That is to say that the discipline of generations of finding money day to day had bred out irrealism. With me irrealism was still alive and flourishing. Sustained by a powerful imagination I saw only what I wanted to see, and not much of that. When they sacked me, kindly John Fox said we don’t mind you dreaming but not on our time…

The star of the show, cockney Jamie Proud led a miniature Ilford existence with his woman Jane and their baby boy. Jamie looked at me searchingly, wary of interlopers. Jane was naturally welcoming, milky and kind. The two other clear couples were John and Sue Fox whose show it was and Steve Gumbley and Lizzie Lockhart.

For Steve and Liz I had special care. Steve was (and is) a genius. From his held back Egyptian king head streamed ideas and runs of imagination that usually found their way into the show. Their caravan home was orderly and neat, Liz, brilliant in her own way, never stopped — bizzy.

Steve photographed at Burnley 1973 possibly by Roger Perry

Sometimes the show took place in the circus tent, hard labour with mallets and thick rough rope. Inside, batlike on his trapeze Jamie elaborated the persona of Sir Lancelot. At Bodmin Moor we staged on opposite hills the marriage of heaven and hell and our ceremonial bonfire and tin can oil lamps drew gyrating blue lights from miles away along the Devon lanes. At Tavistock we terrified the citizens by re-incarnating the Hanging Judge Jeffries who had evenhandedly fertilised the local graveyard and Australia in the eighteenth century.

The late Peter Kiddle arranged a gig at Dartington Arts Trust. We haunted a ruined chapel, a Disney silhouette, it was a warm dark cidery night. A girl put her arms round my waist and I pillioned her back to her place. She let me lie with her, only that, as she had a proper boyfriend away somewhere.

Down at St Michaels Mount I could have had a whole crowd come to see the Honda coast down that last long slope. My father, the abstract painter Roger Hilton, was over the hump of land at St Just telephoning appliance shops to be sure of having a wheelchair for his upcoming show at London’s Serpentine Gallery. I was there to see him carted in to the gallery, cap askew, another form of theatre, my last glimpse of his wonderful life.

Off St Michaels Mount. Photo: Roger Perry

On the sands Roger Perry crabbed this way and that for a photo sequence of the troupe leaving England. A launch took them out into the bay where Foxie had a Her Majesty’s submarine Andrew waiting. (I find out now that his father was a twice lifeboated merchant commander, it hangs together).

Foxie’s appetite for the phenomenal and an immense talent for charismatic leadership had found its way like some fine surgical tool into this tiny crevice of English culture and was energetically inflating it with his tumble of heady visioned rapscallions.

Tho there was opposition — King Mob spat back with what may be personal rancour,

“… John Fox had been involved in the mid-60s agitation in Newcastle but was one of those who quite quickly turned rancorously against the revolutionary negation it was leading to. Art is Dead do not consume its corpse didn’t go down well at all because that was what John Fox was very precisely to finally design as product… ”(1)

I was dead pleased to have been a part of the troupe. I rode back to a basement in Earl’s Court and winding the evil grey Ilford reversal stock thru the Moviescop I was astonished how little film I had shot and how paltry it was. Only a few clips of film rest from that tour, the major production was by two chaps from the National Film School who drew up in a blue Land Rover2.

I painted the basement walls in brown and green camouflage while my room-mate had a breakdown and thought no more about it. There was nothing to be done. I did nothing.

In November I got a postcard from Welfare State — have ordered Siemens DH cine projector — a mechanical beast onto which you could load film and magnetic sound track. Would I deliver it to their new home in a quarry on the edge of Burnley, Lancashire? And would I edit together all the odds and sods of sixteen millimetre film they had lying around. And perhaps I’d like to stay on and work with them a while?

I felt like I was going somewhere again. I drove up at night thru Sheffield on the stilted motorway, steering between steelworks furnace flames that tongued the stars. The Transit rocked along with its tiny cargo and its grinning, one handed driver. They gave me a showman’s caravan.

home 1973

Burnley Council had lent them Heasandford Tip, a shallow cut into a hillside, to live at and build their performances. Mid Pennine Arts Association was eager to put public arts money onto the streets and Welfare State were just the people to do it.

I put together the film montage. I slept in my cabin. I went foraging into Burnley where you could buy bathtime for half a crown (twelve pence). I said to Shabby one day that the bus stop shelters were less high than in the South. He looked at me sideways, …industrial revolution shortened the buggers…

Foraging into Burnley. I caught a girl all in white who took me awkwardly into her parent’s parlour for tea. Beer began big time. I drank with the mechanics. There was an electric moment when the phrase a fight erupted came true, pressure with locals burst and everybody was up at once fighting and me running out of the pub at the crossroads where the Todmorden road hits town.

The work Welfare State did in Burnley and surrounding towns was solid outwardly because it had a core of wildness inwardly. I didn’t detect the play-acting I’d met in other street troupes. I invented a soft shoe shuffle busker who played at Rawtenstall (or was it Bacup?) but I wasn’t tuned in to openly contribute, my things were sidelights so I was never in the closest creative huddle. Boris, a devilish figure, a natural task master, mocked me with his skull grin when I said I liked to taste different approaches, he said the thing was to do one thing over and over until you had exhausted it. I had to wait another five years before linocut became that.

They found a use for me — they sent me over to fetch their new lorry, a Bedford TK with a pristine yellow cab and a silver ally body. The seats were squeaky new, the smell was good. I tried the handles for size, the air-brake let off with a dinky blue lever. I looked into the mirrors with a sense of responsibility that was something new. By the time I had got back to the quarry and eased the little beast thru the gateway I had stopped being a film maker and had become a roadie.

Thank you John — your instinct confirmed my talents for driving and logistics, for service and route finding, for all weather cheeriness. Nearly all my jobs from then on were built on that: arriving in a vehicle, doing some stuff outdoors and then making good. (Two years after my final gig with Welfare State I joined West Yorkshire Fire Service).

With my cards stamped dreamer, a beast not to be carried over the winter, I went back to Earl’s Court. But they remembered me as a lorry driver and I got a call in the early summer. Welfare State was to play their Beauty and the Beast at Rotterdam, Amsterdam and the Hague. We streamed in convoy down the long straight road from Leeds to Hull, next to me, his foot on the dash was someone not clear and behind bumped a caravan. I don’t remember the performance at Hull but maybe something of the town’s otherness and end of worldliness lodged in my scanner since I moved there in 1984.

Der Lanteren Arts Centre was tucked away next to an immense sweep of concrete with Rotterdam’s radio tower sticking up out of it. Dancer Di Davies joined us and took off all her clothes and did her exercises as Steve showed me an exquisite cabinet he had built in which he’d crafted an Ur rodent. It was her way of getting to know us.

I was kidnapped onto an endless motorway belt by a cunning pair of Belgian film makers who radically disheartened me. They took over filming the show. At Amsterdam I dipped into the red-light district with Shabby. I got thrown out, he fell in love. We played the Shaffy theatre, in the dressing room were dark green cans of wartime film on dusty shelves. We slept lightly in a disused factory. I sold my Bolex. At the Hague I slipped and gouged a chunk of ankle on stage scaffolding. They rushed me off to nuns to be stitched. Bandaged I fell into the canal two nights later. I was in high spirits throughout.

I’m not sure if there was a break after that or whether I hung on at Heasandford, I know I saw the superb catacomb/labyrinth they’d built, was it that they later fired as the houses of Parliament?

Then there was an intervention from ways and means that bent me away from the Welfare States magnet’s off/on pull. Welfare State had an ally in Nina Hibben, Morning Star film critic and film officer for Yorkshire Arts who was keen to stitch together a network. On a visit to the Tip she put me onto a video person working for Granada TV who I met in Manchester where she was hosting a conference to do with contraception. She had hair dyed flaming red. She became my wife. She brought her mum to see me laying a trail of tin can oil lamps in Hyde Park and an extravaganza with Mike Westbrook at the Tower of London in 1974.

The break with the troupe began somewhere between London and Bristol. A block of ice of several hundred weight in the back of a van run out of petrol. I don’t remember how much ice was left for the performance that night but I do remember I found the players paying court to Arts Council high-ups, the funders. Suddenly there was a different language and one I didn’t take to. Despite the ice, I claim my last departure was voluntary but I’m not asking you to agree.

While I was courting the red-head it didn’t take me long to find another sect who swore by yellow transportation. National Car Parks Special Events division operated out of railway arches in the City. I was in the charge of an On the Buses type supervisor with early Parkinsons. I drove a yellow Transit loaded with balls of string, iron stakes and old lags from Paddington out into the countryside wherever they needed big car parks built in the wild.

It was theatre, spectacle, but of a more literal kind. The old lags would build a lobster trap from string and stakes into which they beckoned anyone with a flashy car (plenty) as tho they were doing them a special favour and out of the window would come a bung.

In my yellow dustcoat I marshalled the streams of cars into showroom order on the hillsides. It was lonelier than Welfare State and not so many giggles, I was just …the toff wot drove the van but I got to see a slice of life I wouldn’t have otherwise. Days off I’d disconnect the mileometer and rocket to my love nest up north.

Now it seems absurd to be looking back at my steam age — there is nothing that can reach out and grab me from there. Or almost, for I had a lucky strike: in John Fox’s book (3) the Belgian film makers are named: Ben Mangelschotts (!) and Yetti Faes. And there it was on a British Film Institute archive page with a photography credit for someone called M.Hiltona. Friends, I live.

— —
(1) http://www.revoltagainstplenty.com/index.php/archive-local/93-a-hidden-history-of-king-mob.html
(2) the film is referenced as being in the Arts Council collection in Eyes on Stalks with director Jonathan Lewis.
(3) John Fox Eyes on Stalks Methuen 2002