A curious rattle bag

It was encouraging to have a nice review in the Guardian for our Maps. They got it in one by describing the book as a "curious rattle bag" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/18/maps-ross-bradshaw-review). But Chris Moss, Time Out's travel and books editor, writing in the current issue, after describing some general faults in modern travel writing said: "It's liberating... to read the essays, portraits, memoirs and travelogues gathered in this compendium. Featuring contributions from seasoned journalists and writers, including Chris Arnot, David McKie, Robert MacFarlane, John Payne and Iain Sinclair, it loosely binds 18 pieces about place that all have a cartographic element - mapping thoughts, mapping walks, mapping history - and through which ripple forms and tones not often found in the modern travel feature, such as the homage, the homily, literary criticism, social and sport history and reportage." There's more, including some particular chapters picked out, then: "All maps are palimpsests to some degree and reading Ross Bradshaw's selection is akin to peeling back layers, deciphering faded contours and, occasionally, redrawing an entire geography. If travel journalism wants to adapt to the recession, here's a direction it might follow." Reading between the lines, all things considered, I get the impression Chris Moss thinks Maps is OK really. Blush.

London anarchist bookfair 2011

Because of the vagaries of train ticket pricing, it was again cheaper to travel first class to the London for the Anarchist Bookfair, but nothing's too good for the working class. Despite the competing attraction of camping outside St Paul's, the Bookfair was mobbed. Estimates for last year suggested around 4,000 people over the day. Were there more this year? The Five Leaves meeting - part of David Rosenberg's Cable Street marathon - was in the first set of sixty talks and discussion. Despite an early start 30+ people listened in respectful silence while Dave outlined the history and detail of The Battle of Cable Street - an event largely involving people from other political traditions (Communist Party, Labour League of Youth, Independent Labour Party). The only other session I attended, however, was a packed meeting on writing and reading anarchist fiction, which perhaps suffered too much from people being respectful when there were good arguments to be had. That session benefited, as did the day itself, from the increasing international presence, with writers from Sweden and Spain taking part. After last year's appearances by John Pilger and Paul Mason, this year's "outside" speakers included the Black activist Darcus Howe and Donnacha DeLong, President of the National Union of Journalists, which again indicates that the anarchist movement is starting to be taken seriously. [Later note - but read Donnacha's comment below - no outsider she!] I suspect, however, Darcus Howe attracted more people than the two hour session on "Tenants' movements in Poland - social resistance to neo-liberal housing policy", however important the latter is.

I squatted on the Housmans stall for most of the day, which did very good trade, especially with Verso books. People were taking their politics seriously. But not too seriously. The speaker at the anarchist fiction session, DD Johnston, read a hilarious piece from his novel, about the anarchist bookfair, seeming to prove the opposite of the quote from The Poverty of Student Life that "since the anarchists will tolerate each other, they will tolerate anything".

As I left at 6.30 - the fair still in full swing - I watched the wonderful French brass band Les Judas playing in the courtyard. Emma Goldman famously said* "If I can't dance I don't want to be in your revolution" and the band had many people dancing. What she didn't say was that you had to dance well!

* Actually, she didn't say that at all - see http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/goldman/Features/dances_shulman.html

Dig for Plenty

Back in 1995, having been too mean or too poor to buy the hardback of David Crouch and Colin Ward's The Allotment: its landscape and culture when it first came out, I got fed up with Faber never bringing out the paperback, the hardback being out of print, so rang them up and asked if I could buy the rights to the book. They asked for, I think, £200 and I said yes. Goodness, so that's how you become a publisher. The paperback duly appeared and, in due course, ran to a second edition and many reprints, but became steadily out of date. Even history dates. We kept it in print because there was still a demand, publishing some other allotment books and other books by Colin Ward (and one by David Crouch) along the way. Sales waxed and waned as interest in allotments waxed and waned but over the last period we began to feel a bit uncomfortable keeping it going; the book was, after all, first published in 1988. But there was never an alternative - for us or the public. Now, at last, we've put The Allotment out to grass (as it were) and commissioned Lesley Acton to write a new social history of allotments, called Dig for plenty: a social history of the allotment movement. Lesley's previous books were on ceramics, but she has spent the last five years researching allotments, their social history also being the subject of her Ph.D. There will be a gap, as Lesley's book is not out until 2013, but we can wait. Meantime, Lesley is limbering up with a succession of articles on her blog at http://www.newsgrape.com/u/Lesleyacton/popular/.

Peter Preston

I was sorry to hear that Peter Preston died yesterday morning, after a period of indifferent health, followed by a short but serious illness. He was a very popular adult education literature lecturer locally (which we put to good use from time to time at Lowdham Book Festival). He was also nationally important in DH Lawrence studies and in the William Morris Society, having been editor of the Society Journal for many years. Lawrence and Morris comprised the main subjects of his published books. He was also chair of the board at Writing East Midlands. Before illness got the better of him, Peter was working on "Reading with mother" - rereading in modern times those books important to his mother in her day, as representative of what the intelligent woman reader read. He mentioned so many books that should be revisited.
Peter was a good friend to Five Leaves. He was particularly keen on our New London Editions series - in fact he liked our emphases on London, on Jewish literature, and on Nottingham - all of which were important to him, representing his upbringing and his home the last few decades. Our condolences to Barbara and the family.
There will be a celebration of Peter's life at the Derek Randall suite at Trent Bridge at 3.00pm on Friday November 4th, which is open to all those who knew him.

Bread and Roses Radical Book Publishing Award

Five Leaves Publications is proud to be working with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers to initiate the Bread and Roses Radical Book Publishing Award. The award seeks to reward outstanding works of non-fiction published in 2011 that engage with socialist, anarchist, environmental, feminist and anti-racist concerns, and primarily will inspire, support or report on political and/or personal change. The name Bread and Roses is taken from the slogan attributed to the many thousands of textile workers who struck in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1912, who, in the song commemorating the event, struck "for bread, and for roses" too. The Award was launched on the 13th October in Liverpool, followed by the Liverpool Socialist Singers singing "Bread and Roses". We have not got that on tape, but here's Mimi Farina and Joan Baez filling in for them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYRcCa-ddOo

The Bread and Roses Award will be judged by the children's poet and broadcaster Michael Rosen, the feminist writer Nina Power and the Festival Director of Liverpool's annual Writing on the Wall Festival, Madeline Heneghan. A shortlist will be announced in the New Year with the overall winner receiving a cheque for £1000 at an awards ceremony at, appropriately, the Bread and Roses pub in London - an ideal venue, not just because of its name but because it was founded by the Battersea and Wandsworth Trades Council.

Nominations (from publishers and agents) are now open and fuller details can be found on www.bread-and-roses.co.uk. Sadly, there is one publisher excluded! As the founder, organiser and trustee...

Five Leaves and the Arts Council

In a one-star-out-of-five review of one of our books, The Battle for the East End, on Amazon, the reviewer remarks that the book looks "at the events of the 1930s from a pro-Communist viewpoint" rather than being "objective", noting that the book is supported by the Arts Council. The reviewer asks whether the Arts Council would "stump up cash to fund a pro-fascist book". I think the latter unlikely, as the Arts Council has an equal opportunities policy, but it does, for example, support Faber which publishes Ezra Pound, who was an active fascist, and TS Eliot, who wrote anti-Semitic verse. ACE also supports Carcanet which publishes Wyndham Lewis, who was, for a long time, a supporter of Hitler. So the situation is not so clear cut. I'd also argue that the author, David Rosenberg, who is not a Communist, reports favourably on Communist Party actions against the British Union of Fascists because they were the right actions, against the quietude of the Labour establishment and the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
But that is to perhaps miss the point. Why should the Arts Council fund those of our books that are not what you might call creative non-fiction or fiction, and have a left-wing stance? Any reader of this blog will have realised that Five Leaves is hardly a contributor to the Adam Werrity Travel Fund.
The Arts Council currently funds Five Leaves through its Grants for the Arts scheme, a competitive scheme, where we submit a programme of activity for, in our case, three years. We receive a modest annual grant towards that modest programme ("Year One - bring down the Tory Government; Year Two - elect a Labour Government; Year Three - oversee the withering away of the state"??) but it can be rather difficult to ascertain how many square feet of our office are devoted to, say, social history, and how many to introducing new young adult fiction writers, or organising States of Independence, so rather than applying title by title, event by event, we apply for the press as a whole. The irony is of course that our social history titles in general do better than the "creative" stuff, so rather than the Arts Council subsidising social history, it is the other way round as our successful social history books enable us to put in smaller bids than would otherwise be the case. This is also a hedge against the day the Arts Council can no longer fund us, or does not wish to fund us. We intend to survive, which would be less possible if our backlist comprised poetry, young adult fiction and other slower selling items. We can see how an Arts Council logo on a book of clearly left-wing provenance might be a red rag to a right wing bull. But wouldn't taking the logo off such books indicate subterfuge on our part?
Finally - a reasonable test of our "objectivity" - would Five Leaves publish writers from the right? Yes, I am sure we do already. In general I would not ask someone's politics before publishing them, but I know that, for example, Colin Wilson, whose second novel we republish next month is hardly a foaming lefty. Would we publish, say, some pastoral poems about the deserts of Dubai by Liam Fox (who will now have some time on his hands to write a sonnet or two). Probably not, but if Ken Clarke ever offers us a book of his writing about jazz (an area we are moving further into next year)? Now you're talking.

History is not quite bunk

An email arrives from one Nick Murray, asking to be put in touch with our Bill Fishman, author of East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914, one of those steady backlist sellers that is so nice to have on the list. Nick had found a reference to his paternal grandfather, Otto Shreiber in the book. Otto was an emigre friend of Rudolph Rocker, the (gentile, Yiddish-speaking) leader of the Jewish anarchist movement. Both had been living in London for years. With the usual logic of governments, Otto and Rocker were arrested as German nationals when the war broke out. That Otto was in Britain to escape the Kaiser was ironic, but no defence, and he was interned on the Isle of Man, where he died, details unknown. His Irish companion (many people in the anarchist movement did not marry) was Kathleen "Dolly" Murray who had two children. Dolly was unable to cope with the children in Otto's absence and Nick's father was put in the care of Edward and Constance Garnett. Edward was a writer, editor and critic (instrumental in getting DH Lawrence's Sons and Lovers published), while Constance was one of the first translators of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. The decades roll on, Nick having been born in 1940. His father - Otto's son - moved in the 1970s to St Ives to a house once occupied by the author and naturalist William Henry Hudson, by then long dead, but whose published letters included some to Edward Garnett way back when Otto's son was living with him.
I'm not sure if there is a moral in this rounded tale other than we are connected to history by very small steps. Which we all know.

Reasons to be cheerful

Just when you think things can't get much worse, they get a bit better. It was a great pleasure to attend (and speak at) the Chapter and Verse book festival seminar on radical bookselling. Some of the old lags were there - Mandy Vere, the matriarch of Liverpool's News from Nowhere; Dave Cope veteran of the old Communist Party shops Progressive Books in Liverpool and Central Books in London, still on the board of the distributor Central Books and owner of Left on the Shelf, an Internet supplier of second hand socialist books. But there were also new arrivals, from the exciting new People's Bookshop in Durham, which mixes second hand and new, from the Book Bloc, whose shop will open in New Cross and some older and younger activists from Bristol Radical History Group who are moving up from bookstalls to open a shop to be called Hydra.

The day consisted of four parts. Firstly, Mandy from News from Nowhere, Sally from the publishing wing of Bookmarks and Alexis from the anarchist distributor AK Press formed a generally upbeat panel discussing the current state of radical bookselling. All said that you have to do everything nowadays, a bit of publishing, bookselling, outside stalls, in store events - working harder and longer hours to reach the market, but the market is there. There was a sense of unity of purpose, of feeling that we are all in this together (who said that?) and a complete absence of sectarian interests.

The second section was by me, on the history of radical bookselling, concentrating on the days when there were 130 radical bookshops and 450 radical publishers, focusing on the pivotal year of 1984, the year of the miners' great strike and great defeat. I thoroughly enjoyed the research, trawling through old files and back issues of the Radical Bookseller. For years, Dave Cope, something of an expert on the earlier years of the Communist Party orientated shops, and I have planned a book on radical bookselling. The idea lives meantime on his website, http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/, as an incomplete listing of every radical bookshop we have been able to find, together with a bibliography covering mentions of radical bookshops. Any help in adding to this will be welcome.

The third section was the national launch of the Bread and Roses prize, initiated by Five Leaves in conjunction with the Alliance of Radical Booksellers. There will be more on the prize and launch shortly, meantime check out http://www.bread-and-roses.co.uk/.

The final session was a closed session for members of ARB to meet, though also attended by me and a representative of Zed Books. There are now twenty member groups, with Housmans in London administering the project. The general view was that the group will largely operate by networking, providing assistance to publishers keen to reach out to radical booksellers and to tour their authors, but to avoid making controversial public statements. An example of this is over Amazon where some members actively campaign against Amazon while others take advantage of it. Again, the main feature was a keenness to discuss issues but to operate by consensus.

One interesting feature was the presence of second hand dealers, never a feature of the old days. As one pointed out, "An old book is a new book to someone who has not read it before". Indeed, People's Bookshop, the first radical bookshop in Durham since the days of Alleycat, has found that they are selling a lot of backlist material (Paul Foot's Red Shelley was exampled) to people who had simply not had access to this kind of material before.

Everyone was aware of the sector's tiny size and fragility, but felt more positive about radical bookselling than for some time. Would that I was young again!

The ARB's provisional is at http://www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk/ . Meantime, let's leave the last word to one Councillor Jeremy Richardson (Conservative) who remarked in the Sheffield Star in 1986 in the following terms about the Sheffield Radical Bookfair "I put in an appearance at the Radical Book Fair at the Town Hall. Anarchists, feminists and every conceivable variety of ragbag lefty was present peddling their wares. For my part I saw no ordinary Sheffielders, just a bunch of grim-faced souls trying to look interested in some rather dull books. Is this really the right use for the Town Hall on a Saturday?" To which we grim-faced souls (illustrated above, for clarity) can only answer, yes.

Kicking and screaming into the 21st century

Five Leaves has just published its first three e-books, each at £2.99. All three titles were previously published in paperback. J. David Simons' novels are set within the Jewish community in Scotland and though connected can be happily read as stand alone novels. The Pretender is a novel about literary forgery. This is new territory for us, and we are still learning. More of our backlist titles will follow. Click on the links below to find out more about the books. In due course they will appear on every platform, but at the moment they are only on kindle.

http://tinyurl.com/liberationofceliakahn, http://tinyurl.com/creditdraper, http://tinyurl.com/belbinpretender

Poets

I'd previously posted about Nottingham Poetry Society at seventy and last night attended the book launch of their anthology, Seventy, which was concluded by the editor CJ Allen reading one of his own poems, Poets, published below, by kind permission of the author.

Poets
You don’t have to admire them, but you might as well;
they receive so little attention. They are causing a ruckus
at The Oblivion Tea-Rooms. They are steadfast
in their uncertainty. They believe they are following
an ancient set of instructions found in a cave.

The instructions are badly translated and partially eaten
by sheep. They have seen the darkness. Their desires
are works in progress. They have no sense of sin.
They bathe in metaphorical waterfalls.
They meet in private and read each other to sleep.

Like everyone else, they stand at the edge of the water
and watch for a sail. They make a noise like an animal
trapped in a sack. They make a noise like a library
in the very early morning. They look like lanterns
swung in an underground cavern. They sit on benches,

saying the light is quite like beaten gold.
They try but they can’t help being slightly annoying.
They are not terrorists or Apollos or aircraft carriers.
They are frequently humbled by the need to earn a living.
They will make a fuss over nothing. They join hands and dance

like ceiling-fans. They love rivers and hares and hatstands.
They climb ladders of grammar to find the perfect view.
Their exaggerations are indistinguishable
from the truth. They feast on thoughts and air
left over from the previous century.

They harvest thunder. They wander. They smell of tarpaulins
and adhesive corners. They know how to pull the wool.
They luxuriate in epigraphs. They miss the point.
They dream about wolf-whistling the Furies.
They have no idea what they’re doing. This is their secret.

CJ Allen, 2010
Poets was first published in Assent 64/3 and will appear in Clive Allen's next collection, At the Oblivion Tea-Rooms from Nine Arches Press in summer of 2012.

Doomed, we are all doomed...

It is always easy to tell a Scotsman from a ray of sunshine, but two interesting statistics came up in discussion at the, sadly not very well attended, States of Independence (West) event in Birmingham on Saturday. The first was talking with a medium sized independent. They told me that they'd had some problems, including big returns, with a well known chain bookseller but they are now getting orders - a fraction of what they used to get, but now have to give 59% discount on standard stock. 59%? Add in the costs of representation, distribution and author royalties and the publisher is left with about £2.20 on a £9.99 book. Of course not every book printed sells, so allowing for returns and unsolds, the publisher is probably getting £1.50 a book. Now this is OK if you are printing tens of thousands and have the books typeset in India and printed in China, and can sell foreign rights. But that was not the case with this publisher. Looks like their business model is cracked.

But they have done pretty well with e-books... Later a writer announced that it is perfectly easy to crack the encryption in e-books that prevents the equivalent of file sharing. He said that as an experiment, he downloaded the complete text of the Booker prize longlist in half an minute, for free. So... soon all e-books will be free. Can't make money by printing books, can't make money by making e-books. There's not a lot left. But still, it was not such a bad day, the number of book sales was slightly higher than the number of manuscripts offered to us.... I rather fear that when the last publisher in the UK closes, attending the closing sale of the last bookshop, those attending the party will be mostly made up of people waving an unpublished manuscript, quite oblivious to everything else. Happy Monday.

Radical bookshop seminar

The Chapter and Verse book festival in Liverpool at the Bluecoat is the venue for a free seminar about radical bookselling. Mandy Vere from the local News from Nowhere bookshop chairs a discussion about the current state of radical bookselling and its prospects, while I give a talk on the history of radical bookselling, delving into the past waves of libertarian, hippy, Communist and freethought shops.
The event is free, on October 13. Full details on:
http://www.thebluecoat.org.uk/events/view/events/1131

A long weekend on the left

In the last posting, about the big Cable Street day on Sunday, I mentioned some of the groups on the demonstration. I should also have mentioned the Clarion cyclists. That particular group had cycled hundreds of miles to attend - I think I heard one say he had cycled 741 miles. They had a point, public transport in London that weekend was awful, with the DLR not running and various other lines or part lines having the weekend off. The Clarion people had arrived on Saturday to mark the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. The International Brigades Memorial Trust and Philosophy Football were not to know it would be the hottest day of the year, which meant the evening gig in a packed hall was rather sweaty. The only person who looked cool was Victoria Hislop. I had my doubts about her, though I'd read and enjoyed her book The Return, but she won me over explaining her general and specific Daily Telegraph background and lifestyle and how things changed when she started writing the novel that the book became. She immersed herself in Spanish Civil War stories and what she found shocked her, being a woman whose family had happily holidayed in Spain under Franco. This resulted in a rather unhappy two years of deep immersion in the civil war and its aftermath as she wrote the book. The IBMT is of course an organisation of fairly longstanding and knowledgable left-wingers so I was impressed that she wanted to be on a panel at the event. She in turn was quite impressed to be called, for the first time in her life, "comrade" by one of the trade union speakers.

I was a little surprised by one of the other speakers (and I don't mean our Andy Croft) who wondered whether there would have been so much interest had it been the "Norwegian Civil War" because of the romantic nature of Spain and the Spanish people. Would 2,500 British people have travelled to fight in Norway? Yes, actually, had the situation and times been the same. Anti-fascism is not determined by the number of fjords a country has.

International Brigade... Cable Street... There are a number of good reports and photos on line. A good place to start is http://stevesilver.org.uk/blog/battle-of-cable-street-75-anniversary/. And then back home in time to pack for a Leicester Trades Council event celebrating the Dirty Thirty, with David Bell speaking to the Five Leaves' book of the same name and Alan Parry singing, including the song he has written about the group. Eight or so of the Dirty Thirty were present including Malcolm Pinnegar and Darren Moore who spoke, and Johnny Gamble, who got his own special cheer for being the only man in his pit to have gone on strike. Jane Bruton, a nurse, who used to be involved in the women's support group also spoke, reading out old minutes and letters from back in the day. This was the second evening in a row that ended with the Internationale - though in this case not the Billy Bragg version, but the full strength original version, standing, with clenched fists aloft.

Finally, today I attended a meeting of local UNISON members who were taking up the Six Book Challenge as part of their Union Learning. It became a Seven Book Challenge as they were presented with copies of the Five Leaves' Nottingham anthology Sunday Night and Monday Morning. A printer we had dealings with found 400 copies of the book in their warehouse which we had not accounted for and we have been steadily finding ways of giving them away to good homes. Why is reading so important to trade unionists? Apart from its intrinsic value, and the value of building a reading culture in the workplace, as the number of veterans of the Spanish Civil War and Cable Street - and even the 84/85 NUM pass on - we can find out what they thought at the time, what they believed in, find their stories, their tall tales, and find what they can teach us through books. Reading allows us to meet remarkable people doing remarkable things. UNISON is doing a great job working with the Reading Agency to promote reading in the workplace.

The Cable Street Day

The Cable Street day started early, bumping into the already tired looking march organiser Steve Silver on his own, mooching round the Cable Street Mural, waiting on the stage to turn up. He wandered off to show me where his grandparents used to live on Cable Street itself and to talk through some of the detailed history of the day, which he is still finding more about. Down at Wilton's Music Hall the stalls were starting to be set up, volunteers from the Cable Street Group were already busy. Pippa Hennessy and Blake Griffiths (together with me and Myra Woolfson making up the Five Leaves team) were there before me, having left Nottingham at 6.30am - they would not get back until 1.30am the next day. Don't mention the European Working Time Directive.
Among the first people to visit our stall was a man with a photo of his father treating one of the injured at Cable Street. Crikey - all the publications about the day recycle the same images. This was completely new to me. He was one of many people sharing family memories of the day, though the number of actual Cable Street veterans able to attend is now limited. At our later book launch I was pleased to see Max Levitas (who spoke at the rally), Beatty Orwell and our own Bill Fishman. There were many stalls including from our friends at Brick Lane Bookshop, Housmans and Freedom and we were well entertained by street theatre and music, including by strolling actors in period costumes rallying the crowds "to Aldgate".
The march - initiated late - passed by. It was led by a number of Bangladeshi groups and our friends from the Jewish Socialists' Group. The Indian Workers Association was strongly represented, as were local trade union branches, the Woodcraft Folk with a brilliant hand made Cable Street banner, and the Connelly Association contingent was a reminder that so many of those at Cable Street were London Irish dockers, who used their work tools to prize up paving slabs to make barricades in 1936. The stall was too busy to leave to see the young musicians of the very multicultural Grand Union Youth Orchestra though I'd sneaked in for their rehearsals.
The next event was the book launch of our five Cable Street books. Maggie Pinhorn of Alternative Arts, the main organiser of the day, had said it would be busy and perhaps 300 people attended. Jil Cove of the Cable Street Group spoke first, followed by Andy Croft who had written the introduction to the late Frank Griffin's October Day. He was followed by Frank's daughter, Josephine Clark, who read from the book. David Rosenberg, who is doing more events based on his book Battle for the East End than anyone thought possible, read next. Alan Gibbons was unable to attend because of family reasons, so I read a little from his young adult fiction book Street of Tall People. Fittingly, Roger Mills ended the launch by reading from his Everything Happens in Cable Street. By now our piles of books - over two stalls - was going down fast. This was the best day of bookselling we have had. Period (as Americans say).
Astonishingly, about 125 people came to our panel discussion on rebel writers from the 1930s, to hear Mary Joannou, Andy Croft and Ken Worpole have a friendly disagreement of the impact of the literature of the 1930s. There was no time for audience participation, though Stephen Watts managed to chip in. Stephen was one of those reading (from our AN Stencl book All My Young Years at the previous night's Cable Street party organised by Jewdas. Leon Rosselson had the next set - I was on stall duty but I got his latest four CD collection and agreed to put on a Rosselson gig sometime in Nottingham. We used to talk about publishing a Leon Rosselson songbook, but somehow that never happened. My fault, not Leon's.
At six we turned into pumpkins and the stall was packed away, or what remained of it. It was time to be civilians, and attend the evening gig. The excellent compere was Ivor Dembina followed by Michael Rosen (one of whose poems had its first book outing many years ago in a Five Leaves/Jewish Socialists' Group book). I can't list the whole cast of those appearing on the magical old music hall stage at Wilton's but the people who stood out for me were the comedian Shappi Khorsandi, the band The Men They Could Not Hang and, finally, on great form, in front of a packed and appreciative hall, Billy Bragg. All of the artists performed gratis, all events were free, and the bucket collection will be used to shore up Wilton's and to pay for all the publicity and other costs. Anything left over will be used to further honour those who fought to defend their area on that extraordinary day on 4th October 1936 under the slogan of No Pasaran! They shall not pass! Five Leaves was thrilled to be part of such an extraordinary day, marking the 75th anniversary of such an extraordinary event.
Map by John Wallett