1967 George Lichtheim and a Ten Bob Note

 

It’s probably because he committed suicide in 1973 at the age of sixty one that I made myself keep in memory an encounter with George Lichtheim. In the summer term of 1967 I was the Chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club. That job carried the privilege of inviting seven or eight speakers whose names would grace what was always a printed programme of the club’s weekly events. I had committed myself to trying to give a more intellectual turn to the club talks, reducing the number of Labour MPs and increasing the presence of those who were making an impression with their ideas. E P Thompson came to launch the original 1967 version of the May Day Manifesto. I wrote to Herbert Marcuse in California who was coming to England for the Dialectics of Liberation congress in London, but he was not going to arrive until after our term had ended. It would have been a coup to bring him to Oxford. And I wrote to George Lichtheim who had become well-known thanks to his 1961 book Marxism, part textbook but part more than that, and which had become a must-read.

After his talk, of which I have no memory, I walked with him to the railway station and joined him on the platform while he waited. In talking about the activities of the club, I must have mentioned that we were raising money for some strike fund. Under the Labour government of Harold Wilson, there were always strikes and we were always supporting them – I did not begin to have doubts until the 1980s. As his train approached Lichtheim extracted a ten bob note from his wallet and handed it over for the strike fund. He wanted to make it clear that he was still on the same side. That’s what he said.