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WD_353/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0353 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"Let us fight for mickey mouse ~
Let us fight for rupert bear ~"
From "God Save Oz" (John Lennon/Yoko Ono), 1971.
-www.lyrics007.com/John%20Lennon%20Lyrics/
God%20Save%20Oz%20Lyrics.html
Oz (magazine) -
Oz was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963–69 in Sydney, Australia and, in its second and more famous incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London. Strongly identified as part of the underground press, it was the subject of two celebrated obscenity trials, one in Australia in 1964 and the other in the UK in 1971. On both occasions the magazine's editors were acquitted on appeal after initially being found guilty and sentenced to harsh jail terms.
The central editor throughout the magazine's life was Richard Neville. Co-editors of the Sydney version were Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp. Co-editors of the London version were Jim Anderson and, later, Felix Dennis.
Oz has been parodied in the short-lived television series Hippies.
Oz in Australia:
The original Australian editorial team included university students Neville, Walsh, Sharp and Peter Grose, with early contributions by future Time magazine critic and art historian Robert Hughes. Neville, Walsh and Sharp had each been involved in student papers at their respective Sydney tertiary campuses.
Influenced by the New Statesman, Private Eye and the radical comedy of Lenny Bruce, Neville and friends decided to found a "magazine of dissent". The first edition, published on April Fool's Day 1963, caused a sensation; it parodied The Sydney Morning Herald (and was even printed on The Herald's own presses, adding to its credibility). The first edition led with a front-page hoax about the collapse of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. In succeeding issues (and in its later London version) Oz also gave pioneering coverage to contentious issues such as censorship, homosexuality, abortion, police brutality, the Australian government's racist White Australia Policy and Australia's involvement in the Vietnam War, as well as regularly satirising public figures, up to and including Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
Two items in these early issues proved especially controversial. One was a satirical poem by Martin Sharp, about Sydney's youth sub-culture, entitled "The Word Flashed Around The Arms"; the other was the famous Issue #6 cover photograph, which depicted Neville and others pretending to urinate into a wall fountain (created by sculptor Tom Bass) which was mounted in the street facade of the Sydney offices of the P&O shipping line and which had recently been unveiled by Prime Minister Menzies.
Both the first and sixth issues landed the editors in court on obscenity charges. The cases stemmed from a number of published items, particularly the pissoir cover and Sharp's poem. In the first trial, all three men—acting on the advice of their lawyer—pleaded guilty.
When they were charged with obscenity a second time, the fact that they had a previous conviction counted heavily against them, and due to the blatant bias and hostility of the magistrate hearing the case, Mr Gerald Locke, SM, the three were sentenced to prison terms with hard labour.
The case created a storm of controversy, but the convictions were turned over on appeal mainly because, like their subsequent British trial, the magistrate misdirected the jury and made remarks that were later deemed to have been prejudicial to the defence's case.
Sydney Oz made several investigations into the murky realms of Sydney's underworld. One celebrated feature delved into the illegal abortion rackets which were then flourishing in Sydney (and around Australia), because at that time abortion was still illegal for all but the most exceptional cases, and corrupt police were wildely believed to be running lucrative protection rackets that netted them substantial sums.
In 1965 Oz editor Richard Neville had a close encounter with Sydney's alleged "Mr Big" of organised crime, Lennie McPherson, a notorious criminal who was at that time well on his way to becoming Sydney's most powerful underworld figure, thanks in part to a systematic program of public assassinations of his rivals.
Late in the year, Oz published a feature called "The Oz Guide to Sydney's Underworld", which was based on information from two local journalists, and which included a "top 20" list of Sydney major criminals. The list deliberately left the #1 spot blank, but at #2 was the name "Len" (i.e. McPherson) who was described as a "fence" and a "fizz-gig" (police informant). Soon after the list was published, McPherson made a visit to Neville's house in Paddington; ostensibly he wanted to find out whether the Oz editors were part of a rival gang, but he also made it clear to Neville that he objected to being described as a "fizz".[1]
The Top 20 list also reportedly played a part in the death of Sydney criminal Jacky Steele, who was shot in Woollahara in November 1965. Steele - who had been trying to take over protection rackets controlled by McPherson -- survived for almost a month before dying from his wounds, but before he died he told police that McPherson had ordered his execution because Steele had bought multiple copies of Oz and had made great play of the fact that McPherson was not #1. Oz revealed this in a subsequent issue, which contained extracts from the minutes of a confidential meeting of Sydney detectives, held on 1 December 1965, which had been leaked to the magazine by an underworld source.
Sharp and Neville left for London in 1966, while Walsh returned to his studies, although he subsequently revived and published a reduced edition of Sydney Oz, which ran until 1969. In the 1970s he edited POL magazine and the Nation Review and later became managing director of leading Australian media company Australian Consolidated Press, owned by Kerry Packer.
Oz in the UK:
In late 1966 Neville and Sharp moved to the UK and in early 1967, with fellow Australian Jim Anderson, they founded the London Oz. Contributors included Germaine Greer, artist and filmmaker Philippe Mora, photographer Robert Whitaker, journalist Lillian Roxon, cartoonist Michael Leunig, Angelo Quattrocchi and David Widgery.
With access to new print stocks, including metallic foils, new fluorescent inks and the greater flexibility of layout offered by the offset printing system, Sharp's artistic skills came to the fore and Oz quickly won renown as one of the most visually exciting publications of its time. Many editions of Oz included dazzling psychedelic wrap-around or pull-out posters by Sharp, London design duo Hapshash and the Coloured Coat and others; these instantly became sought-after collectors' items and now command high prices. The all-graphic "Magic Theatre" edition (Oz #16), overseen by Sharp and Mora, has been described by British author Jonathon Green as "arguably the greatest achievement of the entire British underground press." During this period Sharp also created two famous psychedelic album covers for the group Cream, Disraeli Gears and Wheels Of Fire.
Sharp gradually drifted away from the magazine during 1968, so a young Londoner, Felix Dennis, who had been selling issues on the street, was eventually brought in as Neville and Anderson's new partner. The magazine regularly enraged the British Establishment with a range of left-field stories including heavy critical coverage of the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement, discussions of drugs, sex and alternative lifestyles, and contentious political stories, such as the magazine's revelations about the torture of citizens under the rule of the military junta in Greece.
In 1970, reacting to criticism that Oz had lost touch with youth, the editors put a notice in the magazine inviting "school kids" to edit an issue. The opportunity was taken up by around 20 secondary school students (including Charles Shaar Murray and Deyan Sudjic), who were let loose on Oz #28 (May 1970), known as "Schoolkids OZ". This term was widely misunderstood to mean that it was intended for school children, whereas it was a statement that it had been created by them.
One of the resulting articles was a highly sexualised Rupert Bear parody. It was created by 15-year-old schoolboy Vivian Berger by pasting the head of Rupert onto the lead character of an X-rated satirical cartoon by Robert Crumb. The majority of the contributors were from public schools (in the UK sense of the term: elite non-state schools); as a result the humour was mostly an extension of the type of material familiar from undergraduate rag mags.
Oz was one of several 'underground' publications targeted by the Obscene Publications Squad, and their offices had already been raided on several occasions, but the conjunction of schoolchildren and arguably obscene material set the scene for the infamous Oz obscenity trial of 1971. In some respects it was a copy of the Australian trial, with evidence and judicial instruction clearly aimed at securing a conviction, but the British trial was given a far more dangerous twist because the prosecution employed an archaic charge against Neville, Dennis and Anderson—"conspiracy to corrupt public morals"—which, in theory, carried a virtually unlimited penalty.
The defence lawyer, John Mortimer QC announced at the opening of the trial in 1971 that “[the] case stands at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our freedom to think and draw and write what we please” (The Times: 24 June 1971). For the defence, this specifically concerned the treatment of dissent and dissenters, about the control of ideas and suppressing the messages of social resistance communicated by OZ in issue #28. The charges read out in the central criminal court stated “[that the defendants] conspiring with certain other young persons to produce a magazine containing obscene, lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, cartoons and drawings with intent to debauch and corrupt the morals of children and other young persons and to arouse and implant in their minds lustful and perverted ideas” (The Times: 23 June 1971). According to Mr Brian Leary prosecuting “It dealt with homosexuality, lesbianism, sadism, perverted sexual practices and drug taking” (op. cit.).
The trial brought the magazine to the attention of the wider public. John Lennon and Yoko Ono joined the protest march against the prosecution and organised the recording of "God Save Oz" by the Elastic Oz Band to raise funds and gain publicity.
Dennis and Anderson were defended by lawyer and playwright John Mortimer (creator of the Rumpole Of The Bailey series) with assistance from Australian lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, while Neville represented himself.
The trial was, at the time, the longest obscenity trial in British legal history. Defence witnesses included comedian Marty Feldman, artist and drugs activist Caroline Coon, DJ John Peel, musician and writer George Melly and academic Edward De Bono. At the conclusion of the trial the "Oz Three" were found guilty and sentenced to prison; although Dennis was given a lesser sentence because the judge, Justice Michael Argyle, considered that Dennis was "very much less intelligent" than Neville and Anderson. Shortly after the verdicts were handed down they were taken to prison and their heads shaved, an act which caused an even greater stir on top of the already considerable outcry surrounding the trial and verdict.
The most famous images of the trial come from the committal hearing, at which Neville, Dennis and Anderson all appeared wearing rented schoolgirl costumes.
At the appeal trial, where the defendants appeared wearing long wigs, it was found that Justice Argyle had grossly misdirected the jury on numerous occasions. During the appeal, it was also alleged that Berger, who was called as a prosecution witness, had been harassed and assaulted by police. The convictions were overturned. Years later, Felix Dennis told author Jonathan Green that on the night before the appeal was heard, the Oz editors were taken to a secret meeting with the Chief Justice, Lord Widgery, who told them that they would be acquitted if they agreed to give up work on Oz, and that MPs Tony Benn and Michael Foot had interceded on their behalf.
Elastic Oz Band:
The song "God Save Oz" was first demoed by John Lennon in the early 70s and an ad hoc group named the Elastic Oz Band was formed to record it. The lead singer was Bill Elliot who would later find some degree of fame on George Harrison's Dark Horse label as one half of a duo called Splinter. "God Save Oz" was released on The Beatles' Apple Records label. The noted music journalist Charles Shaar Murray was at the session for the record, and contributed guitar, but claims on The End Of The Century Ramones DVD commentary that his guitar work was mixed out.
Lennon's original demo was issued in 1998 on the John Lennon Anthology and again on Wonsaponatime.
After the UK trial:
The magazine continued in publication with diminishing success until 1973.
Dennis was stung by personal comments made by the trial judge that he was of limited ability and a dupe of the other defendants; since that time, he has become one of Britain's wealthiest and most prominent independent publishers as owner of Dennis Publishing Ltd (publisher of Maxim and other magazines), and in 2004 released a book of original poetry. In 1995 Justice Argyle reiterated allegations about Dennis in The Spectator magazine. As this was outside court privilege, Dennis was able to successfully sue the magazine, which agreed to pay £10,000 to charity. Dennis refrained from suing Argyle personally: "Oh, I don't want to make him a martyr of the Right: there's no glory to be had in suing an 80-year-old man and taking his house away from him. It was just a totally obvious libel."[2]
Neville eventually returned to Australia, where he has become a successful author, commentator and public speaker. His books include a critically praised account in the 1980s of the life of French/Vietnamese serial killer Charles Sobraj, who preyed on Western tourists travelling on Asia's so-called "hippie trail" in the 1970s; the book was later adapted for a successful TV mini-series starring Art Malik. He also wrote a memoir of Oz magazine, Hippie Hippie Shake.
Walsh became a magazine editor with Kerry Packer's Australian Consolidated Press organisation and eventually rose to become its senior publisher.
Sharp has long been regarded as Australia's leading pop artist and is well known in Australia for his passionate interest in Sydney's Luna Park and in the life and music of Tiny Tim.
Notes:
1. ^ Neville, 1995, p.55-56
2. ^ Davidson, Andrew (Sep 9, 1995). The old devil. The Independent. Retrieved on 2007-02-01.
References:
1. ^ Neville, 1995, p.55-56
2. ^ Davidson, Andrew (Sep 9, 1995). The old devil. The Independent. Retrieved on 2007-02-01.
* Green, Jonathon, All Dressed Up: The Sixties and the Counterculture. Pimlico, London, 1999, ISBN 0-7126-6523-4.
* Neville, Richard, Hippie Hippie Shake. William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1995, ISBN 0-85561-523-0
* The Times Digital Archive 1785-1985 (access supplied by JISC, based in the UK)
Further reading:
* Nigel Fountain Underground: The London Alternative Press 1966-74, Commedia/Routledge 1988 ISBN 0-415-00727-5 / ISBN 0-415-00728-3 (pb)
* Tony Palmer The Trials of Oz, Blond & Briggs, 1971.
* Geoffrey Robertson The Justice Game, Vintage, London, 1999, ISBN 0-09-958191-4.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oz_(magazine)
The Rupert Bear Controversy: Defence and Reactions to the Cartoon in the OZ Obscenity Trial
From 1967 until 1973 Oz was the irreverent ‘colour supplement’ of the London underground press. In June 1971 the editors (Jim Anderson, Felix Dennis and Richard Neville) went on trial at the Old Bailey for, among other things, conspiring to "corrupt the morals of young children and other young persons" by producing an "obscene article", sending said article through the mail, and publishing obscene articles for gain. Had they been on trial for obscenity alone, the maximum penalty would have been a fine of £100 or 6 months imprisonment. However, the use of an (archaic) conspiracy charge meant that there was no limit on the fine or sentence that could be imposed.
The ‘article’ in question was ‘School Kids’ Oz (#28: May 1970), an issue that was put together, in great part, by adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18. As usual, the magazine was a surreal mix of graphics, cartoons, articles, reviews and adverts, but a great deal of space was devoted to writing by school pupils—on such things as pop music, sexual freedom and hypocrisy, drug use, corporal punishment, and examinations ("Examinations are a primitive method of recording a tiny, often irrelevant, section of the behaviour of an individual under bizarre conditions"). The overall tone, defence witnesses and prosecution agreed, was libertarian and anti-authoritarian.
A central piece of evidence at the trial was a montage/collage of two cartoon strips that appeared in this issue. This montage was put together by Vivian Berger, then a 15 year-old schoolboy. The strips used were parts of a Rupert Bear cartoon which had been superimposed on a strip by the American underground artist Robert Crumb. Rupert Bear had appeared in the pages of the Daily Express for years (he emerged in late November 1920 as a result of circulation battles between the major dailies) and offered an innocent, nostalgic and quintessentially ‘middle-English’ version of childhood. Crumb was one of the most prolific and notoriously ‘explicit’ of the underground artists (incidentally, established cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, often up to no good, had frequently appeared in the work of underground cartoonists) and the Crumb strip that Berger used was part of a long cartoon called ‘Eggs Ackley Among the Vulture Demonesses’, which had appeared in Big Ass Comics, June, 1969. Basically, Berger’s montage presents a sexually excited Rupert Bear violating the virginity of an (unconscious) female. Although the basic drawings and speech-bubbles are Crumb’s, Rupert’s head and scarf had been carefully superimposed on the original character, and the frame titles (there are six frames) and the characteristic narrative in rhyming couplets beneath had been retained from the Rupert strip.
Tony Palmer’s book The Trials of Oz transcribes a lot of the court proceedings verbatim, and Vivian Berger’s defence is worth citing at length:
Asked by Mr Mortimer [defence] why he had contributed the Rupert Bear cartoon, he [Berger] replied: "I think that, looking back on it, I subconsciously wanted to shock your generation: to portray us as a group of people who were different from you in moralistic attitudes. Also, it seemed to me just very funny, and like anything else that makes fun of sex". Mortimer asked: "You say you did it to shock an older generation? What relevance did Rupert have as a figure or symbol?" Berger replied: "Well, Rupert would probably be known to many generations as the innocent young character who figures in magic fairy tales. Whereas here, he’s just doing what every normal human being does." "Was it part of your intention," he suggested, "to show that there was a more down-to-earth side of childhood than some grown-up people are prepared to think?"
"Oh yes", Berger responded cheerfully. "This is the kind of drawing that goes around every classroom, every day, in every school." The Judge looked wounded. "Do you really mean that?" he asked… "Yes, I do mean it," Berger replied immediately. "Maybe I was portraying obscenity, but I don’t think I was being obscene myself."
Mr Leary [prosecution] then elucidated from Mr Berger that he lived with his mother and his two sisters, aged 10 and 12. Yes, he had often bought Oz magazine and yes he had usually left it around the house. His mother had known about his involvement in School Kids Issue and had actually encouraged the lad to contribute. No, she did not think that it had depraved or corrupted him… Mr Leary lurched to the meat of the matter, as he described it. "You were asked by Mr Mortimer," he nodded, "about your contribution to the magazine. Do you remember saying: ‘I thought it was portraying obscenity, but not being obscene myself’?"
"Yes, I do remember saying that," Berger replied, somewhat hesitantly. Quick as a flash Leary inquired: "And what did you mean by that?" Berger was not to be cajoled. "Well," he replied, "if the News covers a war or shows a picture of war, then, for me, they are portraying obscenity—the obscenity of war. But they are not themselves creating that obscenity, because it is the people who are fighting the war that are creating that obscenity. The obscenity is in the action, not in the reporting of it. For example, I consider that the act of corporal punishment is an obscenity. I do not consider that the act of reporting or writing about corporal punishment is obscene".
Feliks Topolski, an artist and a defence witness, pronounced that the juxtaposition of the two elements/cartoons produced "satirical art" in a magazine "which has a large proportion of material that is immensely interesting precisely because it is produced by school children." Marsha Rowe, co-founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, stated that the Rupert cartoon was "puerile, rebellious, and not pornographic". However, other witnesses felt that they couldn’t take the stand, as Nigel Fountain reports in Underground:
Rupert, the long-time children’s cartoon from the Daily Express, meant little to Rowe, who hadn’t been in England long enough to know who Rupert was. For her the airbrushed women on the cover, with their whips, made her uncomfortable, but for her in those days there were no words to explain just what it was she was concerned about. Another potential witness did know Rupert. Having talked to Louise Ferrier she indicated that she couldn’t take the stand. She felt bad about it; and they [the defendants] were, she thought, quite offended and hurt, but Rupert, she brooded, was one of her childhood heroes. ‘I think in many ways my character was partly shaped by Rupert Bear! My memories were being violated. The arrogant, male, aggressive style of drawing that appeared in the name of revolution worried me. It brought into symbolic shape areas of male antagonism to women that were completely covered up in the old socialist style of the movement. It awakened our antagonism to the way men had the arrogance to portray sexuality in their terms’.
While the defence of the cartoon and the magazine’s general aims were persuasive the broader issues which the cartoon raised seemed symptomatic of a significant split within the underground press, a split which coincided with the demise of the 60s counter-culture as a whole. On August 5th 1971, after being refused bail and kept in prison for 7 days pending ‘medical, social and psychiatric reports’ and suffering enforced haircuts which the New Law Journal called a "monstrous violation of an individual’s personal integrity", the three editors were sentenced to a variety of fines, deportation (in the case of Anderson and Neville) and prison sentences ranging from 9 to 15 months (all sentences were quashed on appeal). In her ‘Oz Trial Post-Mortem’, unpublished until collected in The Madwoman’s Underclothes (1986), Germaine Greer accused the magazine of naïve untimeliness:
Before repressive tolerance became a tactic of the past, Oz could fool itself and its readers that, for some people at least, the alternative society already existed. Instead of developing a political analysis of the state we live in, instead of undertaking the patient and unsparing job of education which must precede even a pre-revolutionary situation, Oz behaved as though the revolution had already happened.
Gerry Carlin and Mark Jones
-pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/rupage.html
Defending Rupert
Richard Neville, defending himself, made pleas for the magazine and its project in both his opening and closing statements (all citations on this page are from Tony Palmer’s The Trials of Oz):
… all of these issues of Oz should not be seen in isolation from other magazines and newspapers published in this country such as International Times, Friends, Ink, Mole Express, Styng, Press Ups and dozens of others, known generally, if misleadingly, as the underground press—papers which offer a platform to the socially impotent, and which mirror the changing way of life in our community. And because this ‘underground’ or ‘alternative’ press is a worldwide phenomenon and because it represents a voice of progress and change in our society, then it is not really only us who are on trial today... but all of you... and the right of all of you to freely discuss the issues which concern you...
Our suggestion that Oz had the intention of improving society has been heavily derided. But that has always been our contention and always will be. We felt it was of social value to find out what adolescents were complaining about, in the hope that when their complaints were published, someone might do something about them. Young people, as they go through this no-man’s land between 15 and 18 are socially impotent. Even if some of the criticisms expressed in Oz 28 are crude and silly, we believe it was of sociological and educational value that they should have been openly expressed.
A host of prestigious defence witnesses supported the magazine, including psychologist Dr Lionel Haward, who argued that what may be "unacceptable" to adults might be perfectly acceptable to children: "For too long we have assumed that what offends us will necessarily offend or disturb them". Vivian Berger’s Mother insisted that the Rupert montage was a joke:
"A joke?" asked Leary, clutching his sides. "Yes, a joke," repeated Mrs Berger. "And the joke was this; to put into print what every child knows, that is that the innocent little bear has sexual organs. Children today are surrounded by, and cannot escape from, the sexual nature of our society—newspapers which are sold by having advertisements based on sex, and which include gossip also based on innuendos about the sexual relationships between people who are not married. This is the world in which our children grow up."
Michael Duane, the former Headmaster of Rising Hill, a progressive comprehensive school, had this to say about Rupert:
"In its own crude way… it’s perhaps the funniest thing in the magazine. It is simply an attempt to shock those of the older generation like myself who have been brought up on the nauseous fact that Rupert and Enid Blyton books and all this kind of rubbishy sentimentality, are suitable for children. The cartoon, therefore, brings together the notion of Rupert, a horrible sentimental little bear, with the more realistic activities of a male human being in such a way as to cause an element of shock. This can only be to the good if it helps people to realise just how bad, how destructive in the long run, such mush as Rupert is".
The ‘aesthetic defence’ of the montage was articulated most forcefully by Feliks Topolski:
The achievement of the cartoon, maintained Topolski, lay in its juxtaposition of hitherto unrelated elements—the American comic strip from which the story line had come, and the head of Rupert Bear taken out of a Rupert Annual; Rupert provided a fantastical and nostalgic quality to the cartoon. "I’m very bad at quotations," he said, "but I think it was Koestler [The Act of Creation, 1964] who said that unexpected elements when brought together, produce the act of creation, of creativity."
LEARY: I’m not dealing with the act of creation. I’m dealing with Rupert Annual. Could you help us as to whether or not Rupert on his own, as he appears in this Annual, as he appears in a national daily, is that Art?
TOPOLSKI: Well, he’s here a symbol of a certain state of mind and when in the central position of the page…
JUDGE: No, Mr Topolski, you haven’t understood. What Learned Counsel is asking you is this; suppose you went into a bookshop and bought the Rupert Annual to give someone as a present, would you regard that as Art?
TOPOLSKI: No, I personally wouldn’t, but many probably would. But I have to add that in this case we are not facing Rupert alone. We are…
LEARY: I fully understand what you mean about bringing two things together. I want to separate them for a moment…
TOPOLSKI: But that’s unfair to the situation on this page.
LEARY: I won’t be unfair. I want to understand what you’re saying. Do you agree that Rupert as he appears in the daily strip in a national daily and in Rupert’s Annual is not Art?
TOPOLSKI: Not to me.
LEARY: And to you, I imagine, this comic strip, again, is not ART? And you say that bringing the two together makes it (pause) different?
TOPOLSKI: Yes
LEARY: Does it make it Art in your opinion?
TOPOLSKI: It makes it satirical art.
LEARY: Satirical art. I see…
TOPOLSKI: …may I remind you that this is a school-children’s issue, which has a large proportion of material that is immensely interesting precisely because it is produced by school children.
-pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/rudefend.html#
(Defence%20%20extracts)
Broader Issues: Verdict and After
After the trial, one of the jurors stated:
When I first picked up Oz I thought it was a filthy magazine. I thought the swear words and drawings were obscene and completely unnecessary. But when the contents of Oz were explained to the Jury I felt more sympathy for what the defendants were trying to achieve. The trouble is they are sincere, but completely misguided. If my children had come home with such a magazine I would have been appalled and, before this trial, I would probably have torn it up. But now I would sit down with them and tell them why I think it is wrong and have a discussion on the subject. That is how the trial has changed me.
(cited in Tony Palmer, The Trials of Oz)
Writing in the third person, Marsha Rowe, co-founder of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, stated:
The issue of Oz which was put together by school kids has a cartoon of Rupert Bear with an oversized prick fucking Honey Bunch K, the US girl-momma figure. It is puerile, rebellious and not pornographic. At the Oz trial she realises the importance of Rupert Bear in the British Psyche.
(‘Up From Down Under’, in Sara Maitland (ed) Very Heaven)
Elsewhere, however, Rowe acknowledges the gender politics which emerged from, but finally challenged, the ethos of the underground:
The flaunting of a defiant sexuality provoked legal prosecution. IT was taken to court for publishing small ads for homosexuals, despite the legalization of homosexuality between ‘consenting adults in private’. Police seized Oz magazine’s ‘School Kids’ Issue’, produced by a guest editorial team of twenty young people. The charge brought, not against the school kids, but the three Oz editors, was the first time the Obscene Publications Act, 1959, was combined with a moral conspiracy charge. The three were convicted and given jail sentences. During the trial, the prosecuting barrister accused the community of which the magazine was a part of being without love. Richard Neville responded that, on the contrary, Oz was against the guilt and obsession of repressed sexuality and that "Oz was trying to redefine love, to broaden it, extend it and revitalize it, so it could be a force of release and not one of entrapment".
The irony of this was that, while this may have been true for men, it was rarely the case for women. The underground press used sex-objectifying images which had developed from being fairly romantic to stridently sadistic. The women who worked on its magazines and newspapers served the men and did the office and production work rather than any editorial work. After a time on Oz I had worked for the defence in the Oz trial, and the cover of that issue was a montage of pictures of a naked woman in erotic display. In November 1971, three months after the trial, I went to the women’s liberation demonstration outside the Albert Hall, the second against the Miss World competition, and was beginning to feel contradictions exploding inside my head.
(Marsha Rowe, Introduction to the Spare Rib Reader)
After the trial the circulation of Oz rose to 80,000 copies. In April 1972 the wife of the Clerk of the Court at the Oz trial was tried for having wasted 1,200 hours of police time by fabricating threatening notes to herself (Judge Argyll took them seriously and was heavily guarded against assassination). In June 1973 Oz went into liquidation. In March 1977 investigation into corruption in the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad began. It would uncover massive complicity between the police and the pornography industry:
Ex-Commander Wallace Virgo was… the most senior Scotland Yard man ever to be brought before the London Courts. He was also the holder of the Queen’s Police Medal. In office, Virgo had overall control of nine squads, including those specialising in drugs and porn. Over the years he contrived to block the many complaints of OPS corruption from ever being followed up. He had done this not out of comradely loyalty, but for payments (as the prosecution alleged) of up to £60,000 in all. What was even more shaming, was that this corruption had coincided with the most ferocious police assault ever against politically subversive ‘obscenity’… (John Sutherland: Offensive Literature)
Rather topically, Oz and its context now (November 1999) provide the template for a satirical TV sitcom:
There are many myths about the 1960s, but none beats the myth that the hippies were a force for social change. The hippy movement was always ripe for one thing, though—a sitcom… The Defendants were the Oz publishers Felix Dennis (now the owner of a successful publishing empire), Richard Neville and Jim Anderson. In the summer of 1971 they were prosecuted for putting together a special ‘School Kids Issue’. It included a number of sado-masochistic cartoons such as Rupert Bear apparently raping the American comic character Gipsy Granny. Puerile and self-aggrandising, it was a rather feeble butterfly for the establishment to break upon a wheel.
(David Lister, ‘Call That a Revolution?’ [preview of the sitcom Hippies], The Independent on Sunday, 7th November, 1999)
But perhaps the final words should be drawn from the final issue of Oz itself:
The truth of the matter is not that The-Leaders-Sold-Out or that-something-greatly-beautious-grew-cankered, but that the underground got smashed, good and proper by exactly those forces of which it stood in defiance. It was smashed because it could not, by 1968, be laughed at or ignored or patronised any longer. The underground was able to make really painful attacks on the system’s intellectually based forms of power. Of all the intellectual property speculators of the 60s, it made the most sizeable incursions into capitalism’s ideological real estate, the family, school, work-discipline, the ‘impartial’ lawcourts and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Unlike previous movements of radical arties, it actually transmitted its mood of indiscipline to young people of all classes.
‘It is an attack on family life’, said Inspector Luff at the OZ trial, quite rightly. The popularity of OZ’s atmosphere (no matter how incomprehensible and downright boring the actual magazine) was, especially to working class kids, an index of the end of decades post war deference, evidence of a new refusal to any longer even pretend loyalty to the Queen, The Law and The Empire. Already the obscenity and dope trials of the sixties look like light comedy compared to the massive police operations around the Shrewsbury building workers’ conspiracy trial or the Winchester bombs trial. But they were the first omens of a new legal viciousness, the opportunity for the police to cut their teeth and the Special Branch to enlarge its files. They could take the Angry Young Men out to lunch, but the hairies had to go to jail.
...It was a politics of gesture, a species of street theatre, a series of provocations, The Cafe Voltair meets the Claimants Union...
What finally knackered the underground was its complete inability to deal with women’s liberation. For the underside of the underground’s romantic revolt is its treatment of women. Men defined themselves as rebels against society in ways limited to their own sex, excluding women except as loyal companions or mother-figures. From its origin in white identification with urban blues through Brando and Mailer and Dylan and Lennon, the defiance of capitalism has been intertwined with a punishment of women (look again at Blonde on Blonde or Look Back in Anger). Because the underground remained so utterly dominated by men, sexual liberation was framed in terms saturated with male assumptions, right down to the rape fantasy of ‘Dope, rock and roll and fucking in the streets’.
And because the feelings and resentments felt by women so long in the underground had been fobbed off by the standard clichés about ‘hang-ups’ and ‘hanging loose’, when the wave came it came as a devastating blow...
But it will go forward again, in different ways, because it asserts that most revolutionary force, the power of the imagination; the ability to compare what is with what could be. The underground (RIP) inflicted such damage on the system’s self-confidence before it was smothered by policemen and smoothies because it provided a possibility of releasing and expressing feelings which the system can only pretend to satisfy. It overrules for good the view that politics is simply a question of cheerleading in an empty electoral stadium. But when the fire comes next time, it will have to be a lot bigger and better organised, less myth-ridden and above all anchored in working class politics. As Tom Mann used to say ‘As we grow older, may we become more dangerous’.
(‘What Went Wrong’ by David Widgery from Oz 48, Winter 1973, the final issue)
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Oz trial lifted lid on porn squad bribery -
Secret home office papers show how prosecution of hippy magazine helped unearth a web of corruption that landed Yard men in jail
Alan Travis, Home Affairs Editor
Saturday November 13, 1999
(Taken from the Guardian Unlimited Website)
The outcry over the 1971 Schoolkids Oz censorship trial sparked a major corruption inquiry in Whitehall which ended in the jailing of the senior officer responsible for the magazine's prosecution, newly released confidential Whitehall documents reveal.
The secret home office papers published today show the public backlash to the savage sentencing of Richard Neville and the editors of the hippie magazine helped precipitate Scotland Yard's biggest ever anti-corruption drive in which 400 officers, including a deputy assistant commissioner, were imprisoned or left the force.
The head of the Metropolitan police's obscene publications squad, who targeted the capital's burgeoning samizdat, also ended up behind bars as had Neville and the magazine's other two editors, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson.
The papers were not due to be made public until 2003 but have been released early under the open government initiative. They show that the then home secretary, Reginald Maudling, was so stung by the accusation that the police were singling out hippie publications such as Oz and the Little Red Schoolbook for prosecution while Soho pornographers were being let off the hook that he ordered a major inquiry.
Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, then in charge of the "dirty" squad, told Mr Maudling that pornography could not be stamped out because it had existed for centuries, and justified his targeting of Oz and the Little Red Schoolbook as indecent publications which were aimed at children and advocated "the alternative society".
Fenwick disputed the home office's claim that the Soho bookshops were operating with impunity. "I would rather question the assertion that pornography was on 'open sale' in Soho or indeed anywhere else in London on a large scale. I would, however, agree that it can be found in various bookshops when it is particularly asked for."
Home office civil servants said this weasel explanation "left a good deal to be desired".
Detailed allegations were made of police corruption soon after the Oz inquiry. Fenwick was eventually jailed for 10 years as the "chief architect" of the biggest ever Met corruption ring in which the Soho porn merchants had some of the most senior police officers in Britain on their weekly payroll.
The Oz case at the Old Bailey was the longest obscenity trial in British legal history. The original sentences of up to 15 months for Neville and the others sparked a wave of protest from Beatle John Lennon, a young John Birt and many others.
The convictions were quashed on appeal only after, it is alleged by Geoffrey Robertson, one of the defence counsels, the lord chief justice, Lord Widgery, sent his clerk, a former merchant seaman, to Soho one lunchtime to buy £20 worth of the hardest porn he could find. The contents of Oz paled in comparison.
After the trial Fenwick had to explain to Maudling why he had targeted Oz. In his confidential report dated August 13, 1971, he said: "In this country at the minute there are somewhere in the region of 80 publications which advocate what in the current idiom is called the alternative society. Of these about 25 can be termed 'underground' press and a number of them contain articles which can be described as indecent.
"However, by far the worst of these are Oz, Frendz and IT, in that order. These in fact are the only ones against whom action has been taken or indeed contemplated in the last 12 months."
He said that alongside these "underground" publications so-called sex instructional literature had emerged, including the Little Red Schoolbook, Curious, In Depth, New Directions and Forum - later to feature articles by Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's press secretary. "All have been the subjects of inquiry or prosecution by this department during the past year. It is an unfortunate fact of life that pornography has existed for centuries and it is unlikely that it can ever be stamped out."
He disputed that pornography was on open sale and complained that the way the law was drafted made his task impossible: "The police cannot act as 'buyers' and so lay themselves open to allegations of 'agent provocateur'. It must therefore be left to the purveyors of filth to make a mistake or the odd genuine complaint to come to hand."
Fenwick blamed the director of public prosecutions for lack of action and the press for giving massive publicity to the hippie cases and leaving the impression the police were doing nothing about Soho.
Fenwick's explanation set alarm bells ringing in the home office. Anxieties were reinforced when an anonymous "senior Yard man" was quoted in the London Evening News saying the Oz trial would not herald a new crackdown on porn as it would take too much manpower: "One can go into Soho today and see far worse pornography than was in the Oz magazines. Any child can buy it."
So when Matthew Oliver, an investigator for Lord Longford's unofficial inquiry into pornography, later that year produced allegations against seven named porn merchants who were bribing police officers, the home secretary demanded a full report.
The inquiries initially came up against a wall of silence.
But in February 1972 the head of the Scotland Yard flying squad, Commander Kenneth Drury, was revealed to have just spent a two-week holiday in Cyprus with James Humphreys, one of seven named porn barons. Drury claimed they were looking for Ronnie Biggs, the escaped train robber.
But investigations ordered by the new Met commissioner, Robert Mark, finally unveiled the systemic corruption at the heart of the police. Four years later Mr Justice Mars-Jones named Fenwick as the "chief architect" and sentenced him to 10 years' imprisonment.
-pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~fa1871/oztrial.htm#
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