New Worlds, Arts Council & Jennie Lee

[David Mosley]

While researching the 'New Worlds' entry for the Moorcockopedia, I came across this:

NEW WORLDS 180 appeared in March 1968, and that was when the shit really hit the fan. Britain's two major distributors, John Menzies and W.H.Smith, refused to distribute it on the grounds of 'obscenity and libel', though it was never made clear just what NEW WORLDS contained that they imagined to be libellous. This was picked up by the 'Daily Express' newspaper, and in the House of Commons a Tory MP demanded to know of Arts Minister Jennie Lee why public money (the Arts Council grant) was being used to subsidise filth.

Now I've been aware of this incident for almost as long as I've known about NW itself, but does anyone know:

a) Who asked the question?
b) What the question actually was?
c) What was the Minister's answer?

Unfortunately, Hansard (the UK parliament's record of parliamentary debates) only goes as far back as 1988 online, so short of a trip down to the Palace of Westminster, does anyone here have details of this exchange?

Cheers,
David

[Michael Moorcock]

I don't remember exactly but the question was prompted by an item in The Daily Express which was decidedly anti-Arts Council (i.e. public money spent on the arts). So the MP was Conservative and he asked why public money was being spent on promoting obscenity. Jennie Lee, who didn't (I heard) like what she saw in NW, nonetheless said something about obscenity not having been proven. The Chairman of the AC looked at the issue, saw Eduardo Paolozzi on the masthead (though as Aeronautics Advisor!) and said that if Paolozzi was involved then it must be okay... The press, who themselves had found themselves in conflict with Smith and Co, took our case up for their own purposes and got both Smith and Menzies to take us back on, but they only did so nominally, never opening the packages of copies they got and holding them for months, so that we had no idea of our sales (or lack of them). It was never the public's fault -- i.e. our circulation was fine until Smith and Menzies stopped displaying us or distributing us to their retail stores. I don't know where you'd find a record of the exchange. Brian Aldiss might have reported it somewhere.

[David Mosley]

Thanks for the response, Mike - it's almost unbelievable in this day and age that a magazine could be effectively banned not because the public complained, or because the Government of the day said it must, or because of legal proceedings against it, but because the distributors didn't like it.

I say 'almost' because I still recall the case of the 'SKIN' graphic novel by Peter Milligan and Brendan Mccathy in...oh, must have been the early '90s, which was pulled from Crisis magazine because someone at the printers (the printers, mind) decided they didn't like this comic strip about a thalidomide skinhead. 8O

And of course, it wasn't that long ago that Smiths decided not to stock 'top-shelf' magazines in their displays - although that also coincided with the explosion in 'lads mags' like FHM, Maxim, and Loaded, which were/are little more than 'soft-soft-porn' (lots of T&A but very careful not to show any 'rude bits') and habitually float around the middle shelves. (I believe Smiths actually reversed their 'no top-shelf mags' policy recently anyway - gee, aren't distributors fickle? :P)

Anyway, thanks for the prأ©cis - I'll keeping looking for the actual Hansard report of the exchange - it's one of those things that has entered into the mass consciousness I think (at least amongst SF fans of discernment ;)) - and it would be nice to know what was actually said. Will try and see if the BWA link leads anywhere.

[Marca]

There are a number of email links on the Hansard and Commons pages demos, have you seen them? Somebody might be able to research the answer for you? Not sure if it can be done free of charge or not. I'm intrigued myself and would like to know the answer. There might also be something in writing by Brian Aldiss or Charles Platt on the subject, since I think Aldiss was involved with getting the Arts Council grant in the first place and of course Platt was involved with the editing of New Worlds. Platt's description of the New Worlds era in the piece on Mike in his Dream Makers book, makes it sound far from glamorous...

[Michael Moorcock]

Charles has since said that he wished he had had a chance to do a different piece in The Dream Makers. Neither of us was happy with its inclusion in what was in general a superb book. He got me at a bad time for both of us... I ran NW less chaotically than is said there, for instance. I had perfectly ordinary habits based on my experience of running regular magazines, including payments and so on. It was apparently more chaotic to someone like Charles, who is inclined to like everything laid out in systems. Keith Roberts was the same and saw my NW method as chaotic, yet I never had copy over or under while poor Keith was always trying to fill another few pages or trim them at proof stage! There is a lot of mythologising gone on around NW and Brian's, Charles's, Jimmy Ballard's and my memories are all rather different. Charles certainly was much more intimately involved with the daily running of the magazine, as was Lang Jones. Maybe Lang would remember -- though he has a notoriously poor memory by his own admission! Maybe we'll never know. Maybe there are records at the Arts Council, come to think of it. Did you know that Giles Gordon, who was on the Literary Committee when the application was made, said that the thing was swung entirely on the say-so of Angus Wilson, then the Chairman, who had read Behold the Man and enjoyed it. What many people didn't know then and don't know now is that Angus also advised Secker and Warburg on their sf list in the 50s! Small world. Giles later became a contributor and later still my publisher and then my agent.
For a while he, me and Sonny Mehta (now at Knopf) knocked about together and were pretty close. Sonny, it must be said, has NEVER published me. In fact he turned down The Final Programme, apparently on the grounds that I'd got Swinburne's hair colour wrong... But I digress.
:)

[Marca]

Thanks for that Mike, it's always good to hear both sides of the story. Although I like Platt's two books of interviews a lot, they are very subjective pieces, which is part of what makes them so enjoyable. Is it true about the leaky roof though?

[Mikey_C]

And of course, it wasn't that long ago that Smiths decided not to stock 'top-shelf' magazines in their displays

Now there's a famous case of hypocrisy for you!

Hamdy Shahein has run the newsagents and travel business at 167 Stoke Newington High Street for the past 16 years. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, he was a useful soccer goalkeeper in his youth and is a black belt judo expert. Despite his quiet manner, he is not a man to be taken lightly. WH Smith, the retail and distribution giant, discovered this when they insisted on delivering soft porn magazines to the busy shop. Mr Shahein objected, saying that the store was used by many women and children and he didn't wish to sell material that might offend any of his customers.

Despite his protests, they kept sending the top-shelf titles under a system known as 'box-out', under which a pre-packed selection, chosen by the distributor, was sent to 20,000 independent newsagents. Some of these included titles such as Best of Big and Fat, Best of Black and Blue, and Shaven Girls Electric Blue.

http://www.n16mag.com/issue6/p6i6.htm

[David Mosley]

There are a number of email links on the Hansard and Commons pages demos, have you seen them? Somebody might be able to research the answer for you? Not sure if it can be done free of charge or not. I'm intrigued myself and would like to know the answer.

Aral, looking at the Hansard FAQ, it looks like they can photocopy records for external enquirers, but you need to provide the references for them; in other words, they don't do research for you. There are professional researcher who can do the research for you, but that costs most likely.

That said, according to BOPCRIS, the Open University at Milton Keynes hold copies of complete parlimentary records, which, seeing as how it's just round the corner from me, means that I may be able to explore that avenue in time. :) I'll give them a call tomorrow and see whether they have the publications I need - and more importantly, whether I can get access to them.

There might also be something in writing by Brian Aldiss or Charles Platt on the subject, since I think Aldiss was involved with getting the Arts Council grant in the first place and of course Platt was involved with the editing of New Worlds.

I haven't tried Googling with either Aldiss or Platt yet, so I'll see what turns up.

Platt's description of the New Worlds era in the piece on Mike in his Dream Makers book, makes it sound far from glamorous...

There's a great 'Answer' by Mike, which I've quoted from a little in the NW entry, in Q&A Archive Article #984 where, asked to describe a typical day running NW, Mike writes:

Horrible. I have no nostalgia for that period. It seems like a nightmare of continuing anxiety, trying to maintain the magazine primarily against censorship rather than financially. I wrote the books I did to support the magazine not because sales were bad but because the distributor was actively sabotaging us. What killed the magazine was the monopolistic system which meant that the wholesalers were also the retailers and could control the entire trade. After a public protest against their banning of New Worlds, they agreed to take it back, but secretly left the boxes of copies undistributed to their shops (this was W.H.Smith and John Menzies who between them still control the UK trade, the way Ingrams does in the US). Therefore most of what I remember is the anxiety. It didn't do my family life much good and in the end I decided I had to choose between the magazine and my children. I'm not sure what happened to my children... That was when I handed over routine editing to a series of other editors, including Lang Jones, Graham Charnock, Graham Hall, Jim Sallis, Charles Platt, Britton and Butterworth and so on. Every so often I returned to edit a special sequence of issues or a one off (like the 50th anniversary done a couple of years ago). The day would be very busy. Lots happening. Children coming and going. Papers all over my living room. Bear garden in Portobello Road (where the offices were) very similar to offices of 'underground' magazines like FRENDZ and the first incarnation of Time Out. Street sellers turning up at Portobello Road to get their issues (we sold a fair number by this standard method whereby the street seller buys the issues at a discount and sells them full price -- Big Issue works a similar system, I think). This was the sixties and the counter-culture. For me the real work on New Worlds was done intensely over a period of days just before the print deadline. Routine work had been done, of course. But it was all done very rapidly, with the art editor working as intensely as the rest of us. Mostly it was a monthly schedule, but of course I didn't work on NW all month. Some of that time I was writing books. I wrote Cure for Cancer as a serial for New Worlds, month by month, and I did Ice Schooner in the same way for Science Fantasy. I also got my kids off to school most mornings, including cooking their breakfast. A busy time, but we were all very optimistic and thought we were going to improve the entire literary spectrum.

[link expired]

Anyway, I'll let you know how I get on with the OU.[/quote]

[DeeCrowSeer]

I noticed today that the upstairs floor of our local WHSmith had a large display crammed with stationery baring the Playboy bunny. They don't stock the magazine itself, but for some reason they're happy to support the brand. Again, that seems a tad hypocritical to me. There is all manner of Playboy related merchandise on sale in Debenhams too, and I always wonder how it became such a "cool" brand... I mean the logo is very cute, but it's a little like carrying a sign which says: "I'm a w*nker"

[David Mosley]

Maybe there are records at the Arts Council, come to think of it. Did you know that Giles Gordon, who was on the Literary Committee when the application was made, said that the thing was swung entirely on the say-so of Angus Wilson, then the Chairman, who had read Behold the Man and enjoyed it. What many people didn't know then and don't know now is that Angus also advised Secker and Warburg on their sf list in the 50s! Small world. Giles later became a contributor and later still my publisher and then my agent.

I still remember my (very) brief encounter with the Arts Council when I was running a College Film Society at university in the late '80s/early '90s and we wanted a grant to enable us to actually show films rather than just pop a video into a VCR. There was a question about the Society being 'closed' (ie you had to be a member to see the film) but we successfully argued that although the students had to be members (which was a legal requirement as I recall) membership was open to all students and available on a 'day rate' if desired, which seemed to satisfy them.

Iirc, the grant was only sufficent to enable us to show five films every term (a term being 10 weeks) so we still had to organise fund-raising activities to enable us to screen films the rest of the term. Even now, I'm not sure how we managed that. Oh wait, now I understand why I graduated with an overdraft. :)

[Ant]

... I mean the logo is very cute, but it's a little like carrying a sign which says: "I'm a w*nker"

Some of the stuff is aimed at pre-teen girls... now, what does that say?

Cheers,
Ant

[David Mosley]

Some of the stuff is aimed at pre-teen girls... now, what does that say?

Those would be the same pre-teens who sport 'Porn Star in Training' t-shirts, yes? :roll:

[Michael Moorcock]

Actually the Arts Council grant was too small to support anything. I still had to write books to do that, after Smiths stopped distributing us. Ballard suggested the AC should buy advertising space in magazines rather than give them tiny grants. The prestige from the grant was probably worth more than the money. Ironically, I wanted to know how to pay the grant back when the magazine started making a profit (as it would have done had we not had the Smiths ban) and the AC were baffled. They told me they had absolutely no protocol for taking IN money, only for paying it OUT. I'm not a great supporter of state grants for magazines (though I think it works for other arts) so this baffled me, of course. Incidentally, we never got a lot of the grant. One of my partners took the first lot and disappeared to Scotland. The other, Stoneheart, took the second lot and never paid anyone out of it. In the end that's why I took over publishing the magazine, just so the AC money would at least go to people it was owed to. I wound up paying off the big debt which Smiths, by not distributing copies so we had no idea that we weren't getting the income, let us run up with the printer. Once we knew what was happening, we budgeted accordingly, which is why the later issues were reduced numbers of pages.

[David Mosley]

Actually the Arts Council grant was too small to support anything.

Mike, can you confirm - if you want to, of course - whether this account below is accurate?

NEW WORLDS faced an uncertain future in late-1966. Roberts and Vinter's distributers went bankrupt, causing the company to re-think their policy. A consequence of this 're-think' was the decision to drop NEW WORLDS, and its sister magazine SF IMPULSE (the former SCIENCE FANTASY), which looked like they would now have to fold. NEW WORLDS 172 (Apr '67) was the last of the digest-size issues, and it appeared it might be the last one ever. However, help was at hand in the form of Brian Aldiss who successfully petitioned the Arts Council for a grant to keep the magazine afloat. The sum involved, آ£150 per issue, was hardly sufficient for the purpose, but the prestige attendant to an Arts Council grant was enough to convince David Warburton to stick with NEW WORLDS for a while longer. It was agreed that he would cover the printing while Moorcock was to pay the contributors, usually with money brought in by hastily written fantasy novels. NEW WORLDS was back in business it seemed, and in July issue 173, the first of the large-format issues, duly appeared.

I found it on something called THEN (http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/SF-Archives/Then/then_3-3.html), a "history of British science fiction fandom" by Rob Hansen. It seems to marry up with what you posted today, but is the grant per issue figure correct? (I assume it's a matter of public record if one knows where to look?) What was the average cost of producing an 'average' issue of NW at the time?

Following up from my discovery that the OU in Milton Keynes is 'supposed' to stock Hansard from the period in question, I managed to get down there today and have a snoop around. Typically their microfiches of Parliamentary debates ran from 1850-something to 1921 before skipping to 1977 onwards. :roll: I had a chat with the librarians about what I was after and as soon as I mentioned Jennie Lee's name they were bending over themselves trying to help (for those who don't know JL helped found the OU), they even called down the Jennie Lee Archivist in case she knew anything. In the end, we found the printed volumes of Hansard, but again, most of the 1968 volumes appear to be missing. (Do you ever have that feeling that someone's deliberately out to stop you? )

I had an email from them tonight which said:

Unfortunately we do not have the relevant copies of Hansard in the Jennie Lee Archive as the holdings for the House of Commons ends at the end of 1964. The bound volumes of Hansard in the library are also incomplete but are available on open access in the mobile shelving on the second floor in the library journals section if you would like to look through them.

If you could send me more detailed information on the date of the debate that would narrow down the search I can check to see if we hold the relevant volume and search for the part you are interested in.

Now, the issue from which all the 'problems' stemmed was NW #180, which is dated (c) March 1968 on the masthead (indicia). Presumably that was the date it was printed, so the parliamentary question must have been asked sometime after that? #181 appeared in April as usual, but #182 didn't come out until July. #183 in October carries the boxout:

"Having trouble getting New Worlds? Editor MM was told by a newsagent 'NW has gone bust' and 'You must mean that UNESCO magazine, New World'. If you have similar trouble send the name of the shop and we will try to get the magazine stocked.

So clearly by that time Smiths/Menzies' distribution was still playing up. Issue #185 (December) is 'largely pulped by the distributor' apparently and the page count possibly drops to under 60 pages? With #187 the distributor (according to the masthead/indicia changed from Continental to Moore Harness, but whether that's relevant or not I wouldn't know.

Was the matter ever discussed in the pages of NW at all? All the above information is gleaned from the Image Gallery here.

Does anyone have any idea when 'The Question'â„¢ would have been asked? Quite soon after #180 appeared, or was did it take sometime for the Express to pick up on the Smiths/Menzies ban before 'the Tory MP' got involved? I've got a feeling that even if I get to the bottom of this the answer is likely to be anti-climatical, and along the lines of:

Tory MP: Does the minister think it appropriate that public money should be used to support this filth?
Minister: The Arts Council operates at 'arms-length' from the Government and how it distributes its grants is a matter for them.

But as I say, this incident has kind of assumed mythic proportions in the history of NW and I feel it would be nice to know what the actual truth of the matter was. (Mike's suggestion of whether the Arts Council has any records is a good one and one I might persue if this current avenue leads nowhere.)

I still had to write books to do that, after Smiths stopped distributing us. Ballard suggested the AC should buy advertising space in magazines rather than give them tiny grants. The prestige from the grant was probably worth more than the money. Ironically, I wanted to know how to pay the grant back when the magazine started making a profit (as it would have done had we not had the Smiths ban) and the AC were baffled. They told me they had absolutely no protocol for taking IN money, only for paying it OUT. I'm not a great supporter of state grants for magazines (though I think it works for other arts) so this baffled me, of course. Incidentally, we never got a lot of the grant. One of my partners took the first lot and disappeared to Scotland. The other, Stoneheart, took the second lot and never paid anyone out of it. In the end that's why I took over publishing the magazine, just so the AC money would at least go to people it was owed to. I wound up paying off the big debt which Smiths, by not distributing copies so we had no idea that we weren't getting the income, let us run up with the printer. Once we knew what was happening, we budgeted accordingly, which is why the later issues were reduced numbers of pages.

Fascinating stuff, Mike - helps to fill in the blanks a little on the mythology of the period.

Does anyone know if Colin Greenland's The Entropy Exhibition covers any of the ground I'm exploring? I've got a copy coming to me off eBay from the States, but it's shipping surface mail so I won't have it for a while I suspect. (That will teach me to skimp on shipping costs. :))

Cheers,
David

[Marca]

I did look in my copy of The Entropy Exhibition, but I couldn't see anything directly to do with the Parliament business there...