David who? David Widgery - never heard of him was my
response on seeing this plaque that reads:
"Dr David Widgery (1947-1992)
practised
locally as a GP.
As a socialist and writer
his life and work were
an
inspiration in the fight
against injustice."
Still none the wiser a quick web search turned up
information about the man. The first thing that struck me was that he died aged
45 and that is very young. An obituary, written by Michael Rosen, on John Gillatts website tells
us:
"David Widgery 1947 - 1992, Writer, Journalist,
Doctor and Activist - An Obituary by Michael Rosen
David Widgery"We have seen through the fancy dress of
modern capitalism": David Widgery
Firework displays have the power to illuminate, shock
and delight. Our heads are constantly turning to catch the next flare-up. David
Widgery was a walking November the Fifth. He could not and would not be tied
down to a one-track life. For a generation of London's East-Enders he was "Doc",
the GP at the end of hours in the waiting room or the GP who belted round the
housing estates of Tower Hamlets. But he was also the spirit that raged at the
evidence that the diseases he was diagnosing were really cankers growing out of
lousy housing, hazardous work and lack of money.
His brilliant and last book Some Lives! (1991) charts
the excruciating cases and conditions on his rounds, but in typical outbursts of
wit and learning interleaves these with a political walk-round the East
End.
I first saw him on the platform at the London School of
Economics in 1968, doing what he always did, firing off disparate examples of
the iniquities of capitalism, matched by stirring, but equally disparate
instances of resistance. He could zoom through rack-renting in Liverpool 9, or
murder in Ian Smith's Salisbury, and a moment later remind us of students on the
Streets of Berlin or striking night cleaners in London W1. "We have seen through
the fancy dress of modern capitalism," he said, "and found the irrational
violence and the hopelessness at its core" - and that was a medical student
talking. We nodded, looking at his cropped hair.
But this was the same Widgery who could recite André
Breton's Surrealist manifesto; who wrote articles on "Fleet Street's Chain of
Fools" on psychedelic paper in Oz, which he was later to edit; and who fell for
Allen Ginsberg. In his fighting collection of 20 years of newspaper articles,
Preserving Disorder (1989), he says, "I'm glad I heard Hendrix live, but gladder
to have marched with the dockers to the gates of Pentonville Prison." He was
also glad to have done the same against bombs, for miners against Gulf wars and
for hospitals.
For some, the Widgery cocktail was a bit too heady. The
organisation he devoted himself to all his adult life, the International
Socialists - later to turn itself into the Socialist Workers Party- did not
always see how his personal liberationist stand - with its shades of Rimbaud,
Shelley and R.D. Laing - slotted into Leninism. But, as he wrote in 1989,
"Without '68 and the SWP I would, no doubt, in the conventional manner of the
educationally upwardly mobile, be ensconced in the Department of Community
Medicine of a cathedral town with my children down for public school and a sub
to the SDP." "Nor", he adds, "am I prone to the depression which seems
near-terminal among so many socialist intellectuals now becalmed in
sophisticated nihilism."
The flip-side saw him delighted that he had irritated
Julie Burchill with the book Beating Time (1986), his fizzing collage-account of
the Rock Against Racism movement of the late Seventies. He rooted for the rebels
of rock, Seeing in a Peter Tosh or an Elvis Costello a glorious popular shout
for change. He gobbled up fiction, history, politics, theatre, cabaret, music
and poetry and then would surprise us with a new enthusiasm - his hero in the
lndependent magazine's "Heroes and Villains" column turned out not to be
Trotsky, Bessie Smith or Lenny Bruce - all in his pantheon - but the free-verse
American poet William Carlos Williams.
In our collaboration on The Chatto Book of Dissent
(1991), we spent many hours choosing past heroes - people who burst out of their
shackles and opposed the ways and means of the powerful. He wanted to be one of
them, with them. I like to think he would have rushed round to my house on a
Sunday morning with this obituary, marked with his illegible black squiggles,
saying, "We can't leave out Widgery." We won't.
He is survived by his partner Juliet Ash and their
daughter, Annie. Another daughter, Molly, died soon after birth nine years
ago.
Michael Rosen
David John Turner Widgery, writer, journalist,
doctor and activist, born 27th April 1947, died London 26 October
1992."