Jobs for life: An autobiographical search for identity through employment
This gave me an opportunity for proving my European federalist credentials, as well as earning some more money after I returned from my temporary job as a chain boy in Anglesey. The job of leaflet folder and distributor became available according to information from my brother, who had volunteered for the Hackney in Europe campaign and was shortly to fight a parliamentary seat in Hackney.
It was paid from the funds that came from the later-to-be-notorious European Parliamentary campaign information fund, money handed to the European political parties to bang the drum for Europe during their elections. It was also handed out to multi-party pro-European organisations like Britain in Europe in countries thinking of leaving after having hardly wiped their shoes on the mat (such as the UK).
I was moved both by the money and by pro-European fervour to spend 40 hours a week in the imperious National Liberal Club, spending mornings folding leaflets that exhorted people to vote yes in the referendum; then spending afternoons distributing the leaflets irregularly around the scattered residential areas of Central London.
I had once before been in the National Liberal Club, at a political meeting the previous year. It was an extraordinary place just off Whitehall, with huge rooms, high ceilings and solemn spaces. The men’s toilet was a cathedral of dark green and cream tiles.
I became friendly with one of my co-leafleteers, who was called Morris. Each day after a morning’s folding and stuffing the leaflets into envelopes, he and I would go to various London districts and spend all afternoon distributing them by posting them into people’s mail boxes.
Sometimes we just left multiple copies in places where we encouraged ourselves to think that they would be picked up, for example on park benches, pubs, cafes, or, surreptitiously, in waiting rooms. Once we just threw them all away and went to the pub together.
I left the job after I took to heart and determined to put into practice post-war Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin’s powerful assertion that his foreign policy was “to be able to buy a ticket at Victoria Station and go anywhere I damn well please.”
I therefore heard a few weeks later while working in Paris that the referendum had been a crushing success for the pro-Europeans and Britain would be staying in the Common Market.
But I don’t think my paid stint with my friend Morris folding and then leaving leaflets in pubs and on park benches helped all that much.