Huddersfield Pride '81

TRANSCRIPT

The march was led by John Addy, and John Addy had a pink Rolls Royce. Now such a sort of ostentatious display of wealth, even if it was a very camp display, didn’t go down terribly well with a lot of the more radical elements, and he told us afterwards unfortunately that his, his pi – lovely pink Rolls Royce was, was covered with scratches, after those people’d taken their keys and... gone, gone along the side of it, and so, and so he was a bit pissed off about that.

And then afterwards, we had to get from the... park, to the... what would then have been Huddersfield Polytechnic, which was going to serve as the equivalent of the University of London’s Student Union. And, and we had a sort of whole afternoon of doing, of doing entertainment, and things there, and I was doing a cabaret there, and a guy called Bob Montbunion [ph], and I can’t remember who else was on the bill, but we had tremendous excitement getting from the park to the thing, because this is where all the National Front people came out of the woodwork, once the march was actually dispersed, we became more vulnerable, and stuff like that. So there were sort of, you know, groups, groups of skinheads just sort of materialised, sort of round the corner as you, as you were going along the streets and stuff. And... be, be, be, because we, because we had a banner with us on, the Consenting Adults one, we were, we were fairly... well-placed sort of to, to react, because we simply just [laughs] took the ban, the banner down like, and like a lance, a battering ram, and just charged into these groups of skinheads and got – and out the other side. And we got, we got through it. I mean I don’t think, I don’t think there were actually any casualties, but it was, it was quite, it was quite exciting and it was... it was... it felt really good to be doing something like Pride... harnessed to a particular cause.