‘Dr David Widgery (1947 – 1992) practiced locally as a GP. As a Socialist and a writer, his life and work were an inspiration in the fight against injustice.’
– Memorial plaque – St Anne’s church, Limehouse, London.
David Widgery’s activism spanned a period that included the revolutionary changes of the 1960s, through to the social and economic transformations of 1980s Britain under Margaret Thatcher. What united all of Widgery’s activism and writings was his belief in and commitment to socialism.
Born in Barnet, London, Widgery grew up in Maidenhead, Berkshire. He contracted polio as a child and spent several of his early years in hospital. In sixth form, he was expelled from his grammar school for publishing an unauthorised magazine – an early indication of his rebellious nature and interest in writing. He studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in London and began working for Bethnal Green Hospital in 1972.
The East End of London provided him with his workplace and inspiration. This area of London was later deeply affected by Thatcher’s policies. These actions led to a change in the urban landscape of the East End, with the creation of wealthy gated communities and global centres of banking established alongside, and yet totally separate from, those communities already established in the East End.
The East End has historically been characterised by poor housing, poverty, and as a receiving community for immigrants. During the 1970s and 1980s, when Widgery was working in Tower Hamlets, there was a significant change in the predominant industrial base. This led to high levels of unemployment and deprivation in the borough.
Books and publications
Widgery’s interests were reflected in the wide range of publications he contributed to: from the underground press during the 1960s; through to columns for The Guardian and British Medical Journal in the 1980s. His books often addressed his concerns about what he saw as the dismantlement of the National Health Service and the effects that poverty and inequality had on people’s health and life chances.
Widgery’s political writing was both eloquent and inspirational. His role as a socialist chronicler of late twentieth-century Britain, perhaps remains one of his most important legacies.
Counter culture
In 1965, Widgery met the influential American poet Alan Ginsberg. It was through this connection that Widgery travelled first to the United States, where he witnessed the Civil Rights Movement, and then to Cuba.
As a student he became heavily involved in the alternative press, writing for Oz magazine. In addition to making regular contributions to the magazine he edited it briefly in 1971, when the editors were on trial, accused of distributing an obscene publication.
He was one of the first men to seek to widen the Left’s exploration of sexual politics, and to challenge counter-culture’s sexist attitudes:
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.[1]
Widgery, as many others of his generation, considered rock music as a means of mobilising against the political right and the National Front, which had particularly become prevalent in East London in the late 1970s. Widgery was one of the main initiators of the Rock Against Racism movement, which was a series of concerts that brought together both white punk and black reggae bands between 1976 and 1981. As well as a pioneering movement which linked music and politics, Rock Against Racism was one of the precursors of the Anti-Nazi League, which Widgery also played a major part in organising. Widgery gave a vivid and politically engaged eyewitness account of the movement in his book, Beating Time, which otherwise has had very little formal documentation.
These movements were some of the first examples of a mass rather than sectarian movement and one of the first times young people from all ethnic and racial backgrounds had stood side by side. Perhaps above all it was an example of a joyful and optimistic view of socialism, which so much exemplified Widgery’s personality and politics.
NHS
The 1980s saw Widgery focusing his activism, to a large degree, on the politics of the National Health Service. He practised as a doctor in Bethnal Green hospital and became a GP in 1985, working in a surgery at Gill Street, Limehouse, until the time of his death. Perhaps his attraction to a medical career was a result his early childhood experiences of suffering polio.
He chaired the campaign to save Bethnal Green Hospital between 1977 and 1979. The campaign utilised strikes, ‘work ins’, marches and public meetings and received national press coverage. Although the campaign had some success, as some wards were kept open for a time, the hospital was closed. The campaign’s success had been in mobilising staff and local people and highlighting the national impact of the health service cuts.
Widgery’s book, Some Lives!, is a poignant, moving and first-hand account of the day-to-day lives and struggles of the patients he encountered during his work as a GP in one of the most deprived parts of East London in the 1980s. He wrote:
‘It’s not easy to forget the depression and the desperation and the desperation of those hellish hotels; kiddies visibly failing to thrive and apathetic, parents glazed and ratty, the crumpled discharge letters from labour wards the other side of London, the lost baby books, the cockroaches and the endless pointless housing letters.’[2]
Widgery believed that as a doctor he had a duty to be involved in the struggle for improving the circumstances and lives of those who were economically disadvantaged and to use his position to highlight social inequality. Most of all he believed it was possible to change things for the better:
‘My own life as much as politics, tells me that the level of compassion with which a society treats its sick and crippled, its old and feeble minded, is the real measure of that society’s level of civilisation… It tells me not that the NHS has failed , but that it has not been given a real chance.’[3]
In his books, The National Health Service: a radical perspective (1988) and Health in Danger (1979) Widgery fiercely attacked public spending cuts and restates the case for comprehensive and democratic health care. Nearly 40 years on, the same political arguments are still being debated by the political parties of today.
Socialist Worker’s Party
Throughout his adult life, Widgery was a member of the International Socialist Party, which later changed its name to the Socialist Worker’s Party. One of his first books, The Left in Britain: 1956-1968, collated some of key texts of the new left and emerging revolutionary parties. The alliance with the SWP was not always an easy one for Widgery but he remained loyal to the Party and steadfast in his belief that any true revolutionary change could only be brought about if it were anchored in working-class politics.
David Widgery never lost his belief in socialism or gave up the fight to achieve a more equal society through revolutionary change. The political landscape of the left in Britain has changed significantly since the time of Widgery’s premature death in 1992, but had he still been alive today there is little doubt that he would have continued to be a passionate and inspirational socialist activist and chronicler. Perhaps not surprisingly, a favourite quote of his was: ‘As we grow older may we become more dangerous.’[4]
By Julia Rendall, a U3A Shared Learning Project researcher for the Citizens Project
[1] David Widgery, ‘What Went Wrong’ Oz 48 (Winter 1973).
[2] David Widgery, Some Lives (Sinclair – Stevenson 1991).
[3] David Widgery, The National Health Service: A Radical Perspective (Hogarth Press, 1988).
[4] David Widgery, ‘What Went Wrong’ Oz 48 (Winter 1973).
Header image: Rock Against Racism, 1978, image from Wikimedia Commons
