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35.
FLYER FOR THE FIRST PUBLIC MEETING OF THE LONDON FREE SCHOOL, St. Peters’ Church Hall, Elgin Avenue, Tuesday March 8, 1966.
Printed offset litho by John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins on buff colour, thin paper stock. Verso blank. 20.4x15.8cm.
The flyer’s headline states that “LFS offers you free education through lectures and discussion groups in subjects essential to our daily life and work”, and lists a range of proposed subjects, from housing problems, immigration and education through to mental health, music, art and literature. Announcing that the public meeting will “explain what the Free School is and does, when and where”, the flyer also promises that “The London Free School is not political, not racial, not intellectual, not religion, not a club, it is open to all.” The meeting, which effectively launched the London Free School, was chaired by Joe Boyd, who remembers that it attracted “a modest turn-out of suspicious locals” (“White Bicycles”, p.134). In a contemporary article for Resurgence magazine, Pete Jenner noted that “Over 50 people from the neighbourhood came along and there was a fair degree of enthusiasm.” The meeting also included a talk given by George Clark of the Notting Hill Community Workshop on the history of Notting Hill (“in relation to some of the subjects listed above”).
The idea for a Free School in London originated from Hoppy’s trip to New York in July 1965. It was there he came into contact with the recently founded Free University and probably, although this is undocumented, one of its teachers, the psychotherapist Joseph Berke, who was soon to move to London to work with RD Laing at Kingsley Hall (Hoppy later told Jonathon Green that he didn’t get on very well with him, adding: “I didn’t really get on too well with all those shrinks”). Sometime in late 1965, following his return to London, and still enthused by thoughts of FUNY’s non-hierarchical radicalism, Hoppy gathered like-minded friends for a series of meetings, two of whom, Michael de Freitas and John Michell, combined to provide the embryonic school with premises at 26 Powis Terrace in Notting Hill.
Blue biro holograph note to upper margin: “canvassers will be calling shortly” (Rhaune Laslett, later to become President of the LFS and principal organiser of the Notting Hill Festival, first became involved after canvassers knocked on her door). Fine.
Together with: Thoughts on a Constitution. Single foolscap sheet, printed recto only. A document outlining the function of the London Free School and “3 basic recommendations on the Constitution”. Probably drawn up following a meeting held at Housmans bookshop on March 13, a few days after the first public meeting (a report on the Housmans meeting in The Gate’s first issue reveals that a Committee was elected, in part to “submit a constitution”). Old central horizontal fold; small pencilled doodle to verso; o/w Very Good.
