How it All Began: A Footnote to History

Abstract

The first memo about starting the Socialist Register was written by Ralph on a sunny Sunday, April 7 1963, on my portable Olivetti which he had adopted after discarding his own very noisy Remington Quiet Writer - a little fact so anachronistic in the days of the super-speed computer. How the Register was set up, its political purpose and its evolution, is inseparable from my own and Ralph's lifelong intellectual and emotional involvement with John Saville, helped along by gallons of strong black tea. Its birth is the subject of this brief aide-memoire.