Jude Rowley | Lancaster University
In 1969, a Lancaster University professor travelled to Prague and stopped off at the British Embassy on a social call. The resultant scandal would embroil British higher education in a crisis of communists, protest, and espionage. Whilst readers of EPOCH 15 might object that this sounds familiar, this affair did not involve Cecil Parrott. Instead, the professor in Prague was W.A. (Bill) Murray, founding Head of Lancaster University’s English Department. While visiting the Embassy to swim in its pool, Murray had the dangers of communism impressed upon him by Howard Smith, the British Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. In regaling Murray with tales of communist subterfuge in the aftermath of the Prague Spring, Smith left a stark impression and seemingly instilled an anti-communist paranoia in the Lancaster Professor.
Murray took his suspicions with him back to Lancaster and became convinced that communist plots surrounded him. After the May 1968 worldwide wave of student revolt, a university campus was not a place to ease these fears of left-wing radicalism. Student politics was increasingly dominated by left-wingers, and the press wasted no time in stirring fears of a communist fifth column within universities. The left had taken control of the ‘apolitical’ National Union of Students (NUS) in 1969, and the then NUS President, future New Labour minister Jack Straw, was under MI5 surveillance as a known ‘communist sympathiser’. His successor (1971-1973), Digby Jacks, was an active member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, offering some indication of why academics like Murray feared that a wave of student radicalisation was underway.
Lancaster also had a reputation in its early years as a hotbed of left-wing student radicalism. The new Fylde College arose out of a self-declared staff and student commune, though attempts to name new accommodation blocks after left-wing figures like Che Guevara and Vladimir Lenin were quashed by University managers. In June 1971, over 300 students occupied University House in protest against the University’s refusal to provide fully subsidised travel to cleaning staff.
In this context, Murray’s fears of a spread of student communism were perhaps a symptom of the times. After 1968, higher education became increasingly marked by tensions between the old world of arcane and begowned University dons and the new counterculture-fuelled ‘subversion’ of the long-haired radicals of a younger generation. These tensions were particularly acute in Britain, where the number of universities more than doubled in the 1960s in a wave of expansion that opened higher education up to working-class students on a large scale for the first time, especially in previously neglected areas such as the North West. Lancaster, as one of these new institutions, would prove to be one of the first battlegrounds on which the conflict between the two worlds would be waged.
Illustrating these tensions, Murray attributed the radicalisation of students to unconventional approaches to teaching, embodied in his own department by David Craig. Craig broke with tradition by assigning contemporary literature, proposing open-book exams, and challenging hierarchical relationships in teaching spaces. He was also an early champion of Creative Writing, launching the joint-first university course in the country on the subject in 1970.
However, Craig already had a reputation as a troublemaker, and this was not Lancaster’s first ‘Craig Affair’. In May 1968, Craig had suggested that the University allow mixed-gender accommodation, a controversial proposal even in the ‘swinging sixties’. This had not only seen Craig suspended as Cartmel College Dean, but sparked public outrage and threatened the very existence of the University when threats to withdraw funding were made. Craig also openly described himself as ‘a Marxist and Communist’ and made no attempt to hide his political views when he applied for Lancaster’s first English lectureship in November 1963.
By contrast, Murray was a seasoned anti-communist. Red Mole, a Trotskyist periodical, characterised him as ‘a burly ex-colonial administrator in the Malayan war, well suited to dealing with academic terrorists’. In July 1971, in the aftermath of the cleaners’ strike and student occupation, Murray sensed the climate was right and moved against the apparent radicals in the English Department. He banned Craig from teaching modern literature courses, reassigning him instead to Victorian literature. The justification centred on Murray’s allegations that exam papers from Craig’s course showed signs of attempts to indoctrinate students, specifically with two anti-war poems that Craig had set a comparative question on: Edgell Rickwood’s ‘To the Wife of a Non-Interventionist Statesman’ (1938) and Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Open Day at Porton’ (1968). After passing an unusually thorough external moderation, exam scripts were mysteriously stolen from the English Department out of hours, re-examined, and found to exhibit the apparent left-wing bias that Murray was looking for. With these poems and a pile of ‘stereotypically’ left-wing student answers, Murray had a pretext to sanction Craig.
Craig was not the only academic to face this fate. Colin Yates, a Teaching Fellow in the English Department, was removed from ‘high-risk’ teaching duties and assigned the ostensibly safer American literature course. It was no coincidence that both academics targeted were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Murray’s insistence this was merely a matter of academic integrity became increasingly difficult to believe, as signs emerged of Lancaster’s own red scare.
The next academic year saw the situation erupt. On 19 October 1971, news of the affair leaked when papers detailing the internal investigation into Craig were stolen, published anonymously, and distributed around the University. The suggestion that academics were being targeted by a McCarthyist witch-hunt sparked uproar amongst students and staff alike. The following month, a petition signed by 700 students was presented to Vice-Chancellor Charles Carter, condemning the treatment of Craig. Far from a Communist plot orchestrated exclusively by student radicals, the petition was supported across political frontiers by the University Labour Club, Conservative Association, and Socialist Society.
The affair reached boiling point in the final week of Lent term in March 1972, when students declared a strike. This came after English Department staff who voiced support for Craig and Yates were hit with similar sanctions. Susan Bassnett-McGuire and Alan McLaurin were refused permanent contracts, while the Academic Promotions Committee refused to pass the probation of Michael Egan. In response, students called a boycott of lectures and seminars. This began in English, where students halted all classes, and spread rapidly to other departments. Within three days students in at least eleven departments were on strike, including History, Politics, and Russian and Soviet Studies. Eventually, as many as 2,000 students would join the strike, or two-thirds of the student body at the time. The strength of student feeling was made clear on 23 March when the University’s Alexandra Square was packed out by a mass meeting in support of targeted staff. Here, a decision was taken to escalate protests to an occupation of University House, mirroring the action in support of the cleaners the previous year. The following day, 300 students stormed University House and the adjacent computer buildings on the final day of term.
University management doubled down. Like Murray, they pinned the blame on Craig, and accused him of having ‘encouraged specific actions to disrupt the University’. His involvement in the establishment by staff and students of an alternative institution, the ‘Free University of Lancaster’, drew particular ire with its own programme of informal ‘teach out’-style seminars. Four specific charges were made against Craig: inciting the student boycott, attempting to overthrow the University constitution, breaching the Charter by advocating the establishment of the ‘Free University’, and defaming University management. As a result, there was now a pretext for further sanctions, and a case was prepared for Craig’s dismissal. At the end of March, he was suspended, pending a meeting of the University Council in May where he was widely expected to be sacked. Threats were also made to deter others from siding with the protestors, with Carter warning staff this was ‘hardly likely to be helpful to their careers’.
Faced with the biggest threat to the functioning of the University since its inception, Charles Carter’s reputation as an even-tempered liberal began to slip, with a similarly hard-line being taken against students. Nine were identified by the University as ringleaders, questioned by police detectives, and threatened with potential trespass charges. The Student Representative Council accused the University of victimisation and singling out students as part of a wider anti-left-wing purge and hundreds of other students came forward to demand that they also face sanctions in the collective spirit of the occupation.
Despite Carter’s threats that student grants would be withheld if there was further disruption in the summer term, students voted on 24 April to escalate the occupation into a rent strike and many began withholding their £40 per term rent. With student radicalism seizing control of the University campus, Murray’s fears had been realised, albeit brought about by his attempts to prevent them. Perhaps recalling his conversation with the Ambassador in Prague, he directly compared the apparent ‘subversion’ threatened by Craig and those supporting him to ‘the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia’.
Carter took a similarly hard line, having accused students and staff of using ‘Nazi methods’ as early as November 1971. Though imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, there was something of a military character to the counter-operation he conducted. After the occupation, a large iron gate was erected at the entrance to University House, plate-glass walls were bricked up, and other buildings were similarly fortified. Students were threatened with all manner of sanctions, and it was made clear that management would involve the police and potential court proceedings wherever they deemed it necessary. Carter announced that returning students would be forced to sign a pledge to not take part in any future protests, or else be reported to the local authority and stripped of their grant. More clandestine tactics were also deployed. Murray had previously travelled to the United States to recruit an incoming Visiting Lecturer to spy on Craig and colleagues, while meetings in support of Craig were bugged on management orders.
Although some senior staff rallied around Carter, including A.H. Woolrych (History) and Philip Reynolds (Politics), these methods were not universally popular, even amongst the leadership. Ninian Smart, a Religious Studies professor and one of the University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellors, resigned the latter role in April 1972 in protest against the University's ‘hard-line tactics’. The Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy similarly condemned the University’s handling of Craig in a well-circulated pamphlet and the Guardian questioned whether Carter had become ‘a Cromwell on the campus’.
Almost every national newspaper featured coverage of the dispute, and calls such as that in the Sunday Times for ‘donnish diplomacy’ eventually urged management to back down and attempt to build a compromise with students and staff. Carter was embattled from all sides, with hard-line tactics proving more of a radicalising influence on students than any of Craig’s poems. Student protests continued to escalate, and the NUS voted to blacklist Lancaster. Eighty-five Lancaster staff signed a petition condemning University tactics, the Association of University Teachers launched an inquiry into the case, and the more radical Association of Technical and Managerial Staffs called a one-day strike in support of Craig and the protesting students. On 2 May 1972, the day of the show-down University Council hearing to decide Craig’s fate, 1,500 students organised a march through the city centre, with police called in from across Lancashire to uphold order.
Several hours of careful negotiation followed between University Council and the lawyer Craig had hired with the proceeds from a benefit fundraiser organised by Adrian Mitchell, whose work had contributed to starting the whole affair. An uneasy compromise was eventually reached. Craig would retain his post but would be removed from the English Department, becoming Lancaster’s first unattached Senior Lecturer. Craig would also have to pledge to cause no more trouble and express regret for encouraging protest, under threat of the charges being revived at any time. In Carter’s words, these terms would leave Craig ‘permanently on probation’ and he was surprised when Craig accepted them. Nonetheless, in response to the settlement, students called off the boycott and rent strike, and the tension began to calm.
An inquest into the affair was launched, led by Tom Taylor, a Blackburn Labour Councillor and member of University Court. Condemned by students as a whitewash, his subsequent report skirted around thorny issues of student dissent and instead focussed on elements such as the need for a dedicated University Information Office and a separate student space. Though initially proposed for the campus, this would eventually lead to the creation of the Sugarhouse student nightclub in the city. Nonetheless, the Craig Affair had been brought to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion and fears of a communist scare on campus never quite reached the same heights. Other student protests would follow, most notably with the 1974-75 student rent strike, and though tensions dissipated after the settlement, they have never convincingly been resolved, with echoes of the affair reverberating around Lancaster’s campus even after Craig’s passing in 2021.
The second Craig Affair is still invoked whenever a new generation of students turn to protest and direct action for causes they believe in, including when students occupied University House against fee increases in 2014 and called rent strikes in 2020 and 2021. In February 2023, Lancaster students launched an occupation in support of staff strikes and University demilitarisation. They chose, fittingly, to occupy a building bearing the name of Charles Carter. There are no physical commemorations of Craig on campus to match those of Carter and yet, in invoking the legacies created half a century ago, staff and students crafted their own historical monument to their predecessors who protested in defence of their vision of what a university should look like after 1968. Thus, whether consciously or not, these histories continue to shape present-day landscapes, making them all the more important to revisit.
Further Reading:
CAFD, The Craig Affair: Background to the Case of Dr David Craig and Others, Lancaster University (Council for Academic Freedom and Democracy, 1972)
Marion E. McClintock, University of Lancaster: Quest for Innovation (A History of the First Ten Years, 1964-1974) (University of Lancaster, 1974)
David Craig, ‘History of Protest at Lancaster: The Craig Affair (II): The Bailrigg Witch Hunt’, Subtext, 8 (2006)
Esmée Hanna, Student Power! The Radical Days of the English Universities (Cambridge Scholars, 2014)
Jude Rowley is a PhD candidate in International Relations (IR) based in the Department of Politics, Philosophy, and Religion at Lancaster University and is also a member of the Centre for War and Diplomacy. His research focuses primarily on the history of IR, especially its disciplinary historical sociology, with a view to addressing some of the historical silences that continue to shape the discipline.
LinkedIn: Jude Rowley
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