Colin Ward 1924 – 2010

‘Think of others…’

An occasion to celebrate the life and work of Colin Ward

Saturday, 10 July 2010, 2pm onwards

(Tea and coffee served from 1.30pm)

Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

All welcome

PROGRAMME

Welcome

Richer Futures: the political legacy of Colin Ward...........Ken Worpole

Meeting Colin in the Sixties...........Harriet Ward

Colin Ward - making anarchism respectable, but not too respectable.......Stuart White

Colin Ward: Sower of Ideas.........Peter Marshall

"Roger Deakin in Conversation with Colin Ward"

(Screening of extract from film made by Mike Dibb, with introduction by Mike Dibb)

Song: 'Always Lift Him Up'.........Ben Ward and Tom Unwin

Colin at Work........Tony Fyson

On the Margins........Dennis Hardy

Other voices

Music by Tom Unwin & Friends

There will be a small exhibition, bookstalls and further opportunities to meet old friends.

Colin Ward, antinomian architect, humane advocate of spaces for children, champion of the vernacular, the self-managed and the self-built, scourge of state planners of right and left, New Society journalist, has died at the age of 85. Over a very long lunch at the Angel Inn in Debenham, Suffolk in the 1980s, when told of our plans to revive Retort, the non-sectarian 1940s journal of art, culture and politics (which he had admired) and having been asked to contribute something to the inaugural issue, Ward the wise old editor gently cautioned against the project. "Do you understand how much life energy you will be expending on this? You seem to have plenty else to do." We heard him, and kept Retort as a metaphor for other purposes.

His writing had a directness and lucidity that mirrored the man. It was typical that, where others would have been tempted to polemic, Ward quietly demolished the case for the Thatcherite privatization of water, drawing on deep historical wells of knowledge about the commons when composing Reflected in Water: A Crisis of Social Responsibility. His ear was finely tuned to the politics of nomenclature: "When we compare the Victorian antecedents of our public institutions with the organs of working-class mutual aid in the same period the very names speak volumes. On the one side the Workhouse, the Poor Law Infirmary, the National Society for the Education of the Poor in Accordance with the Principles of the Established Church; and, on the other, the Friendly Society, the Sick Club, the Cooperative Society, the Trade Union. One represents the tradition of fraternal and autonomous association springing up from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above."

Colin Ward was unwilling to wait for blueprints of the future. "Utopia", he wrote in his 1973 classic Anarchy in Action, is "already here, apart from a few little, local difficulties like exploitation, war, dictatorship and starvation." He argued that spontaneous, voluntary, non-hierarchical cooperation is all around us, in the interstices of statist society, working around authority to get things done. Asked to comment on fashionable talk of "temporary autonomous zones", he recognized an affinity with those "fleeting pockets of anarchy that occur in daily life" which were Ward's own abiding inspiration, akin to "golden moments" of the kind that used to overtake Augustus John, sitting in the Cafe des Varietes, with "the apparition of a face or part of a face, a gesture or conjunction of forms which I recognize as belonging to a more real and harmonious world than that to which we are accustomed."

Roderick Long described Ward's book Talking Houses as "a detailed history of the unconventional, self-built housing — frequently built on land of dubious title and more often than not illegal — that the working poor created throughout the twentieth century." Based on lectures delivered at the LSE, after it had become largely a Blairite stronghold, Social Policy: An Anarchist Response is a powerful recovery of the history of the working class’s self-organized welfare provision, and the war of suppression that both employers and state often fought against it. What Colin Ward himself favored, in a much-quoted summa, was "a society which organises itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism."

Colin was an old friend of Retort and we shall miss him.

Memorial for Colin Ward