Hats off to John for the latest update to the Hackney Radical History blog – digitised versions of all the 1977 editions of Hackney People’s Press. As is pointed out in the post, this was a big year for the paper. We started 1977 as a bimonthly A4 newsletter – printed in single sheets, hand collated and folded by ourselves. We ended it as a 8pp A3 tabloid, printed on the Bethnal Green web press belonging to the SWP’s printers, Feb Edge.

I spent a happy hour or so browsing through the content, most of which I had forgotten. John has singled out the full page cartoon which made up the back cover of issue 23, seen above. I’m fairly sure that the artist was called Tony. I particularly like the representation of my old Austin A40, “rushing the sheets off to the printers”, complete with its actual number plate, 309 YPP. This had been manufactured in about 1960/61 and was reaching the end of its life by 1977. I sold it for scrap a year or so later, and bought a green 2CV instead.