Colchester, Oxford, Trafalgar Square

While the twin military onslaughts in 1956 on Egypt and Hungary both occurred in the week covering the end of October and early November, in each case there had been earlier indications of the subsequent conflicts. The first came from Moscow in February, with the report to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union by Nikita Khrushchev, the party's First Secretary, in which he denounced malpractices by the former leader, Josef Stalin; in the case of Egypt, the event which led to the autumn invasion was the nationalization of the Suez Canal, announced on 26 July.

The Khrushchev speech caused ferment in Communist parties outside the USSR, including the British party. I was at the time in the second year of compulsory military service, stationed in Colchester, and it had not taken long to make friends with members of the party branch there. At a meeting held in Ipswich to discuss the speech the main speaker, Emile Burns, sought to downplay the issue and to justify the traditional Stalinist line; this effort produced an audience outbreak of muttering, quickly rising in volume.

Unable to make himself heard, Burns paused in his address and turned to the chair of the meeting, Michael Barratt-Brown, evidently to ask what was going on. Silence fell in time for us to hear Michael's reply: ‘They say you're talking balls, Emile’.

By August the first indication of the Suez crisis had appeared. I was due for release from the army on 16 August, and a certain nervousness set in as very bad-tempered reservists were recalled to service, while trucks painted in a sand colour rather than the standard dark green appeared in our barracks. Nevertheless, the military machine kept to its timetable, and I was demobbed on 16 August, to my enormous relief.

Hastily making off to France for a holiday before the authorities had time to change their mind, it didn't take long to return to life as a civilian instead of just number 23059250. The next stop was Oxford University, just in time for Suez phase two – and for the Soviet invasion of Hungary. In the case of Suez, Britain and France vetoed a UN Security Council resolution tabled by the United States, calling for a withdrawal by Israeli forces which had invaded Egypt on 29 October; on the 31st, British and French aircraft started bombing Egyptian targets.

Egypt announced its rejection of a Franco-British ultimatum which demanded that Israel and Egypt should cease hostilities and withdraw to a distance of ten miles either side of the Canal. Breaking relations with Britain and France, the Egyptian government imposed martial law and announced general mobilization, promising ‘total war’ to the ‘last drop of blood’.

As a demonstration against the war was called in London, the Oxford University proctors issued an edict confining undergraduates to the city. Nonetheless, a sizeable group headed for the railway station and boarded a London train, ignoring a notice which informed us that members of the student body were not permitted to travel. Soon after the train moved off, a ticket inspector came along the corridor and opened our compartment door, inquiring: ‘Any Oxford students here?’ Not at all, we replied. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘this is the first London train I've ever been on without a single university student on it.’ Grinning, he closed the compartment door and went on down the train.

The march and Trafalgar Square demonstration were impressively large, and I remember the highlight of Aneurin Bevan's speech, when he shouted: ‘They call it an armed intervention; I call it a war’. Tumultuous applause, and the beginning of the end for Prime Minister Anthony Eden. (Lady Eden subsequently complained that it felt as if the Suez Canal had been ‘flowing through my drawing room’.)

Meanwhile, a popular movement in Hungary against the Soviet system had led to the formation of an all-party government headed by Imre Nagy, who announced in late October that Hungary had left the Warsaw Pact and intended to follow a policy of neutralism. Nagy had become prime minister after clashes between the army and demonstrators on 23 and 24 October; on the 26th he had accepted demands for the withdrawal of Soviet forces. On 28 October Nagy had met the Soviet commander-in-chief in Hungary, who promised withdrawal. However, the Soviet forces instead launched an attack on Budapest and provincial towns. Nagy, who had promised free elections, was arrested and subsequently executed.

The effect of these appalling events on the Communist Party in Britain was dramatic: within a few months around a third of the membership had resigned, feeling that it was not possible to remain in a party which countenanced such barbarism. It was particularly striking that this should have happened within a year of the Khrushchev speech, which had aroused hopes of change.

Out of this upheaval, two new publications appeared in Britain: Universities and Left Review and the New Reasoner, which in 1960 amalgamated under the title of New Left Review. Germano Facetti, who died recently, designed all the issues of ULR and at least the first issue of NLR. Of the two component publications, ULR had grown from an Oxford University base; the New Reasoner from a dissident Communist Party background in Yorkshire. (The Oxford University CP branch had ceased to exist, all its members having resigned.)

With half a century gone since then, and mainstream politics in England dominated by an ossified and imperfectly representative parliamentary system, the left is at a low ebb in conventionally political terms. Instead, a wide range of community-based groups are active on many specific issues, while the close links between the current occupant of 10 Downing Street and his mentor in the White House constitute a continued threat to international security, which will undoubtedly arouse further disillusion and discontent.