Remembering the Chile Solidarity Campaign

By Sam Dawson

From 1973 to 1990 the Chile Solidarity Campaign operated out of a couple of ratty rooms reached via the fire escape behind the offices of Islington North Constituency Labour Party. They were packed with teetering piles of merchandise, leaning shelves, cast-off desks, brimming ashtrays and an ink-oozing Roneo duplicating machine too old to use, too heavy to remove. The offices were poorly lit, frayed around the edges, and rarely slept. The people who worked in them weren’t too different.

Two of the powerhouses of the founding years were Mike Gatehouse and Jerry Hughes, whose experiences – in one case arrest and torture in the coup, in the other abandoning a university career to aid the first traumatised exiles arriving in the UK – led them to help build the nascent campaign. Contact with Allende-era Chile and exiled Chileans were common motivators, later supplemented by new generations who just wanted to do something about the festering injustice of the coup and the shameful support for Pinochet from the Thatcher-era government.

The work of the CSC is documented elsewhere: the importance of its regions and members, the essential role played by trade unions, union branches, CLPs and trades councils in helping keep it (just) financially solvent – with the fundraising supplemented by concerts, the showing of videos in people’s front rooms, and the sale of some of the best t-shirts then available anywhere on the British left. Somehow it worked. The campaign survived, was studied by others, did some good.

Despite its relatively small size, hundreds, maybe thousands, worked for the CSC in some way or another, most of them unpaid. Of those most deeply involved I suspect that there were some common elements, even if we were too busy to notice them at the time.

One of them was the primacy of the Chilean people in keeping the flame of protest – to which we were a mere adjunct – alive.

Less discussed was the sense of guilt at being safe in the UK when in Chile people were being arrested, tortured, disappeared. But it made you tireless when you needed to be. News of any detention would kick off a rush to get telegrams of protest sent, letters written, approaches to the Chilean government made. A local police chief might be intimidated into inaction if they began to receive messages suggesting that the person they had in their cells had ‘influential’ friends half a world away. It might mean better treatment. It might even mean a few hours’ less torture.

But maybe the single characteristic that we had in common was that almost everyone came from a previous campaign and, after the CSC, went on to others, taking the skills and ideas learnt there with us. Yet I’d bet that for most of us, of all those campaigns, it was the fight for Chile that will always stand out as the special one, the one that really mattered, the one that a snatch of Chilean music or a whiff of Pisco can still evoke – and leave you standing there, with tears pricking the corners of your eyes, thankful to have been (some small) part of it all.