Match held under Stars and Stripes: When Malcolm McLaren was arrested for burning the US flag in Grosvenor Square in 1966
//From The Times, July 29, 1966. Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//
The late Malcolm McLaren made his first national media appearance in a 250-word item on the Law Report page of The Times in the summer of 1966.
This is an extract from my biography The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren:
In 1966 while he was attending a painting course at Chelsea College of Art, Malcolm McLaren – who had been forced to take his step-father’s surname Edwards a few years earlier – came under the influence of Stan, a fellow student whose last name is lost to memory.
“Stan was a Trotskyist who played a mean jazz saxophone and politicised Malcolm,” says Fred Vermorel, a friend of McLaren’s who had been at Harrow art school with him a couple of years previously.
For McLaren, radical politics opened up a world of possibilities when entwined with his investigations into art. Encouraged and initially accompanied by Stan, McLaren began attending rallies and demonstrations protesting on behalf of the causes célèbres of the day: against the war in Vietnam and South Africa’s apartheid regime.
Long gone were the polite CND parades peopled by earnest chaplains and fresh-faced Home Counties youth in duffel coats chanting Kumbaya. Taking their cue from the US uprisings such as that among the African American community on Chicago’s West Side, the British protestors of 1966 brought activism to new heights in direct confrontation with the authorities. A turning point was the July central London rally calling for the British government to disassociate itself from US military policy in south-east Asia.
McLaren was among the 4,000 who amassed in Trafalgar Square before marching on 10 Downing Street and then to the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Once there, pitched battles were fought with the police, stoked by such acts as McLaren joining a faction setting fire to the American flag in full view of the US Embassy.
//Adler took the opportunity of the court appearance to attack the American president Lyndon Johnson and the British prime minister Harold Wilson. Paul Gorman Archive. No reproduction without permission//
With 30 demonstrators, McLaren was arrested for insulting behaviour contrary to the Public Order Act. His court appearance a few weeks later featured in The Times’s Law Report; 20-year-old Malcolm Edwards described himself as a sculptor and gave as his address as Finchley Lane, Hendon, north London, where he was lodging with a friend of his grandmother’s, a Mrs Gold.
McLaren was fined a hefty £20 and bound over to keep the peace for 12 months along with another protestor, a South African named Henry Adler.
“There was so much activity in those days, you couldn’t help but jump in,” said McLaren. “It wasn’t my idea to burn the flag; I was just there and ended up holding it as it was set alight. After we were arrested we spent eight hours at West End Central police station before we were bailed. Then I was whisked off to Drayton Gardens in Kensington with a load of Libyan diplomats who were going on about being anti-Vietnam and anti-American.”
Adler was among those who shared a cell with McLaren; in fact his lawyer paid McLaren’s bail. Three years older than McLaren, Adler was a moneyed exile who had been lured by tales of Swinging London and set about spending his monthly allowance on enjoying the cultural activities the British capital offered.
The super-connected Adler, who died at his own hand in the early 80s as I discovered during my researches, was an important figure in McLaren’s artistic and political development, introducing him and Vermorel to a range of new experiences and characters such as the members of the British Situationist cell King Mob and the drug-addicted beat writer Alexander Trocchi.
Read all about Mclarenm’s adventures with Adler in The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren, which is available from all good booksellers as well as amazon.