ABSTRACT
I was elected to the House of Commons in May 1962. From January 1963 until 1972, when in London, Mondays to Fridays I had a room at the top of Dick Crossman’s house at number 9 Vincent Square, and used to make his breakfast downstairs three or four mornings a week. I tell you this, because his sitting room on the ground floor was the weekly lunchtime haunt of the Bevanites – where the plots were hatched, or, certainly, where the right of the Parliamentary Labour Party imagined them to be hatched. If those walls could speak, they would record the impassioned argument of Aneurin Bevan and his wife Jennie Lee, Fenner Brockway, Barbara Castle, Dick Clements, G.D.H. Cole, Desmond Donnelly, Tom Driberg, Michael Foot, John Freeman, Victor Gollancz, Tony Greenwood, Leslie Hale, Judith Hart, Clive Jenkins, Elwyn Jones, Jack Jones, Nicholas Kaldor, Fred Lee, Harold Lever, Ian Mikardo, Dick Mitchison, Jo Richardson, Sidney Silverman, Donald Soper, John Strachey, Richard Titmuss, George Wigg, Harold Wilson, Woodrow Wyatt, Michael Young and Konni Zilliacus.
