{Demo}[1st November 1970]

[Redbook1:181][19701101.0000]{Demo}[1st November 1970]

Sun. 1.11.70.

            Varsity [the Cambridge student newspaper] this week says that there were nine hundred people at the picket outside the Senate House last Monday.  I think one of the speakers there gave a similar figure fairly early on in the meeting.

            I was there.  My own calculations at the time were as follows: at the beginning there were about three hundred people there; by early lunchtime this had shrunk to about one hundred and fifty, which the speaker estimated as three hundred.

            In addition to this, the figures were inflated by a number of things.  First, at the beginning at least (and possibly later) there was a fairly noisy right-wing contingent of about twenty in one group.  How many right-wingers or uncommitted people were there, like myself, to see what happened, I don't know; it could have been as high as twenty per cent.  It was fairly high because the Senate was meeting in the Law Schools and a lot of lawyers on the way in or out stayed to find out what was happening.

            Perhaps the most startling thing about it for me was that after a few hours I began to feel that I wanted something violent to happen -- otherwise I should have been cheated.

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