On a cold bleak October day in 1958, motor coaches jammed with 'scab' labour, protected by hundreds of mounted and foot police tried to break the picket line at McAlpine's Shell Mex site. Over 1,000 men - building workers, electricians, steel erectors, engineers and clerks, inspired by a tall, redshaired Irishman, repulsed their every effort. For his actions that morning, Brian Behan was jailed for three months. It was his second prison sentence due to political activity. The man who organised the Festival of Britain Site in 1951, who broke away from the British Communist Party in 1957, with his socialist beliefs still intact, was 2 real rebel. Fire burned in his belly, salt spiced his humour and there was compassion in his heart.
Today he is a little older, some of the humour has dried up,an eye for the main chance has replaced the compassion. Now he 'will never join another union again', Bemused he asks: 'Is our dictatorship any less evil than the employers'?' Disparagingly he describes the sacking of an Indian worker as ‘another Bengal Lencer bitins the dust'. Sneeringly commenting "How inoffensive the Indian is'. But how tragic the one-time militant, who parodies his own past like some grotesque jester in an undignified attempt to join the coterie of society's 'kept rebels',
His attempts to copy the Rabelaisian wit of Brendan do not come off. If Brendan was distrustful of the organised socialist movement, he nevertheless mercilessly pillorised society's institutions and castigated its inhumanity. Brian lends only a stylised prose to consecrating the status quo. In an unusually perceptive lapse, he describes hov the talented Brendan was drowned in the vortex of commercial success. 'Cut off from his main source of supply, real people, he couldn't write much about the cavorting set of false-faced bastards who praised his every belch as a sign of heavenly inspiration',
Brian's best years were when he too had contact with real people and when he fought on their behalf. For what he did then the socialist movement will always owe him a debt. Tht past and that part of himself he has now sold via MacGibbon and Kee for 25se per volume. ‘That is his market value, not a literary talent. ‘With Breast Expended' is a reckless and tragic expenditure of a former rebel's only capital. The ex-trade unionist, ex=- Communist, ex-Trotskyist, ex-Anarchist, is now probably an ex-author. * 'With Breast Expanded', MacGibbon & Kee, 25s.