Ralph Oswick: Story behind the mayhem is a great read

There’s a book coming out soon all about the heady days of that creative behemoth, the Bath Arts Workshop. This colourful tome ties in with the splendid archive exhibition staged at the Museum of Bath at Work some months ago. Such is the plethora of photographs, reminiscences and documentation that was unearthed, the book is taking longer than expected to come to fruition. Now, in quintessential Arts Workshop style, it seems the only thing holding up publication is a decision on the title!

I’ve seen the proofs and it makes great reading. Bath’s amazing 1970s burst of creativity encapsulated in all its highly imaginative but sometimes chaotic glory! I worked with BAW for over a decade and even I didn’t know how wide-ranging and ground-breaking the activities were.

The book mainly concentrates on the workshop’s successes. It was, after all, nationally renowned for its experimental approach to alternative technology and the arts. But at home, we inevitably came up against the bigoted, the narrowminded and the downright scared. I’m certain one reason the founders decided to base themselves here was that Angry of Tunbridge Wells had nothing on Disgusted of Bath!

True, we never went as far as to organise a huge rave in the middle of a pandemic lockdown (how thoughtless is that?) but we did have an admirable capacity to annoy. One council officer waged war on our adventure playground. It was a hotbed of immorality, according to him, and to prove it he went round the Women’s Institutes in the area showing slides of the graffiti on display at the project. This was in actuality a small felt pen scribble declaring: “Dawn likes it!”

We lost no time in presenting a scurrilous cabaret based on the phrase. I would go as far as to say that Dawn Likes It was one of our most successful and topical shows, enjoyed by a sell-out audience that included two bulky and embarrassingly out-of-place plain clothes policemen.

The show featured a number, the rousing neo-wurzels singalong chorus of which was a direct quote from a councillor who referred to us as “hippies, layabouts and hobbledehoys”.

Once we were performing our perfectly innocent version of St George and the Dragon at a school fete when the games master leapt into the action and cried: “Get your off-off Broadway filth out of here!” Broadway, eh? We felt quite proud.

The impossibly glamorous and highly charismatic mayor at the time, one Mary Rawlings, damned us with faint praise.

“Their hearts are in the right place, but I wish they would all get proper jobs,” she famously said on HTV.*

Mind you, she could have been far more vehement as the poor lady suffered from living next door to the Cleveland Circus, a seven-day, 24-hour extravaganza we created in an empty hotel in Pulteney Street. Hawkwind played in the lounge.

But apparently what annoyed Mary most was the constant use of the big brass knocker on the front door. We had it removed.

*My mum agreed.