The wizards of Oz

A classic of 1970s counterculture, the editors of Oz magazine pushed their luck – and ended up in the dock at the Old Bailey. By Mick Brown

The trial of the School Kids Issue of the underground magazine Oz in the summer of 1971 was the longest-running obscenity trial in British history – and the most bizarre. Over the course of six weeks in Court Two of the Old Bailey, a parade of expert witnesses – including academics, psychologists, the author and jazz musician George Melly, the comedian Marty Feldman and the disc jockey John Peel – were called upon to take part in grave deliberations on such matters as the sexual prowess of the cartoon character Rupert Bear, and whether the Earl’s Court neighbourhood of London was famous for ‘male perverts’ or Australians – or both.

Notionally at issue was whether a magazine produced by a group of secondary schoolchildren offended standards of public decency, but the Oz trial was much more significant than that. It was a catalyst for the clash between the counterculture of the 1960s and the political and cultural Establishment, between the rising tide of what was then described as ‘permissiveness’ and the forces of censorship assembled to resist it. As John Mortimer, the counsel for the defence, put it, it was a trial ‘standing at the crossroads of our liberty, at the boundaries of our freedom to think and say and draw and write what we please’.

These boundaries, it seems, were to be limited. At the conclusion of the trial, the three ( grown-up) co-editors of Oz (Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis) were all found guilty of obscenity charges. In sentences that shocked many in the legal establishment, Neville, the magazine’ s founder, was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, with a recommendation by Judge Michael Argyle that he should be deported to his native Australia; Anderson received 12 months; and Dennis was given a lesser sentence of nine months on the grounds, Judge Argyle said, that he was obviously ‘very much less intelligent’ than his fellow accused.

A few months later, the Court of Appeal quashed the convictions, ruling that Argyle, in his eagerness to obtain a guilty verdict, had misdirected the jury on no fewer than 78 occasions – 14 times on points of law and 64 times on points of fact.

But nothing was more wide of the mark than his judgment of Felix Dennis. The ‘least intelligent’ of the so-called ‘ Oz Three’ would go on to build the biggest independent publishing empire in Britain.

On his death three years ago, at the age of 67, Dennis left behind a fortune estimated at some £500 million, along with the splendid Elizabethan manor house where he had lived in Warwickshire, residences in Manhattan and Connecticut, and a house on the island of Mustique, which he had purchased from David Bowie.

A compulsive collector and hoarder, Dennis also left behind a huge store of material on the 1960s underground press, including an extensive archive devoted to Oz, comprising magazines, artwork, posters and storyboards, as well as box-loads of files and the entire court transcript of the infamous 1971 trial.

This archive has now been acquired by the V&A, where it is presently being catalogued and digitised for an exhibition next year tracing the history of British censorship.

To browse the archive is to enter a time capsule back to a London of the late-1960s and early ’70s, on the cusp of a cultural and social revolution. ‘The Oz trial marks the last time that the state threw the full weight of the obscenity laws against an artistic enterprise,’ says Geoffrey Marsh, the director of the Department of Theatre and Performance at the V&A. ‘It really marks the end of that era of the Establishment knowing what was best for you.’

The son of a former soldier known as ‘ the Colonel’, Richard Neville started Oz in 1963, while still a student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. The magazine attacked local politicians, censorship laws and the ‘White Australia’ policy, twice facing obscenity charges, on one occasion for publishing an interview with an abortionist and an article on chastity belts.

In 1966, Neville arrived in London, at the tail end of a wave of migrants from Australia including Clive James, the art critic Robert Hughes and Germaine Greer, and within a few months he had launched Oz from his basement flat in Notting Hill. He would later be joined by Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis. Anderson was born in Britain but brought up in Australia, where he trained as a lawyer, before growing disenchanted with the legal profession and spending several years travelling in Asia and Africa, ‘a nihilistic beatnik’, then arriving in London. He joined Oz after meeting Neville at a ‘legalise pot’ rally in Hyde Park. Dennis had twice been expelled from both a state school and a private one, and had worked as a park attendant and as a gravedigger for Pinner County Council before becoming Oz’ sc ham pi on street seller, moving on to take charge of its admin and business affairs.

The first issues of Oz, following in the footsteps of its Australian predecessor, were largely inspired by the New Statesman and

Private Eye (which described Oz as ‘the worst magazine in the history of the world.’ )

‘They were pretty dull stuff,’ remembers Richard Adams, who worked as a designer on the magazine. ‘And then the drugs took hold. And suddenly there was this complete explosion – colour, design, subject matter.’

Catching the mood of the emerging counterculture, Oz celebrated psychedelic drugs and new sexual freedoms, radical politics, philosophy and rock’n’roll. If another publication, International Times ( IT, as it was known) was the newspaper of the counterculture, then Oz might be seen as its bumper colour supplement. It published themed issues on acid, flying saucers, homosexuality; and there was a proto-feminist Oz, edited by Germaine Greer, a regular contributor.

Free-exchange arrangements with the burgeoning underground press in America also gave the magazine access to the work of cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton, and screeds of material on the rising ferment on American campuses and the Black Power movement. As Jim Anderson puts it, ‘Everything the Establishment hated was in Oz’ – even if it was not always legible. The magazine was also famous for an in-house design style, pioneered by the artist Martin Sharp, that might, typically, put purple lettering on a lime-green page, overlaid with a citrus-orange illustration. ‘The writers were always pissed off that their words were being covered up by some wonderful piece of arcane art,’ Anderson remembers with a laugh.

Anderson, who is now 80, is the sole surviving member of the ‘ Oz Three’. Richard Neville died last year, at the age of 74. ‘In a way, Oz was revolutionary, evolutionary, provocative – all these things were in the back of our mind,’ Anderson says. ‘But it was also very idealistic and positive, putting forward lots of different alternatives. We were just having fun in the counterculture and feeling free to publish anything we wanted to publish. Sailing close

to the wind and getting away with it. That was a real thrill for all of us.’

And it would prove to be the magazine’s undoing. Early in 1970, Neville published an open invitation to Oz readers under the age of 18 to edit the magazine, promising ‘you will enjoy almost complete editorial freedom. Oz belongs to you.’ Twenty secondary-school students applied, and the School Kids Issue, Oz 28, was published in May 1970. Two months later, officers from the Metropolitan Police Obscene Publications Squad raided Oz’s offices. Neville, Anderson and Dennis were indicted under the archaic charge of ‘conspiring to corrupt public morals’ (which theoretically carried an unlimited sentence rising to life imprisonment) with lesser charges of publishing an obscene article and sending such articles through the post.

The trial presented the British judicial system in all its glorious peculiarity. Judge Argyle was a notoriously reactionary figure who advocated life imprisonment for burglars, bred whippets and lived in a house called ‘Truncheons’ in the Nottinghamshire village of Fiskerton.

John Mortimer, who acted as defence counsel for Anderson and Dennis (Richard Neville defended himself ) was a celebrate d author and play wright who would go on to create Rumpole of the Bailey. The prosecuting counsel was Brian Leary, a smooth-talking advocate known in legal circles as ‘Acapulco Leary’ after the sybaritic Mexican resort town where he liked to take his holidays.

Prostesters gathered each day outside the Old Bailey (‘a Wailing Wall of Weirdies’, according to the Daily Express), and John Lennon and Yoko Ono released a protest single to raise funds for the defence.

On the face of it, much of the content of the School Kids Issue was relatively anodyne: attacks on corporal punishment, the Combined Cadet Force, pervert headmasters and school exams. But the prosecution concentrated on two items in particular. The first was the cover – an erotic drawing by the French artist Raymond Bertrand, depicting lesbianism, with a young woman employing what Judge Argyle described as ‘an imitation male penis’ (to which Neville interjected that he ‘did not know a penis that was not male... m’lud’).

The second was a strip cartoon by Robert Crumb of his character ‘Gypsy Granny ’ apparently being ravaged by Rupert Bear – ‘a well-loved children’s cartoon figure having intercourse with an old woman’, as Leary thunderingly put it – which had been mocked up by a 15-year-old contributor, Vivian Berger, by sticking Rupert’s head on to the original Crumb cartoon.

‘ What sort of age would you think Rupert is?’ Leary asked Michael Schofield, a social psychologist and author, in one of the trial’s more surreal exchanges.

‘I’m very sorry,’ a bemused Schofield replied. ‘I’m not up to date with bears.’

‘He’s a young bear, isn’t he?’ Leary persisted. ‘He goes to school; that’s right, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t know whether he goes to school or not,’ Schofield said. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m obviously not as well informed as you are about little bears. I’m a psychologist.’

Leary, Anderson says, was ‘a flapping gowned, Victorian housewife of a prosecutor, pretending to be outraged. He was actually a very amiable, sophisticated man, but, boy, he could really flounce around and be destructive.’

At the conclusion of the trial, the ‘ Oz Three’ were found not guilty on the conspiracy charge, but they were convicted of the two lesser offences – publishing an obscene article and sending such articles through the post. As Neville was being taken down to his cell, another prisoner asked, ‘What did you get?’ ‘Fifteen months,’ Neville replied. ‘That’s terrible,’ the man said. ‘I got the same – and I tried to murder my wife.’

‘I’ve no doubt it was a political trial,’ Anderson now says. ‘ Oz wasn’t pornography by any stretch of the imagination; they were much more worried about our anti-vietnam War and pro-psychedelic drugs stance. The trial was a way of getting at us.’

Inevitably, the trial provided a temporary boost in the sales of Oz. Mary Whitehouse, seeking support for her moral crusade, took a copy of the

School Kids Issue to the Vatican to show the Pope. At its height, Oz was selling around 80,000 copies. The magazine finally folded in 1973. ‘We’d said everything we could possibly say,’ Anderson says.

Neville had already left for Australia by then – of his own volition – disillusioned with the way in which the steam had run out of the counterculture, and idealism had curdled into bitter radical politics. He threw himself into environmental campaigning, and became a prominent broadcaster, writer and commentator, publishing a memoir of the Oz years, Hippie Hip pie Shake, in 1995. Anderson ‘went around the bend a bit’, as he puts it, as a consequence of LSD, and found his way to Bolinas in California, where he lived for 17 years, running a local newspaper, helping develop a radical eco-sewage ‘ system and becoming town mayor (‘everybody in Bolinas was mayor’). He returned to I‘ Australia in the mid-1990s, and is now a novelist and photo-artist.

Dennis set up on his own, publishing poster magazines of kung fu star Bruce Lee and pop stars like David Cassidy and the Bay City Rollers, moving on to personal-computer magazines such as Macuser and PC Pro, the men’s magazine Maxim and The Week.

In the course of the trial, Dennis was asked by Brian Leary if he believed there was anything at all that tended to corrupt people. ‘Yes, Mr Leary,’ Dennis smartly replied. ‘The object of most people’s lives – money.’

But Dennis proved entirely amenable to temptation. He lived a life of glorious and unapologetic excess. He once claimed to have spent at least £100 million on drugs and women – and enjoyed every minute of it. He painted, wrote poetry and was devoted to the preservation of ancient woodland. He left the lion’s share of his fortune to maintaining and extending his forest, known as the Heart of England – 3,000 acres, stretching from the ancient Forest of Arden to the edge of the Vale of Evesham, where over the years Dennis planted more than one million trees.

‘Felix was basically a 19th-century gentleman,’ says Barry Miles, a longtime friend who prepared Dennis’s archive for sale to the V&A. ‘He liked his poetry to rhyme, his paintings to have a subject and his women to be submissive. In many ways he was as reactionary as you could get. And he kept everything – magazines, posters, diaries, correspondence. The archive is an extraordinary collection of genuine historical interest.’

‘There’s never been a decade like the 1960s,’ Anderson adds. ‘It was so influential. The ideas that we were promoting in Oz went into the mainstream a long time ago.’ He smiles. ‘All this is just reminiscence, nothing more than that.’

The Victoria and Albert museum; vam.ac.uk