Muddy Waters at Goldsmiths 1968

This poster popped up recently on Twitter (@salvatorRosa) - legendary blues artist Muddy Waters playing at Goldsmiths College in New Cross, November 29 1968. Also featuring Otis Spann (playing with Waters), British blues guitarist Gordon Smith (who has played with Kevin Coyne among others) and Mike Kean's Dusty Blues Ensemble.

However, as somebody in comments has pointed out, the image in the poster appears to be John Lee Hooker rather than Muddy Waters! Awkward...

John Lee Hooker

Muddy Waters (left) as he actually looked in 1968
(pictured at Hammersmith Odeon)

Update April 2026:

This post has attracted some interesting comments over the years, clearly despite the poster mix up this was a memorable gig for those who were there. It was seemingly arranged by Pete Bentley for the Goldsmiths Blues Society.

I have also seen a poster for a gig in the following year - 28 February 1969 - with John Lee Hooker playing at Goldsmiths supported by the Groundhogs.

For more on 1960s music at Goldsmiths see:

Goldsmiths History Project

Golddream - an exhibition

1968 in South London (5): The Who at the Elephant

From the South London Press, Friday 28 June 1968, by Monty Smith:

The Who stage pop explosion

The Who are that pop rarity - a good commercial group. They make attractive noise which sells. And noise it most definitely is. As the people at the Elephant and Castle's London College of Printing found out last Saturday when The Who appeared at an all-night dance.

Coming on stage at about 10.30, The Who deafened all and sundry with an impressive performance encompassing humour, violence and 'Happy Jack'. For over an hour they played, often showing scant respect for their instruments. In their final number - a 10 minute version of the classic 'My Generation' - Moon threw his drums all over the place and Townsend jumped up and down on his vox box.

In America they are considered to be an Underground group. Over here parents don't like their children going to see them.

1968 in South London (4): Lewisham Floods

Photo by David Wright showing the flooding on Bromley Road, Catford, outside the Robertson Jam Factory. The latter closed in 1970 with the loss of 350 jobs.

Probably the biggest event in Lewisham in 1968 was not related to global political movements but to the weather. In September 1968 there was flooding across the South East of England, with the Lewisham area badly hit: ‘Hundreds of families were… trapped in their homes in Lewisham, South London, which was one of the parts worst affected. All the families could do was to shore up their doors with planks, chairs, and carpets as the water swept into their homes. The worst affected part of Lewisham was the High Street. The River Quaggy, normally only 6 inches deep, rose in some places to 15ft. In Carthorn Street the water rose to 4ft. Traffic was halted as it stretched from Catford to New Cross. Extra police were called to filter some of the traffic through side roads’ (Times, 17 September 1968).

Bromley Road facing towards Catford in 1968.
Photo by David Wright on Flickr (he has a couple of other flood photos there)

[last updated with additional pictures 28 December 2013]

1968 in South London (3): Brixton Squatters

The following report of a 1968 protest in Brixton was published at the time in the radical newspaper Black Dwarf:

'Squatters seized an empty five-storey office block in London's Brixton Road on Saturday, 29 March. About a dozen squad cars, black marias and motor cycle police surrounded the building just before 9 a.m.) minutes after the “invasion squad" otherwise known as the South London Squatters, had got in through a back way.

A detachment of police headed by an inspector from the nearby Brixton police station and a plain-clothes man clambered over a ten-­foot hardboard fence at the back of the concrete and glass building and tried to get the squatters to leave quietly. They refused. A few minutes later large banners appeared over the balconies of the block reading: 'Homes not offices' and 'Enough room here for eighty families'. Plus a red flag.

The building is next to Brixton Register Office. Astonished wedding guests watched as police tried to get the squatters out. According to a leaflet handed out by supporters outside, the building - 40,500 sq. ft of it - has been empty for three years. 'Why can't Cathy come home to this'!' the leaflet asks. 'We have occupied this building to expose the housing shortage. A building this size could be converted at only £1,000 a unit to house eighty homeless families. Eight million sq. ft of office building stands empty in London alone - enough to house all the homeless in Britain.'

The operation, the first carried out by the group, was surprisingly simple. The glass in a door at the back of the building was cut and Hey Presto! The next they heard were the sirens.
Said Ray Gibbon, travel agency manager and father of two, of Shakespeare Road, Heme Hill, “We intend staying here until 5.30. Then we'll leave quietly after we've made our point.”

The squatters, all local people, passed their time listening to the radio, playing football and putting records on a record player they'd brought with them. At lunch-time fish and chips and bottles of beer were hoisted up by rope from outside. Rubbish was put in a Lambeth Council paper sack they had brought in with them. 'We want to be as tidy as possible,' said Mr Gibbon.

During the day, the squatters gave out over 7,000 leaflets in the Brixton shopping centre. One West Indian bus conductor said, 'Give me a heap man. I'll give them out to the lads when I get to the garage at Croydon.' The leaflet said: 'Some people try to blame immigrants for the housing shortage but we know we had lousy houses in Britain before we ever saw a black face or heard an Irish accent. The real for the housing shortage is that a small group of people make millions of pounds out of our need for a decent home.'

Source: David Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956-1968 (London: Penguin, 1976)

1968 in South London (2): Brockley school students

In Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If, Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) leads an armed revolt in a private school. Events at Brockley County School in Hilly Fields (now Prendergast School) were not quite so dramatic, but there was discontent nevertheless:

“Three boys at a South London grammar school – all members of a national campaign to get greater freedom for pupils –were suspended yesterday after a boycott of the school prizegiving. Mr H.I. Jones, headmaster of Brockley County School, told them they must stay away until he has seen their parents.

One of the organizers of the boycott, aged 15, said last night: ‘We hoped to have the entire school of about 550 pupils staying away’. But about 30 in all, from the fifth and sixth forms stayed away. ‘We did not object to the prizegiving as such, just to the fact that attendance was compulsory’ he added. ‘We do not like the suppression of the individuality of pupils. At present they are not allowed to think for themselves. I agree there has to be some discipline and organisation in schools, but I do not think it should be carried on the way it is now’.

He complained of ‘stupid traditions such as speech day’. Some masters were also sympathetic with their campaign. ‘All the boys who boycotted the evening were punished in some way, unless they gave a good reason for not being there. Some were given a large imposition, and I understand, some were caned’. One of the other boys said: ‘Our campaign is for the abolition of examinations and uniforms’".

(Source: Times 9 November 1968)

1968 in South London (1): Students

There has been a lot of coverage elsewhere of the anniversary of 1968 – just as there was in 1998, and no doubt will be in 2018. Some people seem to have made a lifelong career on the basis of their late 60s press notoriety and standing next to Mick Jagger on an anti-Vietnam War demonstration. Clearly there were some historically significant events in 1968- the May movement in France, the massacre of students in Mexico, the Prague Spring, the beginning of the civil rights movement in the north of Ireland. Equally clearly, some fairly minor events in England have been somewhat over-dramatised by their nostalgic baby boomer participants. People do go on and on about the Grosvenor Square anti-war demonstration as if it was a bloody civil war, when in reality it seems to have been little more than a giant rugby scrum compared to the violence of, say the Miners strike in the 1980s or the 1990 Poll Tax riot.

So how was South London affected by the global wave of revolt? From what I’ve found so far, not too dramatically. There were some stirrings amongst art students following the occupation of Hornsey College of Art at the end of May. ‘A group of Hornsey students last night visited Goldsmiths College, New Cross, SE, to appeal for support’ (Times 1 June 1968), but there does not seem to have been an occupation at Goldsmiths itself. Later in the year ‘Sixty students from Goldsmiths’ College of Art, New Cross, SE, invaded Hornsey College of Art on the first day of its new term… They crowded into the corridors of Hornsey and chanted ‘We support you. We support you’. Hornsey college authorities called police, who dispersed the students and ejected them’ (Times, 5 November 1968).

There was a ‘sit-in by students’ at Croydon College of Art, with an occupation of ‘an annexe at South Norwood for six nights’ (Times 11 June 1968). The students don’t seem to have been too clued up on tactics though – they left the occupation unguarded and then were surprised to find themselves locked out: ‘Three hundred of them had left the annexe and were at the main college building for a meeting between deputations of staff and students to discuss the students’ grievances. When they returned to the annexe in Selhurst Road, South Norwood, afterwards, they found the doors locked and the building in darkness’ (Times 12 June 1968). Jamie Reid – who later designed Sex Pistols record sleeves – took part in the occupation, as did The Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McClaren.

If none of this was quite on the scale of events elsewhere in the world, the authorities were still interested: ‘The actions of a plain clothes police officer in visiting Goldsmiths College, New Cross… to discover the names and addresses of three students for inquiries into a forthcoming Vietnam rally, is deplored by Dr D.R. Chesterton, college warden, in today’s issue of Smith News, the college paper’ (Times 11 October 1968).