This book is in print at last. It was in November 2010 that I took a trip from Leeds, England, to Bologna, Italy, to interview Marcello Dall’Aglio for my first foray into Big Flame’s history. Bologna was cold and grey and the magnificent mansion where Marcello lived and worked did
n’t have much heating. He rented it to run a gourmet cooking teaching programme, with a magnificent restaurant and rambling hotel attached.
Marcello’s life, post-Big Flame, wasn’t as far a stretch from being one of Big Flame’s inspirations in Liverpool, England, in the early 1970s, as you might expect. I joined Big Flame in 1975 at least partly because Martin Yarnit, a founder of Big Flame in 1970, had served up stuffed vine-leaves for tea in the austere, modern flat he and other members rented in Speke (Liverpool). At 6am the next morning we were leafletting the Ford’s plant in Halewood. I thought the revolution might be somewhere near. After, we’d eat well, live as equals and make love better.
Big Flame was a huge part of my life for almost ten years. I learned something new every day and I met wonderful people of all shapes and sizes. I don’t know when our branch in Leeds finally dissolved — my archive in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University is incomplete because they lost a pile of papers I deposited — but I think it was probably in 1984. My co-author Kevin has traced its dissolution as a national organisation to about 1987, but it never really recovered from the decision by some key people to join the Labour Party after our 1981 Conference.
I wrote my sections of the book over about 13 years and it took about two years to chop it down to the size Merlin Press required and prepare it for publication. It was surprisingly hard to find good photos but there are a few in the book. 53 former members contributed some long, and some very short personal reflections on their time in, and after, Big Flame. This makes for a lively book which, like Big Flame, moves up and down the personal, sociological, cultural, economic and political dimensions of life. The book, like Big Flame, is a labour of love and I’m deeply grateful to everyone, especially Kevin, who helped bring it to print.
I’ll do another post on its relevance to political and personal life today, in 2025. So very different, and so very similar, to 1975. And I’ll be posting on Substack about this stuff (and other things) too. Here’s something on the Labour Hub website about Big Flame and the discussion events we’re doing in early 2025.
