David Davis
I would like to write an elegy for Tony.
For, out of all the surviving early members of the Libertarian Alliance, I probably knew him best and got closest to him as a friend for a time.
In the mid-1970s this wretched Planet was being steadily consumed by “social democracy” and (worse, locally) “Eurocommunism”. Anyone remember that one then? No, I thought not. In this time, Chris Tame – who needs no introduction on here – Tony Hollick, and others including me as a latecomer, formed the core of the current Libertarian Alliance. The Alternative Bookshop [40 Floral Street, Covent Garden, WC2] of which if you are on here now, you will know, was the hub.
Now, Tony had had a somewhat exciting life previously, as a capitalist-entrepreneur, being in a rather comforable “good way of doing” – as they say down in Liverpool. He had previously owned a Facel Vega motor car, when these were new and extremely expensive, and of which he had been very proud. When I met him, he was working at The National Association For Freedom (later the freedom Association) and he was living in the back room of the Alternative Bookshop with his very very large ginger cat, Beeper, who himself became a minor character of the British libertarian movement. Somewhere in my Library is a photograph of early LA members, posed behind Beeper in a foreground commanding position. Beeper was a Free Cat.
In 1980/81, Tony and I Continue reading