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revolutionary
spirit lay a long way back. Did he not boast that on school holidays he had
plastered the public lavatories of Cologne with anti-French stickers at the
time of the occupation of the Rhineland? There were all sorts of later
insurgent activities, ‘chalkings’, marchings, making policemen’s horses shy at
May Day celebrations, exertions which led, logically enough, to association
with Gypsy Jones. Bagshaw was even reckoned to have been engaged to Gypsy at
one time. His own way of life, the fact that she herself was an avowed Party
Member, made it likely he too had been ‘CP’ in his
day, possibly up to the Spanish Civil War. At that period Quiggin used to talk a lot about him, and had
probably learnt a good deal from him Then Bagshaw was employed on some sort of
eyewitness reporting assignment in Spain. Things went wrong. No one ever knew
quite what happened. There had been one of Bagshaw’s rows. He came back. Some
people said he was lucky to get home. Politically speaking, life was never the
same again. Bagshaw had lost his old enthusiasms. Afterwards, when drunk, he
would attempt to expound his changed standpoint, never
with great clarity, though he would go on by the hour together to friends like
Moreland, who detested talking politics.
    ‘There was a chap called Max
Stirner … You’ve probably none of you ever heard of
Der
Einzige und sein Eigentum
… You know,
The
Ego and his Own
… Well, I don’t really know German either, but
Stirner believed it would be all right if only we could get away from the
tyranny of abstract ideas… He taught in a girls’ school. Probably what gave him
the notion. Abstract ideas not a bit of use in a girls’ school…’
    Whatever Bagshaw thought about
abstract ideas when drunk – he never reached a stage when unable to argue – he
was devoted to them when sober. He resembled a man long conversant with racing,
familiar with the name of every horse listed in
Ruff’s Guide to the Turf
, who
has now ceased to lay a bet, even feel the smallest desire to visit a
racecourse; yet at the same time never lost his taste for talking about racing.
Bagshaw was for ever fascinated by
revolutionary techniques, always prepared to explain everybody’s standpoint, who was a party-member, fellow-traveller, crypto, trotskyist, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist,  every
refinement of marxist theory, every subtle distinction within groups. The ebb
and flow of subversive forces wafted the breath of life to him, even
if he no longer believed in the beneficial qualities of that tide.
    Bagshaw’s employment at the BBC
lasted only a few years. There were plenty of other professional rebels there,
not to mention Party Members, but somehow they were not his sort. All the same,
the Corporation left its mark. Even after he found more congenial occupations,
he always spoke with a certain nostalgia of his BBC days, never entirely losing
touch. After abdicating the air, he plunged into almost every known form of
exploiting the printed word, where he always hovered between the sack and a
much more promising offer on the horizon. He possessed that opportune facility
for turning out several thousand words on any subject whatsoever at the shortest
possible notice: politics: sport: books: finance: science: art: fashion – as he
himself said, ‘War, Famine, Pestilence or Death on a Pale Horse’. All were
equal when it came to Bagshaw’s typewriter. He would take on anything, and – to
be fair – what he produced, even off the cuff, was no worse than what was to be
read most of the time. You never wondered how on earth the stuff had ever
managed to be printed.
    All this suggests Bagshaw had a
brilliant journalistic career ahead of him, when, as he described it, he set
out ‘with the heart of a boy so whole and free’. Somehow it never came off. A
long heritage of awkward incidents accounted for much of the furtiveness of
Bagshaw’s manner. There