I met Mick first when I just turned 14—we were in the first flush of that revolutionary generation that Bob Dylan had promised would soon shake your windows and rattle your doors. We wanted change, and we were part of that huge current for radical social reform, revolution, and peace, which began to subvert our whole generation. Mick was in its vanguard

It was he who, sitting in the wee hours of the morning in his living room after an underage drinking session round the town, had revealed the sacred words of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” LP. I had heard nothing like it in my life. I thought those words, those concepts, were addressed to me. It was, in the words of the Christian revivalists, a revelation, the hour I first really understood the way the world worked. We became aware of ourselves as a worldwide wave of youth rebellion intent on shaking the system ‘til it changed its ways or died. We pushed at all walls, broke them down, and defied the rules of morality and patriotism. Everything the older generation took as gospels of truth we doubted and challenged.

We helped found the Heaton Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the most radical Tyneside anti-bomb group, going on to form the faction that became the Tyneside Direct Action Committee and later the Committee of 100. We demonstrated at Holy Lock on the Clyde and on numerous Aldermaston marches against the H-bomb and atom bomb, which had brought us to the very wire of nuclear war and convinced us of our possible premature departure from life before we had the chance to live it.

Mick was a key character in the city “movement”—the Tyne beat scene. He was always on the scene. Sex, drugs, rock and roll, and revolution: that was us. Mick was “a lad” right enough. As our beatnik and mod strange new wave confronted the old culture, the teds, biker gangs still in their white socks and greased back hair, we were often attacked. We represented something strange and scary—politics, beat poetry, and peace campaigns. We listened to the beat poets in Newcastle Bigg Market, shouting the poems of Allen Ginsberg and local Geordie young beat generation poets, reveling in their defiant use of words, which everyone knew were banned and which you couldn’t write down let alone speak as poetry. To the old ted generation, we were surely all “commies” and “freaks,” but those became titles we took as our own.

Mick was no mean street fighter, and, although we aspired at first to pacifism, he was a handy lad to have around because he wouldn’t easily see his friends attacked without wading in.

Mick had been born into a unique and dying community, for his dad wasn’t simply a Northumbrian pitman, he was a Geordie pitman. He worked at the Rising Sun, Wallsend. Mick grew up the terraces of Heaton, amongst miners, railway men, shipyard workers and their families. He was raised in the strongly militant trade union tradition of the miners’ union and communities. As many of those in the restless, long-haired beat generation entered the mines themselves, the old lads shook their heads in disbelief. “Pitmen?” they queried, but it was not long before that generation had started to add its own coloration to the industry and the miners’ union.

My life has been marked by Mick’s presence and Mick’s comradeship; we were together at Grosvenor Square as we tried to storm the U.S. embassy in solidarity with the Vietnamese people, as we went on anti-fascist mobilizations and punch-up’s with the National Front. He was for a time the Secretary of the Gateshead Trade Union Council and organized some of the best of the Tyneside May Day rallies. Through raising funds and joining pickets, he was shoulder-to-shoulder with every battle the miners had from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

He developed a deep and lasting love of Bulgarian and Greek culture and spent every spare holiday in Bulgaria and Greece, becoming a self-taught expert on all aspects of these two cultures and their history.

Mick and I started our political careers as anarchists, and then took brief detours through the woody glades of Trotskyism in the 1970s. Mick went to the Socialist Workers Party, and I went to the Revolutionary Workers Party. By the time of the miners’ great strike, we were both headed back to anarchism. We both became enthusiastic in the re-formation of the Industrial Workers of the World in Britain, and it was this organization that Mick, heart and soul, has worked for in the last 15 years. He has also been an enthusiastic member of the Follonsby Miners Lodge Banner Community Heritage.

Mick’s last fight with cancer was his hardest, and he wouldn’t yield. He smoked and drank until the end; he paraded and demonstrated when he could hardly stand. Indeed, he very nearly died at last year’s Durham Miners’ Gala, but, clinging onto the railings to hold himself up, he refused to take a taxi to the hospital, demanding that the Cole Pits Pub was the only destination he was heading for. He went through hell this last year. He refused to give up, always believing he’d beat cancer and come back.

Mick was my friend and comrade for over a half a century. We shared so much. We had the privilege to have been teenagers in the 1960s and to set ourselves a benchmark for freedom, for justice whatever the law said, until in our own 60s we still aspired to those same values because we couldn’t live any other way. Mick was a character round the towns. Gateshead and Newcastle were his stomping grounds, where he met tens of thousands of people, debated with whole cities over the bar table. People all over Tyneside knew Mick; he will be a huge loss. You were a diamond marra! I will miss you in 10,000 ways.

Transcribed by Juan Conatz