Building ‘The NCROPA Virtual Archive’

It all started last year when I received a phone call from my lawyer. The anti-censorship activist David Webb had died, and as executor he was in the process of clearing his apartment at 68c Flood Street, Chelsea. Did I want to come along and help myself to anything that took my fancy prior to its contents being disposed of? I accepted with some reservation, then ended up going there four or five times.

I found a massive collection of theatrical ephemera and other material, most of which I offered to the British Library, and most of which it didn’t want, so I had the novel idea of building an on-line archive out of it, and after acquiring a scanner, set up The David Webb Virtual Archive.

There is still a bit of work left to do on that, but if I say so myself it is an impressive collection, and from my hosting statistics it is clear that it has received many visits and been heavily downloaded.

That was only the start of things though. For the last twenty-five years or so of his life, David Webb had run an anti-censorship organisation called NCROPA. Although I was at one time a member, I had never been active in it, and I assumed it was basically him and a few others, but mostly him. While he ran it in autocratic style, it had a committee, generated a lot of correspondence, and a great deal of other material.

Then somehow, I’m still not sure how, but somehow it was agreed that we – read Yours Truly – would not only set up a virtual archive of David Webb theatreabilia but another one devoted to NCROPA including correspondence and publications. Originally it was agreed that I should collect a couple of files at a time, scan them, then return them and collect a couple more. Somewhere down the line that idea was discarded, and I now have bundles of lever arch files and other documents cramping the stairs to my garret flat.

The NCROPA Virtual Archive was opened March 1, 2013, and to date contains over 800Mb of scanned documents including the complete correspondence for 1976 – the year the organisation was founded. I say complete, I’m actually scanning only a fraction of the correspondence, all the important stuff, or what I think is important. David Webb would often write to one person and copy the letter to several or many more, especially MPs, many of whom would simply acknowledge. There would be no point including every single document the organisation generated, which would in any case take until Domesday.

There will be a delay before any more large quantities of material are added because having obtained a scanner for free through Lewisham Freecycle, and scanned over 5Gb of material, I have literally burned it out. I should be picking up a new one on Monday from my local shop.

Censorship is an ever topical subject, but there is not much in the way of sexual censorship nowadays, so anyone unfamiliar with the Zeitgeist of Britain after the so-called Swinging Sixties might be surprised at some of the ludicrous campaigns the enemies of freedom embarked on here.

In 1976, the homosexual newspaper Gay News published a blasphemous poem The Love That Dares To Speak Its Name. This resulted in a successful prosecution for blasphemous libel, the last ever in the UK. This prosecution was initiated by Mary Whitehouse, a lady David Webb considered clearly to be the Devil Incarnate rather than the upstanding Christian woman she believed herself to be. Her later attempt to prosecute the play The Romans In Britain over what appeared to be an act of homosexual rape on stage resulted in farce, but there were many other prosecutions and police raids. In 1977-8, there was numerous raids on three private cinema clubs in the West End of London, and at times even “girlie mags” were snatched off the shelves of newsagent shops. NCROPA went in to bat for all these organisations and individuals, and David Webb as its founder and head honcho would write letter after letter to MPs, Government Ministers, media outlets and others.