David Widgery

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David Widgery (27 April 1947 – 26 October 1992) was a British Trotskyist writer, journalist, physician, and activist.

Widgery was born in Barnet and grew up in Maidenhead, Berkshire. He contracted polio as a child and was expelled from sixth form for publishing a magazine.[1]

In 1965, Widgery met Allan Ginsberg, then visited Watts, where he encountered the civil rights movement, followed by Cuba. On return to Britain, he studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital Medical School before writing for New Statesman and Oz, becoming co-editor of Oz during 1971.[1]

Widgery joined the International Socialists in 1967, remaining in the group as it became the Socialist Workers Party. In 1972 he began working at Bethnal Green Hospital, and later in the decade he published his first book, The Left in Britain, 1956–68.[1]

Widgery also presented a paper at Ninth symposium of the National Deviancy Conference in Sheffield (7-8 January 1972) on 'The Politics of the Underground'[2]

His written works include The Chatto Book of Dissent (1991), an anthology of dissident writings co-edited with Michael Rosen, Some Lives!: A GP's East End (1991), the story of his experience as a doctor in London's East End, The National Health: A Radical Perspective, and Beating Time (1986), an account of the Rock Against Racism movement of the late 1970s. One obituary described Widgery, who died in London at the age of 45, as "a radical humanist intellectual on permanent loan to revolutionary socialism."

[edit] Publications

Widgery, D. (1991) Some Lives!: A GP's East End, London: Sinclair Stevenson

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c "Widgery, David John Turner", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  2. ^ Taylor, L. & Taylor, I. (eds) (1972) Politics and Deviance, Harmondsworth: Penguin pg.213

[edit] External links