Talk:Lobster (magazine)
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[edit] Stephen Dorril contributions?
I removed the following statements from the article:
In fact, it was my idea (Stephen Dorril) to start the magazine (I still hold the correspondence between myself and Robin Ramsay) in order to shift the focus away from primarily US politics/intelligence to looking at British politics/intelligence in terms of parapolitics. As co-editor, I funded the magazine for the first few issues and Robin did the typing and production.
As he stated in a letter to myself (Dorril)out-of-the-blue, at issue 26, Mr Ramsay decided that he was experiencing something of a mid-life crisis and wanted to have greater recognition for his contribution. He then decided to take the name, back copies and valuable subscription list for his own. Mr Dorril continued to publish Lobster for five more issues.
Even assuming this is Stephen Dorril, I don't think we can have direct claims from subjects of the article in the article itself, and definitely not in the first person. As the relevant correspondence is not publicly available, I don't think they are useful as a source. - Crosbiesmith 08:54, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
- If we can verify that it's Dorril, then it's a good source for what Dorril claims, I suppose. Although what he says isn't totally inconsistent with what Ramsay says (I'm guessing this squabble boils down to a pathetic semantic argument over what an 'editor' is), I'm tempted to just delete the question of 'editorship' out of there and just say it was started by those two and is now run by Ramsay. Oh, and the 5 post-split issues of Lobster he talks about aren't really the same Lobster that this article is about. --Aim Here 20:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Not convinced that this is unencylopedic
I'll readily agree that this isn't the best article in Wikipedia, but I don't think that it should be deleted without further discussion. Rlquall 22:15, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
- Agreed, it's a poor article, but I think Lobster is notable enough to be mentioned. I removed the prod before the automatic deletion kicked in, but maybe we'll be visited by an AfD... --Aim Here 20:15, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Notability
Removed the tag (added recently by someone who didn't add an explanation here). Did a quick LexisNexis search for Lobster plus editor's name and it came back with 64 references in UK/US etc newspapers and magazines, including the Independent and the Toronto Star. Of recent note was a July 2007 piece of over 1000 words (Hull Daily Mail, July 13 2007) entirely given over to discussing the magazine and its importance over the years. Agree the article isn't great but that's nothing to do with notability.Testbed (talk) 06:49, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
- I agree - if you find sources like that add them in here and we can take a look at them and add anything that looks useful. (Emperor (talk) 12:49, 23 April 2008 (UTC))
[edit] Hull Daily Mail
Hull Daily Mail
July 13, 2007 Friday
Sexed-up files, lies and surveillance tapes ... One man's search to uncover what lies beneath By A Coggan
There are times when a vivid imagination is more of a hindrance than a help. For 25 years, Robin Ramsay has accused the establishment of collusion, conspiracies and cover-ups. Twenty minutes late, I imagine his fate growing more lurid with each tick of the clock. Bound and gagged, he's being stuffed into the boot of a black saloon. Two ticks on, he's face-down in a gutter after a jab from a pointy umbrella. Finally, a man in mucky overalls jolts me from mytroubled reverie in Chance café in Chanterlands Avenue. Knee-deep in gooseberries on his allotment, he'd forgotten all about me. Shouldering the insult, we head to his home in the Avenues as he shakes off the soil.
Since 1983, Robin Ramsay, 59, has edited Lobster magazine, which investigates government conspiracies, state espionage and the secret service. "As far as being paranoid, it depends what you mean," he says. "I don't trust the State and there are huge amounts of evidence about why you shouldn't.
"Outside Northern Ireland, the British state has killed hardly anyone. It doesn't need to, it just convicts you of a crime you didn't commit or messes up your career.
"But the American state has killed all kinds of people. They've wiped out the Black Panthers, look at Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. If you challenge these guys, it's dangerous."
Born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1948, he did not have a great childhood. "My parents were miserable," he says. "They should never have married. By the time they realised, they had three children. Then, it was 'for the sake of the children' and the pretence of being happy. "They stayed together until I was 15 and it ended in divorce, mess and tears, with me in particular, as the eldest son, in the middle of warring parents." His frankness, illuminated by the odd sweary word, is a breath of fresh air. When exposing the lies of others, his integrity carries added significance. Time and again, we return to his parents' failed marriage, acknowledging deep-rooted scars.
"My suspicions that things are not as they appear to be partly reflect my experience as a child, that my mother and father pretended to be happy but weren't," he says. "It was about what lies beneath."
"Alternative" before the coining of the label, he hung on the fringes, quitting university after a single term to play jazz, promote concerts and flirt with theatre, holding down jobs from night-shift worker at a biscuit factory to civil servant. Fleeing Edinburgh after bad-mouthing a gangster with a long reach, he ended up in Stoke-on-Trent. He married his girlfriend to stay in the house he loved because the landlord wasn't keen on them cohabiting, muttering something about it being the 60s. In the 70s, they moved to Hull, his mother's home town, after he decided to go back to university. His marriage failed and he turned down the chance to work in the US as a PhD research student for a job as an administrator at Hull Truck.
He read an article in underground magazine International Times about The Gemstone File, the original conspiracy theory about the US's rise as a super-power. While everyone else exhaled "far out, man", he pursued the truth. He went to the university library, following a paper trail through US history and politics. "I discovered it was nonsense," he says. "I wrote an article refuting the Gemstone File and the International Times published it."
He was hooked. After giving up his job at Hull Truck, he spent the next four years signing on the dole and devouring vast quantities of information about things that interested him, such as the Kennedy assassinations. "I was a single guy, no responsibilities, no dependents," he says. "I could afford to sit and read for four years." After starting a left-wing magazine in Hull called "The Post" with Colin Challen, now MP for Morley and Rothwell, he linked up with Stephen Dorril, who shared his interest in the alleged Kennedy cover-ups.
Lobster was born. From the original print-run of 150, it now sells 1,300 copies twice a year. It's not quite Heat, but it points to a growing number who believe the truth is out there. He occasionally appears on television, wrongly labelled a "conspiracy theorist". Every claim or accusation is backed up by reams of research and legitimate footnotes and he's scathing about ill-informed allegations breeding unchecked on the Internet.
He claims Nato governments have been experimenting with mind control for two decades, that Lyndon Johnson had JFK killed to become US President and that the British Government colluded with Loyalists to murder Catholics in Northern Ireland. But he doesn't believe Princess Diana was murdered, that the US Government was behind the attacks of September 11 or that Dr David Kelly was murdered over the "sexed-up" dossier on weapons of mass destruction that took Britain to war in Iraq.
He's written books on the JFK assassination that shatter conspiracy theories and on the rise of New Labour, but it's not made him rich. "In a good year, I make as much as I would do signing on," he says. He's been able to pursue his work by relying on his long-term partner Sally's income, but it doesn't sit easy. "I've never been that comfortable not earning money," he says. "How do radical journalists make a living? They don't, they have women to support them. "Without Sally, I would probably have been just another unhappy teacher."
His work has brought life's more colourful folk calling. He tells me about the man who arrived at his door, declaring aliens had removed his vital male appendage only to replace it with a smaller version. "He even offered to show me it," he says dead-pan, while I'm this close to hysterical. "I told him 'I think you're mad. Go and see your doctor.' He was really disappointed, saying 'I thought you'd understand'."
Then there was the elderly chap, who arrived with an envelope stuffed with £1,000. "He didn't stay for long and wouldn't answer any questions," he said. There have been less welcome intrusions, from phone-tapping to secret agents, in particular a man who befriended him before Robin outed him as a spy. If it sounds far-fetched, come on a journey to a previous life, when I was part of the worldwide media pack covering the Lockerbie bombers' trial in Holland in 2000.
Glasgow University set up a media unit to "assist" journos and its deputy director was Professor Andrew Fulton, a friendly white-haired gent, always quick with a smile and a helpful steer on legal points. Until, that is, he was exposed as a former head of M16 in Washington. As western intelligence services' handling of the bombing was being scrutinised, you could say the unit's impartiality was called into question and we never saw Phoney Fulton again.
After two hours in his company, Robin Ramsay has convinced me to look at "what lies beneath." His credibility lies in his normality. I don't think he's bothered if you believe him, he just knows he's right. At the door, he hands me a bag of gooseberries, collected from the allotment that made him late for our meeting. If it's a bribe, it's a good one.Testbed (talk) 17:45, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
[edit] The Guardian
The Guardian (London)
August 31, 1991
Inside Story: In the lair of the lobster - Stephen Dorril and Robin Ramsey edit a left-wing journal that offers succour to conspiracy theorists and keeps the professionals on their toes
By ROBERT MCCRUM
TOWARDS the end of 1982, a young Huddersfield probation worker with a fascination for the dark side of American politics wrote to the editor of Echoes of Conspiracy, one of a dozen fringe publications devoted to the assassination of President Kennedy. He asked who, in Britain, was the JFK buff with whom he could discuss his conspiracy theories? The editor's answer put him on a train to Hull. For identification, he carried a card inscribed 'Maurice Bishop'.
'This was an in-joke,' says Stephen Dorril, now a self-employed desktop publisher. 'Bishop was the cover name for a CIA agent involved in the case.' It was a joke appreciated by Robin Ramsay, waiting on the platform. 'We hit it off at once,' he says. 'I suppose you could say we were like spirits.' Within a few months these 'like spirits' had set up 'a journal of intelligence, parapolitics and state research', a whistleblowing publi-cation that asked the question, 'Who controls Britain?' They printed 150 copies (price 50p) and called it Lobster.
Over the years the name has attracted a lot of exegesis. Sartre, for instance, used a giant lobster as a symbol of paranoia. Dorril's explanation is more Yorkshire. 'We wanted the magazine to sound not pompous.' As a teenager, he would invent names for punk rock groups. 'Lobster' was just one of his favourites. Dorril, 36, grew up in Kidderminster, the son of a British Telecom engineer. He is a smiling, thoughtful, self-styled 'anarchist libertarian' with a taste for footnotes. (He has a BSc in Behavioural Sciences from Hud-dersfield Polytechnic.) In his crumpled navy blue suit, he could be the art director of a trendy advertising agency.
Robin Ramsay, his collaborator, had taken a rather different route to that meeting on Hull station. Now 43, he is an extrovert, fast-talking Scot with jack-of-all-trades experience in alternative journalism, jazz music and the theatre. He has the breezy bonhomie of a character actor or a pub comedian. Laughing, he de-scribes himself as 'a ghastly hangover from the Sixties', and claims that his formative influences derive from 'a gang of Beatniks I used to hang out with in Edinburgh'. Like Dorril, he loves footnotes. Lobster is 'laden to the gunwales' with footnotes. In the latest issue, No 21, a 10-page article on the Moonies and the Korean CIA has a two-page bibliography and no less than 262 footnotes. This edition will, like all its predecessors, sell out its 1,500 copies (price pounds 2) to subscribers from Kiev to Tokyo, from Westminster to Foggy Bottom.
Ramsay boasts that 'we're the only left-wing journal to pay for itself.' He adds, 'Dorril's brilliant at seeing the connections between X and Y. He's got a very good radar.' Dorril chips in, 'When you discover that something fits with something else, it's brilliant. It's not quite as good as sex, but nearIy.' They both seem to derive intense and enviable satisfaction from their work. Why do they do it? 'Enjoyment,' says Dorril. He looks a bit sheepish. 'I really do believe in things like The Truth. . . Of course you can't actually get to the truth, it's always elusive, but you can try to get to the bottom of things and enjoy yourself in the process.' Ramsay had spoken in a jocular way, when we first met, about the simplicity of Freudian interpretations. Now he says, 'My parents had this pretend marriage. They hated each other, but they pretended not to be-cause of the children. As a marriage it was a charade, a facade. I've always been fascinated by people who say 'Here is official reality' when I know there's something quite different going on behind it.'
The big break for Lobster came in 1985, though this is clear only with hindsight. Duncan Campbell, the investigative journalist, had been to see a certain Colin Wallace, then a disgraced army officer serving a 10-year prison sentence. He had been given an extraordinary story about dirty tricks in Northern Ireland. For various reasons, Campbell decided not to investigate further. Wallace's associate, Fred Holroyd, turned to Lobster. He asked Dorril to come and look at the Wallace papers. 'I think I was the first to read right through the file. . . You could say that we got Duncan Campbell's left-overs!' Dorril spent a week reading highly classified documents about what is now known as 'Operation Clockwork Orange' (the plot by disaffected members of MI5 to discredit, among others, Edward Heath and Harold Wilson). He called Ramsay. 'We couldn't believe it. We said to each other, 'This is Watergate. This is the biggest story since World War Two.' '
Lobster's issue 11 was devoted to the Colin Wallace story. They called a press conference and issued a press release. Several journalists turned up - but nothing happened. Then came Peter Wright and Spycatcher. From the other end of the political spectrum, Wright's story confirmed the Lobster account of what Wallace had alleged about the MI5 plots. The phone didn't stop ring-ing in Ramsay's house for six months. In 1987, he worked for ITN on a special report about the Wallace affair. 'Gradually we realised that Wallace had transformed our understanding of the British state,' says Ram-say. He and Dorril found themselves delving back into those tense, anarchic pre-Jubilee years in the mid-Seventies, when the sense of 'something rotten in the state of Denmark' pervaded all levels of society.
For all the Watergate talk, they don't see themselves in the Woodward and Bernstein mould. 'We don't resemble those guys at all,' Ramsay admits cheerfully. 'To be a good journalist you have to con people on the telephone. We're not journalists, we're deviant academics.' They read Chapman Pincher, Penrose and Courtiour, and back numbers of Private Eye, often the first printed source for such well-established smears as Ted Heath's 'homosexuality' and Wilson's 'corruption'. The more they read, the more they became convinced that such stories were part of a long-term campaign by 'the secret state' against the Labour Party, and in particular Harold Wilson.
When they first started to study the history of the post-war Labour Party, says Ramsay, 'we knew almost nothing about Wilson. We had no prejudices, pro or anti. We've ended up as reluctant admirers. This has been described as 'heroically unfashionable'.' The upshot of five years painstaking research among the most unlikely of archives is Smear! - Wilson and the Secret State, a revisionist biography of a politician whose career, they argue, was fatally undermined by the machinations of the secret services and their allies in the Conservative Party and the media. The tale they tell is of a sustained and vicious covert operation against an elected prime minister, a tale of harassment, surveillance, burglary, and disinformation. Only in Britain could such allegations go unan-swered, and no one reading Smear! in an election year with the possibility of a Labour victory at the polls could feel other than pessimistic about Neil Kinnock's chances with 'the permanent state'. As Ramsay says, 'The great myth of our society is that the civil service is neutral.'
What does the secret state make of their activities? 'We assume they watch us,' says Ramsay 'but who cares? We can't beat those guys, and anyway we're not doing anything illegal.' He is disarmingly matter-of-fact. 'You can't keep secrets from those guys because they already know all the secrets.' Dorril breaks in, 'All they want to know is: how far have you got the blindfold off?' Unlike Wilson, neither of them has ever had an unexplained break-in, though there was some 'funny business' with the proof copies of Smear!, and Ramsay has a story about a fellow jogger. 'He was a post-doc researcher. He'd ask me about what I was doing and I'd tell him anything. I was working on the Wallace stuff for ITN at the time. Then one day we're talking to a friend in the US. He's heard on the intelligence grapevine 'Don't worry about the Lobster. We've penetrated the Lobster.' I thought: there's only two of us. Who could it be? And then it came to me. It's X. I never saw him again.'
Dorril adds, 'People in the intelligence services quite like us, I think, because we take them seriously. They see us as left-wing but honest.' In the surreal world of spooks and buggers, this rationale makes a weird kind of sense. Dorril and Ramsay remain incorrigibly speculative about the British establishment. Like boys in the play-ground, they're addicted to swapping conspiracy theories they've heard on the grapevine. Apropos Mrs Thatcher's election to the leadership of the Conservative Party comes up. Dorril says, with some relish, 'I've heard that Airey Neave rigged the ballot. Heath may have known he was cheated. That's why he is so angry with Thatcher.' Ramsay adds, 'We've not a shred of evidence for this, but it rings true to me. We asked Julian Critchley how the ballot actually worked and never got a reply.'
They have no illusions about the power of the state, but they also recognise that the state is the sum of fallible, individual effort. 'Everything,' says Ramsay, rather reasonably, 'is always a mixture of cock-up and conspiracy.' In the shadowy world of parapolitics, Lobster looks like a brave, bright beacon, a Quixotic piece of typi-cally English amateurism that keeps the professionals on their toes. Dorril will have none of this. 'Lobster isn't important and we aren't going to change the world.' Perhaps they will have more impact now they have graduated from the quirky world of fringe magazines to the open society of the book? Ramsay shakes his head doubtfully. 'Who knows. The trick is to go on with-out hope.'Testbed (talk) 17:52, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
