When I attended the mass demonstration against the Vietnam War in London in October 1968, what most impressed me was the sedateness of the occasion. Among the demonstrators there was concern about the police horses. An anarchist fringe was rumoured to be planning to throw ball bearings under their hooves, a tactic many – including myself – deplored. The police were mostly restrained, many seeming chiefly concerned to avoid trouble. A section of the demonstrators led by a Maoist faction broke off and moved on to Grosvenor Square, where they attempted to break through police cordons guarding the American embassy. There had been a violent clash with police in an earlier demonstration in March, but after some hours of scuffles and a handful of arrests this confrontation fizzled out.
The body of the march continued as planned, handing in a petition at 10 Downing Street and proceeding to Hyde Park, where speeches were made demanding an immediate end to a war that would drag on until the fall of Saigon nearly seven years later. The home secretary of the day – the future Labour prime minister, James Callaghan – visited Grosvenor Square in the evening to watch it being cleared. Callaghan praised the demonstrators and the police, commenting that a demonstration of this kind would not have gone off so peacefully in any other part of the world.
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