ANARCHY: No. 110 (Vol. 10 No. 4): April 1970

A very, very dangerous person--Tim Daly, poet

Sentencing Tim Daly to four years in prison, a judge called Thesiger said: "One who endangers other people's property is a very, very dangerous person."

The only name for a system which steals the liberty of loving human beings like Tim Daly, locking them in prisons which are mazes built of small and large cruelties, is barbarism.

In November, 1968, Tim was twenty years old. He took two petrol bombs to the Imperial War Museum, and, after ensuring that nobody was likely to get hurt, started a good fire. Nobody was hurt, but a pile of documents went to blazes. Tim did this because he had seen children being taken round the Museum. He believed that the Museum them that war is glorious. Of course it did, and still does. The State wouldn't tolerate a Peace Museum.

I didn't meet Tim until after his sentence. Since that time, by exchanging letters and poems, and by visiting Tim in Wormwood Scrubs and Maidstone, I have come to love Tim as much as any other man on earth. I do not know a gentler or braver person. He is not a faceless saint, but an intensely complicated person, good to be with even in the limbo of a prison visiting room.

The British penal system is designed to break men. Tim, as you'll see from the visions and jokes in his poems, has not been broken. And he will not be broken. His spirit is a flame. You cannot brake a flame.

These are only a few of his poems, songs, epigrams and messages, almost every one of them written in Her Majesty's Prisons. Their subject are women, politics and prison. Their tune is love. Use them well.

-- Adrian Mitchell [the Introduction]