It’s a long story, and complicated.  It certainly had nothing to do with antipathies to royalty, Empire or an honours system.  I interpret OBEs, CBEs, Knighthoods, OMs,  the lot, as acknowledgements of achievement.  I might wish the acknowledgement was made in financial terms but, artists being victims of fashion, need all the forms of recognition they can get.  Heap them on me.  I will turn down nothing.  My reason for saying ‘no thank you’ to Harold Wilson’s offer of a CBE in 1967 was other.

One of the most influential arts movements of the 1960s was CENTRE 42 (whose history is waiting to be written) and of which I was elected Artistic Director.  Its birth lay in the passing of an extraordinary T.U.C. resolution in 1960 calling for an enquiry into the state of the arts.  The resolution was number 42 on the agenda.  In response to it a number of writers, theatre directors and others involved in the arts said to the Trade Union Movement if you are interested in the arts we will set up an arts organisation of which you can take advantage for your members.  CENTRE 42 was born in 1961with the aim of finding a popular audience for the arts, NOT an audience for popular art as was its frequently mistaken description.

In 1961 the Trades Council of Wellingborough invited us to help them mount an arts festival to encourage union recruitment.  It was a success that led to Wellingborough plus five other Trades Councils (Nottingham, Birmingham, Leicester, Bristol, and Hayes & Southall) inviting us to mount another arts festival to tour those cities.  Armed with a £10,000 grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation we opened offices in 20 Fitzroy Square, just below a young couple called Terrance and Shirley Conran, and set about putting together a festival that included a production of Stravinsky’s ‘The Soldier’s Tale’ as the main part of a double bill with a new work called ‘The Nottingham Captain’, text by me, and set to music in two forms:  Jazz by David Lee, classical by the late Wilfred Joseph; a National Youth Theatre production of Hamlet; a new play ‘Enter Solly Gold’ by Bernard Kops; and many other events including folk song concerts, poetry and jazz, readings in factory canteens, exhibitions, and the creation of a FORTYTWO JAZZ BAND for an end of festival dance.

The festivals were sufficiently successful to encourage us to think such an arts organisation could work.  We needed a base, and found an old Victorian engine shed in Chalk Farm called The Roundhouse.  I spent eighteen months persuading its new owner, Louis Mintz, to give us the remaining lease of 19 years.  We commissioned an eminent French architect, Paul Chematov, and theatre designer, Rene Allio to draw up plans and costs for converting the building, and I set about trying to raise the £650,000 – an amount that included both the cost of the conversion and the cost of running for two years without subsidy.

One day Doris Lessing, one of our Council of Management, rang to suggest I try to engage the interest of Jennie Lee, M.P. and widow of the late Aneuran Bevan who as Minister of Health under Atlee had been the architect of The National Health Service.  Jennie, Doris informed me, was depressed and at a loose end after the death of Nye.  I contacted her and invited her to attend a lecture I was giving in Wellingborough.  It was a very packed house.  Jennie was impressed.  “I’ve not heard such passion since Nye,” she told me.  She was hooked, and ‘adopted’ both Centre 42 and me.  We had a friend at court, one that secured for me two meetings with Harold Wilson.  The Prime Minister offered moral support and seconded an old colleague, George Hoskins, to become our General Administrator.

George and I worked out a plan to raise the £650,000 but we were hampered by the hesitancy of both the unions and business world to financially commit themselves to helping us.  Then followed a development that was both good and bad: Wilson appointed Jennie Lee to be the first ever Minster For The Arts.  This should have given us a friend in the inner sanctum of court.  It didn’t.  Jennie embarked on her own agenda for the arts, and saw Centre 42 as redundant rather than as a project for which she was now able to encourage the financial support she had worked for while a member on our Council of Management.  We had transmogrified into a thorn in her side.

Hoskins and I again turned to Wilson for help.  He offered us a fundraising tea party at Downing Street.  A date was set and then postponed.  Another was set and again postponed.  I suspected that Jennie was behind the postponements.  At which point there happened, within weeks of each other, two occurrences that confirmed – though didn’t prove – my suspicions: the late Lord Ted Willis, a playwright famous for creating the long running TV series ‘The Blue Lamp’, and now a government spokesman for the arts, wrote – apropos of nothing - an article for Tribune, the left-wing weekly, questioning the concept and further relevance of CENTRE 42; and I was offered a C.B.E. 

Suspecting that I was being offered the carrot after the stick, I wrote my reply to Wilson: 
Dear Sir,

Thank you for your letter informing me that the Prime Minister, has it in mind, through Her Majesty, to recommend me for a C.B.E. I understand this to be the nation’s way of honouring an artist’s contribution to his country but, though I am moved by the intention, I must - in all humility - decline to accept the form.

It seems to me that knowing the project to which I’ve devoted my time and energy, and knowing this project, despite having inspired others, has itself remained earthbound therefore the country should honour me by aiding through its other offices the one thing with which it knows me to have been so concerned.  I refer of course to Centre Fortytwo.

Both Her Majesty and the Prime Minister must not see in this refusal any slight to what I respect most sincerely is their wish to pay me tribute as a writer.

But I am confident they will understand. 

Yours sincerely