Alan Clayson writes: After Richard Neville and his Oz magazine colleagues surrendered edition 28 to teenagers, I submitted three articles – all of which were published. During May 1970, when “my” Oz was on sale, I gave it some showbiz at college, though knew there would be hell to pay if my parents heard about it. For the same reason, I got rid of my copy like a spy who’d memorised and eaten a top-secret document.
When the scandal unfolded in the papers at the time of the following year’s court case, I scanned them in a newsagent’s with mingled excitement and anxiety for my name, but found nothing until the following Sunday, when an excerpt from one of my pieces filled half a paragraph in the Observer. When the “guilty” verdicts had been announced and Richard and his co-defendants issued with regulation convict garb and all-off haircuts, I joined and then, with my claim of complicity in the “Schoolkids Oz” half-believed, led a protest march of about 12 people through Worcester’s main shopping thoroughfares – and up and down department store escalators until cautioned by a constable. I wrote to Richard in Wandsworth prison, and was thrilled when he replied, counselling me to “stay tuned in and react according to the situation”.
Giles Oakley writes: I first saw Richard Neville as a speaker at a National Union of Students journalism conference in the spring of 1967, soon after the launch of Oz magazine, and I was instantly captivated. There was something very sensuous and seductive about him, I suspect for both men and women. He was a delightfully liberating spirit, so relaxed, so funny and so irreverent. I loved Oz above all other underground publications, sensing the deeper seriousness of purpose that Richard embodied.
