Bethnal Green tenements in 1973

(This is the first of four blogs about the Club of Rome, which along with Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, is an important think tank in the Round Table network of world elites. Bill Clinton’s mentor Carroll Quigley describes their history and function in his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope.)

I arrived in London in June 1973, a week after graduating from medical school. My first order of business was finding somewhere cheap to stay for two months. I was awaiting  my future husband’s release from HMP Brixton and was forbidden to work on a visitor’s visa. He was in Brixton on a charge of demolishing a turning vehicle that ran into him as he was crossing the street. He didn’t exactly dismantle it. He just tore off one of the doors and the front bumper. Because he was unable to pay for the repairs, the insurance company had him arrested.

I started out at a student hostel which cost 2 ½ pounds ($6.25) a week. From there, I moved to Tent City in East Acton, which charged us one pound weekly  ($2.50) to sleep in sleeping bags in enormous circus tents. It was there I learned about the tenement building in Bethnal Green that Christian Action was rehabilitating. It was set up as a hostel, only they paid us to stay there, provided we spent a few hours a day scraping paint off the walls.

There were about twenty of us, all but two of us international students touring Britain for the summer holidays. In return for scraping paint, we got free room and board and 2 1/2 pounds a week. We started work at 10:00, had a fifteen minute tea break at 11:30, a half hour lunch break at 12:30, and a second tea break at 2:00. We knocked off for the day at 3:30. At 5:30 they gave us dinner. We didn’t work weekends, but they gave us breakfast, lunch and dinner Saturday and Sunday, as well,

What Were They Paying Us For?

Needless to say, not a whole lot of paint got removed from the walls. Several of us suspected we had been lured there for ulterior motives. Providing two or three of us with paint stripping chemicals and sanders would have been far more efficient and cheaper. Yet despite Christian Action designation as a church sponsored group, there was no attempt to indoctrinate us – about religion at least. In fact there was no mention whatsoever of Christianity.

It was a great adventure in communal living. I had one day off from scraping to serve on kitchen duty. In addition to setting out bread rolls and muesli for breakfast, I had to do all the washing-up, as well as the shopping and cooking for both a meat and vegetarian option for lunch and dinner.

After a month I was relieved of kitchen duty and given a promotion and raise. I now had the job of going to the Christian Action office in downtown London to collect the week’s payroll. In return for this additional responsibility, I was paid five pounds ($12.50) a week.

Taking Us Downtown to See Limits to Growth

I had been doing this for two weeks when all of us got a day off, so the project manager could take us to the Christian Action office on the bus. He wanted us to see a very important film called Limits to Growth, produced by the Club of Rome. It was based on their 1972 book by the same name. Officially the film wasn’t released until 1974. However I and the other volunteers working in the Bethnal Green tenement got to see a preview in August 1973.

I have yet to find any evidence of a link between Christian Action and the Club of Rome or any of the other usual culprits (i.e the CIA linked “democracy” manipulating foundations involved in indoctrinating foreign youth). It’s possible there are links of this nature that are yet to be exposed. It’s equally possible someone in the Christian Action leadership had read the book or seen the film and thought these were ideas young people should be exposed to.

According to www.wordcat.org (a catalog linking the world’s libraries), the film Limits to Growth “examines pros and cons of continued worldwide economic growth as compared to a leveling off of growth in population, capital investments, and material goods to the point of a steady economy.” I don’t recall any mention of population control. All I remember was a warning that we needed to reduce consumption because of pollution and limited resources. There was a specific proposal for families to share washing machines and household appliances, instead of each household buying their own.

Betty Friedan: an Original Member of the Club of Rome

At the time this seemed like a good idea. It still does. In 1978, I would read a similar viewpoint in feminist Betty Friedan’s 1963 Feminist Mystique. In her landmark book, Friedan rails against corporations and advertising firms for brainwashing women to believe they were inadequate unless they each had their own washing machine, dryer and humongous fridge-freezer. It’s only recently that I learned that Friedan was an original member of the Club of Rome.

In 1973 I had no idea the Club of Rome was a think tank made up of global elites seeking to influence government policies. Would knowing this have made any difference? I doubt it. Learning about the Trilateral Commission a few months earlier merely confirmed what I already believed: that you to be worth at least a million dollars to have any influence in America’s so-called democracy.

Ironically it was the French students, all Marxists and fresh from the 1968 French general strike, that I met in Bethnal Green who convinced me otherwise. They were the ones who convinced me that the US, like all industrialized countries, had an organized left that influenced government through grassroots organizing and direct action. And inspired me to seek it out when I returned to the US eighteen months later.