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Where to start and how to end? Like known cosmic reality itself, Arthur Moye wasn’t and isn’t a linear medium. Being a legend in his own time, he was widely regarded as much larger than life. Now he seems far bigger than human animal death. So probably  best to simply plunge in at the shallow end.
   
   George Melly once took  the kind of textual snap-shot that authoritatively capsulated our Main Man. “Physically, Arthur Moyse looks avuncular, but a bit of a card. He could have been a music-hall comic, his very blue eyes have that wary twinkle that goes with summing up a tough Monday night first-house. His laugh, too, isn’t quite a response to humour. It’s more like a signal, an invitation to share his sense of sustained outrage at the way the world runs.” (1)
  
  I first came across Arthur’s illustrative and creative  art work in the late fifties. Being then a  naïve teenager from the provinces getting an exciting uncritical taste of city bohemia. I bought a copy of Freedom anarchist paper at Hyde Park Speakers Corner when Arthur was busy doing art exhibition reviews for them and contributing cartoons. He was painting mainly water-colours at that time and, in retrospect, his influences seemed many, varied and diverse. From Surrealism to seaside postcard cartoon imagery. When offset printing (in the mid-sixties) began to be used by the small press (progressing from hand-letterpress and mimeograph production) he altered his drawing method to include more lines and dots ( and less solid density). This was a practical response to the smaller offset printing machines, with only a few rollers and consequent difficulty with large solid area reproduction. At this time a very recognisable AM style developed.
    
   Mister Moyse  was conceived in Ireland and entered Lambeth in 1914. His navy father died young and Arthur was reared by a working mother and Irish grandmother in Shepherds Bush. Expelled at 14 as unmanageable, from the school he later became a governor of, his real education began at Hyde Park’s Sunday Speakers Corner. The articulate and entertaining socialist orator Tony Turner being the main attraction.
   
   Arthur was always hands on.  Forever the extrovert centre of  every attention, Arthur suffered severe inner-panic whenever within sensory contact range of Authority Control (be it police, clerk or night-club bouncer). Despite this he was never absent when it all went down. From throwing  bricks in Cable Street to walking past his transport colleagues, in the company of early Gay Pride marchers. Arthur was personally hard-core heterosexual but always ethical consistent and remarkably courageous. When Breakthru magazine was banned from the celebrated Betterbooks  Charing Cross Road bookshop (then staffed by underground luminaries Miles, Cobbing and Harwood), Arthur held a one-man protest outside. Editor Ken Geering had unfairly attacked Samuel Beckett  but such censorship was always to be resisted. Mister Moyse managed  to  regularly  upset  most of the trailblazing celebrated cultural and  political elite.
    
   In WW2 days he attempted to stop some maltreatment of local prostitutes, during the allied liberation of France. Generally he’d enjoyed a good war. Fucking the colonel’s wife; pissing and bathing in Buckingham Palace kitchen sinks.  Later he’d emptied a bottle of piss in Red Square to show his deep contempt for oppressive Warsaw Pact regimes. Tooling himself up for the infamous Destruction in Art get-together — ready to inflict mayhem on the assembled middle-class poseurs  and cultural vultures, should any living animal be misused or abused. As a bus conductor he was often rolling on the ground with aggressive late-night drunks.
   
   My favourite Moyse anecdote is his successful placement of anarchist literature in a Soho porno-shop. Inevitably the friendly libertarian manager was incarcerated and replaced by a disinterested heavy-duty minder. “I’ll be back with the boys”, threatened Arthur. Apprehensively returning to the shop later, with a brick in his pocket and without any kind of backup. Luckily the now worried tough paid-up in full and even managed a donation to the cause.
   
   In the late fifties he regularly held guru court to a colourful following of bohemian eccentrics, malcontents, transvestites, drug dealers, gangsters and cerebral dropouts of many kinds. He dropped his knickers for Yoko Ono’s bum film. In 1964, he had started “to seek out from the walls of the places of suppression, the confessionals of the public lavatories and the locked drawers the rhyme and the prose that the authorities of the Church, State and Public Opinion always seek and succeed in suppressing.” (2)     Review mailings of his July 1965 book were intercepted in the mail and a series of police raids, confiscations and years of harassment followed.   As poet Jim Burns put it — “I live in a strange world, / the Blackburn police at every corner, / if they can’t get me one way, / they’re out to get me in another.”  (3)
   
   Mister Moyse’s textual collage The Golden Convolvulus eventually had me, as  its publisher, in the dock. Ray Gosling penned his court performance. “A large, round, bald pated, jolly—he’s a bus conductor on London transport route 73—fast talking, much the Londoner. This was the first time he’d spoke in public. Yes, he was an artist, and a writer, and a labouring man. It was him that had done the drawing on the covers. Him that had written the introduction. He was talking so fast  the Assistant Recorder  kept stopping him for the shorthand girl was falling behind. Arthur Moyse went on about how his mother had scrubbed and cleaned and done out for the rich. He harped on his working class background. He was no long haired beatnik; no juvenile. He was like the jurymen.” (4)
  
   By the seventies, Arthur was one of my insider deep-throats; revealing the secret foibles and hidden history of many prominent London anarchists. Such information was used by me in the iconoclastic prankster Anarchism Lancastrium. Mike Waite quoted John Sutherland that “..for the youth-radical press of the middle and late 1970s, sexual offensiveness was not any more a legitimate weapon. Indeed, the new opinion formers like Time Out, the Leveller, or City Limits took a severely puritanical line against ‘sexist pornography’..” (5)  and concluded that “In this context,  AL’s failure or refusal to recognise what had changed, and its continued  use of exuberant and self-consciously  provocative  statements,  ‘which  would  never  have  stood  up  to  feminist critique’, was bound to lead to serious trouble.” (6)  The retrograde prudery of some 70’s authoritarian feminist  tendency was a Monty Python PC that only amused Arthur Moyse. Individualist libertarians rarely tolerate ‘opinion formers’ of any kind. They are generally free spirits who think for themselves and make up their own minds. Mister Moyse was very much his own man.
   
   My most cherished AM memories include his whiskey lubricated fatherly lectures. Repeatedly warning me of hidden agendas in the mainstream Peace Movement. Patiently counselling me not to be conned by Vatican City’s Irish chapter. Slowly coming out of a deep (skull fractured) coma to see his splendid dog Patch; smuggled into Intensive Care in a voluminous overcoat.  His seemingly studious and successfully executed plans, during early Blackburn visits, to eat at my mothers in order to avoid our ‘Northern potato eaters diet.’ “Get a fucking meat pie inside you, Dave.”  Randomly tuning into an eighties late night TV discussion on WW2. There was Mister Moyse, in full pro-war flight. As the night wore on and the booze was camel drunk, he answered every question with a personal mantra chant. “Boum! Boum!”
   
  Now this old mentor is physically gone and I’m deeply hurting.

Notes:

1    George Melly. ‘The Art of Paradox’. Observer. December 18th, 1977.
2    Arthur Moyse, Intro. to The Golden Convolvulus. Screeches Publications,   1965. 
3    Jim Burns.  Poetmeat 11, Summer 1966.
4    Ray Gosling. ‘The Golden Convolvulus Trial’. New Society, December 30th, 1965.
5    John Sutherland. Offensive Literature. Junction Books, 1982.
6    Mike Waite. ‘Remembering Anarchism Lancastrium: Notes on the cult seventies prankster 1974 —1981. Anarchist Studies, Spring 2002.