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When David Solomon picked Grantchester Meadows as his new home after arriving in the UK from Majorca during the spring of 1968, he was well aware of its rich literary heritage, stretching back to Chaucer and into Anglo-Saxon folklore. As an East Coast intellectual, the sheer Englishness of the place can’t have failed to appeal, captured forever by Rupert Brooke in his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which famously asked if the church clock stood at ‘ten to three’ and whether there was ‘honey still for tea’? But Grantchester’s allure wasn’t merely located in the past; its proximity to Cambridge was a massive bonus. For nearly a decade, the city had been a counter-cultural hub. According to one undergraduate, the ‘student scene was one of the hippest in the country’. Modern jazz and the Beat movement arrived in the late 1950s. Cannabis appeared in 1960. Membership of CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) was disproportionately high. Apart from London, the grand old university town was one of the few places that witnessed an influx of acid: a former student recalled how ‘Cambridge was a wonderful place to take LSD, as there were loads of fascinating places you could go’.
As a venerable authority on LSD and cannabis – his books were required reading – who’d rubbed shoulders with iconic jazz musicians and figures like Leary and Huxley, Solomon was guaranteed a captive audience and quickly gained guru status: students flocked to his cottage for parties, which never seemed to end. His main problem was money. His only source of income was royalties from his books, which were boosted after The Marijuana Papers came out in paperback in the US with the backing of a heavyweight publisher; Signet was an imprint of the colossal New American Library, which shifted millions of books a year – everything from Shakespeare to James Bond. The new edition bore praise from a selection of reviews. Bookweek called it ‘the basic reference work on marijuana’ and trumpeted its scholarly credentials: ‘this volume provides illuminating answers with a wealth of evidence’.
More important for building his profile, however, was getting the book out in the UK and in 1969 it was published by Panther, one of the market leaders in popular paperback fiction. Panther was launched in 1953 under the wing of Hamilton Ltd – a pulp sci-fi outfit who pumped out magazines with titles like Fantastic Stories and Strange Adventures – as a showcase for novel-length material. By the late 1950s, Panther was issuing the work of US sci-fi writers as well as local ones, and by the mid-1960s it dominated the market, releasing new work by the current crop of authors alongside reprints of classics from the so-called Golden Era of Asimov and Heinlein. Solomon’s book was part of a new series of titles – Panther Modern Society – and sat alongside a history of the relationship between pornography and literature, and two works that tackled environmental issues like over population and wasteful food production.
In a new foreword written at his desk in Grantchester, Solomon described how marijuana has been consumed throughout human history, not only for recreation but as part of folk rituals and sacred ceremonies in Africa, Asia and Latin America; dispelled some of the myths surrounding it; noted its spread from the margins of Western society to centre stage; and demanded that ‘the use of marijuana should be legalised’. To support his theses, Solomon commissioned a new piece for the UK edition. Cannabis Law Reform in Britain was by Steve Abrams, an American academic who studied under Jung and was head of the Parapsychology Department at the University of Chicago, before joining St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he studied extrasensory perception (ESP). In his essay for Solomon’s book, Abrams argued that ‘the social cost of prohibiting cannabis is becoming difficult to justify’, not only on moral grounds but also practical ones, as ‘only a considerable intensification of police powers and activity could hope to halt the spread’. He concluded that ‘cannabis smoking will have profound long-term effects on society’ leading to a ‘far more sophisticated and humane mass culture’.
In 1967, Abrams had set up the Society of Mental Awareness (SOMA) to campaign for legalisation of cannabis after a police raid on the Redlands home of Keith Richards. The cops found drugs and a naked Marianne Faithfull. Mick Jagger was sentenced to three months for possession, Keith Richards a year. SOMA ran an ad in The Times criticising the judgement, which was signed by sixty-five eminent scientists, artists, writers, thinkers and musicians. That summer SOMA marched through Fleet Street and held a rally in Hyde Park attended by 10,000 supporters. The noise generated by SOMA prompted a reaction from the government. The Wootton Report – January 1969 – was based on an exhaustive study of the available data: though it conceded that ‘in terms of physical harmfulness’ cannabis was ‘much less dangerous’ than opiates, amphetamines, barbiturates and alcohol, its ‘mental effects were much less clear’, which meant that it was ‘necessary to maintain restrictions on the availability and use of the drug’.
Solomon’s publisher, Panther, was determined to cash in on these debates about the rights and wrongs of cannabis. The enthusiastic pitch on the back of the book described it as ‘the first paperback of such scope to appear in Britain’, and it came with a recommendation from R.D. Laing, the most famous psychiatrist in the UK, a bestselling author who made frequent appearances on radio and TV and had integrated LSD into his therapeutic practice. Laing may have met Solomon on a tour of the US – during which he visited Leary at Millbrook – or through their shared involvement with SOMA (Laing was one of the signatories of The Times ad). Laing informed prospective readers that The Marijuana Papers was ‘indispensable’ because it contained ‘all the significant references on the subject up to 1969’ and praised ‘David Solomon’ for collecting ‘much more than we expect to find in one volume’.
Unfortunately, even if The Marijuana Papers sold well, it would take a while before Solomon saw the benefits. It was time to resuscitate the plan to extract THC from its host, especially as Abrams was pursuing the same goal and was currently locked in a Cambridge lab trying to pull the rabbit out of the hat with the help of his co-conspirator Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize winning biochemist who unravelled the mysteries of DNA. Based in Cambridge since 1950, Crick was a social animal. By 1962, he was hosting fancy-dress parties where the unmistakable smell of marijuana hung in the air. Within a few years, Crick was sporting shaggy sideburns, jackets with wide lapels and multi-coloured shirts. Solomon was eager to tap his brain. He invited Crick to the cottage and sweet-talked him. Would he share his findings? Crick’s response was guarded. Solomon tried the same with Abrams but got nowhere.
Then another option presented itself. Gerald Thomas – who’d settled in London with £20,000 ready to invest in the THC venture – introduced Solomon to a young postgraduate biochemist called Richard Kemp. Thomas had met Kemp at a scientific conference. Kemp told him about a forthcoming event in Cambridge. Thomas suggested that they meet up and visit his friend David Solomon. At 25, Kemp was an earnest young man who had so far avoided all contact with cannabis and LSD. Lack of availability may have been a factor. It was perfectly possible that Kemp simply couldn’t find any acid after parliament had introduced a range of penalties for unauthorised use and added it to a list of substances that could only be obtained ‘on prescription from a registered premises or under the supervision of a qualified pharmacist’. These measures were followed in August 1966 by a modification to the 1964 Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act. Though it continued to grant ‘psychiatrists’ and ‘bona-fide research workers’ the right to play around with LSD, it also gave the police greater powers to ‘take action’. These changes severely limited imports from European manufacturers, and there was no British equivalent of Owsley to fill the gap. The vast majority of the population remained untouched. During the whole of 1968, there were just seventy-two convictions for unlawful possession of LSD.
Kemp may have resisted for political reasons: he was a radical and many on the Left were wary of the hippy drugs, fearing they encouraged introversion, self-absorption and a hedonistic attitude that would blunt revolutionary potential and undermine commitment to the struggle. However, Solomon wasn’t your average stoner. And his expertise on the subject was hard to deny. Disarmed, Kemp smoked his first joint in the grounds of Solomon’s Grantchester cottage. Kemp was pleasantly surprised. Whatever his concerns, they quickly evaporated the moment he inhaled.
Richard Kemp was born on 17 June 1943 in Bedford. He was a bright kid from a working-class background with an early gift for science. Aged 11, he embarked on that great adventure in post-war social mobility when he won a scholarship to Bedford Grammar. His talent and background made him something of an outsider there, but he performed well and earned a place at St Andrews University to study inorganic chemistry in 1961. Entering higher education, Kemp took an irreversible step away from his roots and up the social scale. Despite a big increase in student numbers in the UK during the 1960s, by the end of the decade only 25 per cent were from a working-class background. When Kemp went to St Andrews, the proportion was far lower. Though university and college attendance had risen from 122,000 in 1954 to 216,000 in 1962, this amounted to just 7 per cent of those leaving school that year: Kemp had joined the elite. This transition – leaving one class behind without being fully accepted into a new one – was difficult and Kemp may have nursed resentments and unresolved feelings of both inferiority and superiority: he was often a difficult man to be around, testy and prickly, prone to sudden flashes of temper. Kemp shared something with the Angry Young Men, who entered the nation’s consciousness during his teens. They came from the provinces. They were either lower middle or working class. Their anti-heroes were alienated and dissatisfied, full of contempt for mainstream society.
Nevertheless, Kemp’s rebellious streak did not emerge until his second year at university. Up to that point, his extra-curricular activities had gone no further than drinking beer, playing squash and joining the bridge club. But in 1962, Kemp bought a motorbike. At that time – when British manufacturers were turning out machines that were more than a match for US imports like the legendary Harley Davidson – any young man astride a motorbike was seen as a potential menace to society. Marlon Brando’s brooding, surly performance in The Wild Ones –which came out when Kemp was 10 – set the template for the biker sub-culture that had sprung up by the end of the 1950s. Emulating their stateside brethren, the ‘rockers’ greased their hair, wore denim and studded leather jackets and continually clashed with the scooter-riding, smart suit and narrow tie-wearing ‘mods’, a battle for supremacy that peaked in 1964 with mass brawls at seaside towns that shocked and horrified the nation.
It’s hard to know if Kemp took sides or to what extent he identified with the ‘rockers’. He may simply have relished the freedom of the open road and the independence his bike gave him. Nevertheless, it was a clear sign that Kemp wanted to cultivate a bad-boy image and, within months, he’d managed to get himself expelled from St Andrews after entering the women’s dormitory at night, which was strictly forbidden. Such was his scientific ability that he was quickly snapped up by Liverpool University. In autumn 1963, Kemp resumed his studies. Liverpool was buzzing with the energy unleashed by the Beatles’ sudden fame. It had its own pop genre, Mersey Beat; its own brand of literature performed by the Mersey Poets; and a thriving art scene.
But just as the 60s started to swing Kemp’s college life was violently interrupted. In May 1964, he had a serious motorbike accident. It took him a year to recover. After this second hiatus in his university career he knuckled down, completed his BSc in the summer of 1966 and embarked on an MA that he finished a year later, before pursuing further studies in organic chemistry. By then, Kemp had a girlfriend. Christine Bott was a tall blonde with striking looks. Born on 26 November 1943 in leafy Surrey, her father was a boat builder. Bott attended Suffolk Grammar School, where she excelled at science, and went up to Liverpool University in 1965 to study medicine. At the time, women were heavily outnumbered on most campuses and many female students were at single-sex institutions. When Bott went to university, women accounted for around 30 per cent of undergraduates; of these, 12 per cent were studying medicine. The overall disparity between the number of male and female students was even wider when it came to her chosen subject. Throughout the 1960s only about 23 per cent of those training to be doctors were women.
Bott was from a generation whose involvement with left-wing politics would shape the development of feminism, providing valuable experience in organising protests, demonstrations and direct action. She was already a committed radical when she met Kemp – who had so far shown little interest in politics aside from a short-lived association with right-wing groups during his biker days – and she soon brought him round to her way of thinking. By the mid-1960s, the inheritors of the fractured Marxist tradition were gaining a foothold in universities, attracting a dedicated hardcore on the fringes of student life, but largely ignored by the majority. This didn’t mean that British students didn’t face the same restrictions and hardships that so enraged their European counterparts. Course content was overwhelmingly old-fashioned and lacking imagination, tied to an archaic exam system. There was intense pressure on accommodation, forcing a large proportion into the world of private landlords and barely habitable dwellings, where the rent and daily outgoings ate up most of their funds leaving them permanently broke.
However, the leadership of the student union (the NUS) was generally more concerned with their career prospects than upsetting the status quo and did the bare minimum required to fulfil their narrow range of responsibilities. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, students at the London School of Economics occupied one of the college buildings and refused to move. Suddenly, there was a groundswell of copy-cat protests: strikes and sit-ins occurred at sixteen different institutions. In Cambridge, there was a campaign directed at the hated exam system; the organisers of the demonstrations thought the whole examination process was ‘a direct expression of class warfare’ that softened students up for ‘mastication in the jaws of the ruling class’. Running through finals week, there were pamphlets, posters, graffiti and the ‘March of the Academic Cripples’, a burlesque parade ‘complete with bandaged heads, burning gowns, street theatre, and a fire-hose employed by an unfriendly porter’.
Elsewhere, moves were afoot to supplant the NUS leadership. At the February 1967 conference, the radicals split from the main body and directly challenged its authority by reconvening as the Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation. Though it struggled to bring all the revolting students under its control, on 1 July the group gathered 3,000 of them outside parliament to demand greater control over their education. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War attracted a large following, but after several rallies turned violent the anti-war movement quickly ran out of steam. Otherwise the student radicals spent most of their time endlessly squabbling over the finer points of ideology and splitting into ever tinier groups: a meeting of the Cambridge Revolutionary Socialist Student Federation to discuss their future plans ended with one irate member expressing his frustration that ‘we’ve been talking for three hours now, and we haven’t made a single decision about what to do next year’!
The leftward lurch of the NUS was halted in 1968 when the radical candidates failed to win any seats on the national committee. An article in The Guardian regretted the fact that most British students ‘tend to be conservative’. Of the students who took part in a 1969 survey at Leeds University, 86 per cent found politics boring. As a consequence, the disturbances in the UK were mild in comparison to elsewhere. But for Kemp and Bott, the upheavals of 1968 made an indelible imprint on their world view and deepened their conviction that revolution was the only answer to the world’s problems.
Once Kemp had overcome his aversion to cannabis and decided it had a part to play in bringing about social change, Solomon suggested he might like to take a crack at solving the THC puzzle. Kemp was intrigued and started work in a crude lab Solomon had furnished with Gerald Thomas’ money. Though Kemp made absolutely no progress, Solomon was undeterred. As far as he was concerned, the next step for the young chemist was LSD. Kemp wasn’t so sure. Cannabis had proved harmless enough, but LSD? What if it wrecked his mind and ruined his scientific career?
It was an encounter with Francis Crick that tipped the scales. According to a friend of Kemp’s, Crick had informed the young chemist that ‘some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas’. More startling was the claim that Crick confided to Kemp that he’d ‘perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD’. If this is true, then it’s a remarkable revelation, given the world-shifting implications of Crick’s work on the structure of DNA. Though Crick was always open about his dalliance with LSD, it is highly unlikely it had anything to do with that miraculous breakthrough. There was almost no LSD in the country when Crick perceived the truth on 17 March 1953 and immediately wrote to his 12-year-old son to share the news that he’d ‘found the basic copying mechanism by which life comes from life’. According to his biographer, Crick took LSD in 1967 and got it from Henry Barclay Todd – who would later become a key member of the Microdot Gang. Todd was in his mid-20s, bumming round Cambridge and doing a bit of dealing on the side. However, there is a problem with this version as well. According to police records, Todd spent the period from November 1966 to February 1968 in jail after being convicted of theft by false pretences (fraud).
If so, Todd must have supplied Crick with the LSD in 1968 not 1967, which raises the possibility that the acid belonged to Solomon: the LSD Todd gave to Crick came from Sandoz, the Swiss firm that Solomon had used for years, and Todd was spending a lot of time at the Grantchester cottage because he had developed a serious crush on Solomon’s eldest daughter. Whatever the truth, Crick appreciated the acid but decided not to make a habit of it. Even so, Kemp may well have heard Crick being positive about LSD or even spoke to him directly. Soon after, Kemp agreed to make some for Solomon: ‘if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using it’.
Early in 1969, Solomon was sent some ergotamine tartrate – the raw material of LSD – by Paul Arnaboldi, the Majorcan connection, in a hollowed-out newspaper delivered to an American Express office in the Haymarket. Solomon gave it to Kemp to turn into acid. Kemp retired to his parents’ basement and only managed to squeeze out a poor-quality batch of dark syrupy LSD. Solomon gave him a few hundred quid and some marijuana as payment and Gerald Thomas smuggled the inferior product into Canada. Kemp sampled his own wares and was not particularly impressed. However, he was intrigued by the problems posed, the obstacles encountered and the difficulties presented by the process of creating LSD. It was a genuine challenge: a test of his knowledge, skill, judgement and nerve. He continued his experiments over the course of the summer. Late one night he smashed a beaker of concentrated LSD and got a huge dose. This time he was really turned on. He had his LSD awakening. He saw that it was the key to transforming society: ‘the answer is to change people’s mindsets using acid’. He dropped out and moved to Grantchester Meadows, a decision made easier by the fact that Christine Bott also embraced LSD. She said that ‘people would be happier’ if they were ‘given the chance to use acid’ and ‘the world would become a better place’.
After Ronald Stark returned to Paris after his summit meeting in Arizona with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, he ran into an American who was at Cambridge and knew Solomon. Stark liked what he heard. Ever the hustler, he was hoping to piggyback on SOMA’s experiments with THC. Perhaps he could kill two birds with one stone. Stark hopped over to London and tracked down Solomon. The inevitable invitation to Grantchester followed and Stark was introduced to Kemp. The Microdot Gang was born.
They had few concerns about manufacturing millions of tabs of LSD for public consumption. During a good trip you were at one with the cosmic chain of being connecting all living matter, in harmony with the universe. They ignored the fact that a bad trip left you totally alienated from that chain of being, isolated in a hostile universe with the cosmos aligned against you. The balance between the two extremes was delicate. Environment and emotional state were crucial. The slightest adjustment of ambience could flip a trip into a nightmare: Leary observed that ‘consciousness becomes extremely vulnerable … swung by the slightest pressure. A frown. A gesture. A word.’ There was little middle ground.
Kemp was a recent convert and couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see the negatives. Solomon had travelled too far down the LSD road to turn back. He had little choice but to believe his own rhetoric. Besides, he wanted to change the world and there were bound to be casualties. He could comfort himself with the thought that acid did far less damage than cigarettes or alcohol, not to mention drugs like heroin. Stark didn’t care: good or bad made no difference, anything that caused disruption was fine. Whether it was naked people running down the street screaming or thousands too blissed out to go to work, the more the merrier; if things got messy, so be it. A revolution had little hope of success unless society was shaken to its foundations, and Stark wanted their LSD to do a thorough demolition job.
At the beginning of 1970, Stark asked Kemp to join him in Paris and make acid for the Brotherhood to sell. To formalise their arrangement, the three of them gathered at the exclusive Oxford and Cambridge Club in central London, which Stark had wormed his way into with the help of his bogus degree from Harvard. Also present was an associate of Stark and Paul Arnaboldi, who claimed a seat at the table on the basis that he’d supplied the ingredients for Kemp’s initial LSD experiments. Aside from his living expenses and some pocket money, Kemp’s fee would be finalised once he’d completed the job. Otherwise, the main bone of contention was Solomon’s slice of the action. Having talent-spotted Kemp and paid for his first efforts at making LSD, Solomon wanted a share of whatever his protégé manufactured for Stark. He also wanted a guarantee that Kemp would be allowed to return to the UK after fulfilling his contract. It took another meeting – a bad-tempered evening at a Chinese restaurant – to settle the matter. Instead of simply being able to purchase the finished product at a reduced price, Stark agreed to let Solomon have one large consignment free of charge. With the deal done, only one question remained; would Kemp be able to overcome the many difficulties associated with producing premium-quality LSD? Until he did, the future of the Microdot Gang would hang in the balance.