Dear Foxy,

I am 94 and was a professor but not an Oxford professor. I met my wife at Cambridge but was not a Cambridge professor either. Just taught in the USA.

david f,

That is excellent.

Are you from the Arts?

Dear David F.,

Sorry I got mixed up. I'd forgotten that you'd
told us all this. Does your wife still write?
You used to give us glimpses of her work at times.
I really enjoyed it. As I enjoy reading your posts
on this forum.

Hi david f,

Hopefully you can post a little more on the forum. Your posts make for a refreshing change from some of the dribble posted by us regular pretend know-it-all's, me included. Anyway its a good forum, a bit like the Sydney Domain on a Sunday afternoon.

John Webster (December 1913 – 15 December 2008), aka Mo(u)hammed Jon Webster, or more simply just "WEBSTER", was a soap box orator and public speaker who principally plied his trade at Speakers' Corner near Marble Arch at Hyde Park, London and beneath the Moreton Bay Fig trees of The Domain, Sydney from the early 1950s till the late 1980s. He also made sorties into the then wilds of Arabia, Tasmania, Melbourne's Yarra Bank and various other outposts of the erstwhile British Empire. Webster, who almost exclusively referred to himself in the third person, cultivated a provocative oratorical style of delivering a wide-reaching and eclectic philosophy in a hybrid carny barking cockney/Australian accent. He was the most prominent and listened-to of all long term speakers at the Sydney Domain. Journalist John Edwards wrote in 1971 "The only (modern) force is the inimitable (sic) Webster who, lately returned from England, is responsible for most of the popularity of the (Sydney) Domain." Nene King observed of a day spent at the Sydney Domain "Webster (no first name, no mister) commanded the largest audience as he waved a verbal flag for the British Empire - 'We Englishmen are God's gift to the whole world.'"

We young rabble rouser's were seen as the Communist element hell bent on destroying the British Empire of 1970! We seen Webster as a latter day Hitler, or at the very least an Oswald Mosley with his British accent. The verbal exchanges from atop his ladder with a heckler could be legendary, a somewhat fiery exchange, with the heckler usually coming off second best. Heaven help any other would-be orator who got there early and took Webster's "spot". such was in for a verbal shellacking of no end.

Hi Paul,

What an interesting life you're lead.

Why not start a discussion of those times?

It would be great to re-live some of those for
the rest of us here on this forum.

You'd get many joining in, I'm sure.
And the rest of us would drool just reading.

Foxy,

Isn't Paul1405 giving an account of John Webster's life, not his own?

Are there any reactionaries left in the world? Definitely no more Fouriers or Marxes and I think people like Webster would have been in the last bunch.