SHEEP
IN THE ROAD TWELVE
IN OR OUT ... THE SUITS WILL STILL BE TRYING TO EAT US ALIVE
EU JUNERENDUM
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Artwork: Jack Hurley https://loudribs.wordpress.com
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE
The
CONTENTS ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Opening 03 Edit & Design: Alan Rutherford
We Already Own It
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DRUM 09
Published online by www.handoverfistpress.com
Tsotsi Zuma
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No Ideas ...
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Cover: re-worked comic. Photographs, words and artwork sourced from ‘found in the scrapbook of life’, no intentional copyright infringement intended, credited whenever possible, so, for treading on any toes ... apologies all round!
Futura 25 Letter to Socialist Worker
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Letters
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There is no deadline for submitting articles to be included in the next issue, it will appear whenever, or in your dreams! Articles and all correspondence to: alanrutherford1@mac.com
mid-June 2016
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OPENING Blah-blahblah-blahblah––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Hello,
Welcome to magazine number 12. A magazine produced freely to be read freely. All articles and artwork supplied, or found in newspapers lining the bottom of the canary cage, were gratefully received and developed with love, enthusiasm and sympathy here at Hand Over Fist Press. Nobody got paid. Perhaps that is the problem? Anyway, ‘Sheep in the Road’ will now appear sporadically and occasionally rather than monthly.
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a luta continua! Artwork: William Morris
mid-June 2016
NHS The collective principle asserts that no society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.
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Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune. the cost of which should be shared by the community. Nye Bevan
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WE ALREADY OWN IT I recently applied for a job at ‘We Own It’, my position plainly made in my application letter … ‘I would be very interested in being involved in ‘We Own It’, as a socialist I agree with the aims of highlighting and possibly stopping this short-term fix for governments with private enterprise agendas who are in financial trouble – finding the continued selling off of public services to the hyenas of the entrepreneurial cesspit an abhorrence!
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Please consider me for the ‘communications assistant’ position …’ Public authorities can offer a very good quality service but, currently that is at a higher rate than private companies. The reason for this is that public authorities pay workers the going rate for the job, have to pay overtime rates and properly abide with employment regulations … and then, as part of the bureaucratic bodge-nonsense that exists in the public sector, some officer’s wages are inflated to be comparative with private sector high-flyers ...
mid-June 2016
Then, the only option that blinkered, narrow-minded public sector grandees and local authority decision-makers can see in times of budget cuts is tendering out, or selling off, services to cheap private providers. Those private services are impersonal, profit driven, fat cats in the driving seat, using workers who are low paid, intimidated, often forced to be complicit in rule-bending for the sake of keeping their job, and generally being denied trade union representation.
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We Own It should be arguing for public authorities to clip the wings of their high flyers and to honestly explain to the public the true costs of services, which in many cases we already own, before considering anything else. Whatever a service actually costs – paying a proper living wage, with job security, safety considered, reasonable hours – tell us, the public, we can take it … Like all social/community costs, if they need to be paid and are demonstrably fair and open, we have to pay them! The truth is, up until the second world war, for most of us, the UK’s history was one of serfdom, wage slave, slums, long hours, children workers, dangerous conditions, misery and wasted lives … and all that fucking upstairs downstairs nonsense. After the war a progressive Labour Party introduced the Welfare State, nationalised things like the mines, the railways, waterworks, gas and electricity suppliers … all brought into public ownership … We Owned It! Since then successive governments, criminally accelerated by Thatcher’s anti-working class zeal, have, at the bequest of pillagers, privateers and pirates, chipped away at that magnificent egalitarian statement of ‘for the good of all’, allowing and encouraging dodgy characters to sow seeds of
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discontent, dissatisfaction and greed. Their aim to return to the good old days of cut-throat competition, small boys up chimneys, where the main beneficiary of any service to the community is the owner/shareholder/ slug … and, most definitely not the user, recipient or the worker … is on the statute books, it is entrenched as government policy ... unless we can change it! ‘… as a socialist I agree with the aims of highlighting and possibly stopping this short-term fix for governments with private enterprise agendas who are in financial trouble – finding the continued selling off of public services to the hyenas of the entrepreneurial cesspit an abhorrence!’
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THE SUITS ARE WAITING TO EAT US ALIVE!
mid-June 2016
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DRUM A photo-magazine that had editions all over the African continent, East, West and South – and whilst perhaps the original management intention of all Drum publications may have been to exploit the vast black African reading/viewing market, it soon became apparent that the staff working on these publications had other ideas – it is the South African Drum that is especially talked about here.
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The photographers of the South African Drum have become famous for their many images of South Africa during the apartheid era, some were published in Drum, some in the world press and others in books published abroad to great critical aclaim. They often showed up white South African society as offensively racist and inhuman by capturing black peoples lives on film ... their images were a catalyst to the fight for a more democratic country. The staff, editors, journalists and photographers, at Drum ran the risk of imprisonment and worse, their commitment deserves remembering.
Man and Child, Sharpeville, 1959 Photograph: Peter Magubane mid-June 2016
Writing about his involvement on Drum in Creative Camera, 1984, Kerry Swift wrote:
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It is probably fair to say that the lack of recognition for the later Drum reflects its steady slide to mediocrity after the tumultuous years of the 1950s and early 1960s when the forces of nationalism in South Africa were flexing their muscles and testing their ground. The quality of picture magazines depends heavily on the social milieu they reflect at given times. Just as Picture Post and Signal found ample subject during the 1939-45 conflict, so Drum’s ‘golden years’ coincided with the steady entrenchment of apartheid in South Africa and the black response to it. It would be a deaf, dumb and blind editor who could not capture at least some highlights of that primordial conflict in a black magazine. Anthony Sampson and Tom Hopkinson produced some fine journalism in the early Drum, being men of quite exceptional talent. There appears to be a seminal flow to black response in South Africa. Where one generation of black resisters encountered police bullets at Sharpeville in 1960, a second generation felt the wrath of the State after a banzai charge into the cannon’s mouth during the nationwide riots sparked off in Soweto in June 1976. The first tide of black protest in the 1950s and the early 1960s provided Drum journalists with fertile ground for photo-reportage which they exploited with skill and considerable flair. But when this tide abated, Drum seemed to slip into a state of creative torpor which accurately reflected the socio-political fortunes of its readers.
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Drum’s fortunes might have continued to slide had not a second generation of black South Africans taken to the streets after June 1976. With this second tide of resistance Drum took on new significance and the ground was laid for a renaissance in Drum-style journalism. The incumbent editor at the time was Tony Sutton, a former Daily Express man whom Drum owner Jim Bailey had recruited in London to service his east and west African magazines before bringing him south. When Sutton took over Drum in early 1976, circulation hovered below 50,000 and Drum was about to go monthly instead of its usual fortnightly frequency. In short, the magazine was not exactly burning up the tracks. I first met Tony Sutton when I was drafted in to edit Drum’s sister magazine with the unlikely title of True Love. Volatile by nature, brash and pugnacious, Sutton was not a great respecter of management, nor proprietorial interference. But he had a passionate love for journalism in general and Drum in particular and possessed an uncanny gift for design, a gift he put to good use, visually transforming Drum and stretching its staff and inadequate facilities to their limits.
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When I crossed over to Drum as news editor, the staff consisted of Sutton as executive editor, Stan Motjuwadi as editor, Chester Maharaja as staff photographer and Sipho Jacobs, a clerk seconded from picture filing to become crime reporter. Occasional input from Jacky Heyns in Cape Town, the late G R Naidoo in Durban and a motley crew of freelancers completed the editorial picture. Slowly we began to develop a robust and aggressive style which, backed by Bailey’s considerable input, began to show circulation results. Our market was once again on the boil and we went out to capture it as best we could.
mid-June 2016
Much had changed since the early days of Drum. For one thing, dictates of modern publishing forced up advertising content beyond the 60% mark, greatly inhibiting our editorial canvas and leading to running battles with management. Relationships within the organisation were often strained and when Sutton was pushed through a glass window by the advertising manager during one particularly heated exchange in the passage we all took it as a minor victory – at least we were getting through to them! But the restriction of editorial pages meant that very few stories could run for more than three pages.
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Publishing conditions had also changed substantially. A vast amount of legislation inhibiting the Press had found its way into the statute books. Blindfold in a legislative minefield is an accurate description of publishing conditions and Drum, not having the muscle of the corporate publishing giants behind it, was particularly vulnerable. The edition of Drum published after the outbreak of the June 1976 riots, for example, was banned, possession of the magazine being an offence. exerpt from Creative Camera, nos. 235/236 July/August 1984
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Tony Sutton, editor of South Africa’s Drum magazine during the 1976 schoolkids’rebellion, tells how Drum’s coverage of one of the most momentous events in South Africa’s history earned it a 25-year ban: Glancing through the pages of Drum magazine 40 years after the events of June 16, 1976, I’m surprised by how little space we devoted to the riots in the issue that followed the initial violence. Then I remember that the magazine had just switched from fortnightly to monthly publishing, and we were trapped by brutal print deadlines – six weeks from delivery of pages to the printer to printed magazines – that were geared for timeless features rather than fast-breaking news. So that month’s coverage of one of the most momentous events in South Africa’s history was limited to just four hasty pages, with a front page teaser – “THE RIOTS: Why They Happened” – pasted across the top-right corner of a cover image of an unnamed local beauty.
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Inside that July ’76 issue are reports by co-editor Stan Motjuwadi and chief reporter Joe Thloloe, accompanied by photographs by Mike Mzileni, who was soon to be detained without charge as part of a state crackdown on journalists. Another un-bylined piece, also written by Motjuwadi, affirms that, “For 25 years Drum has been saying that if South Africa were to have a revolution of social conscience and recognise the brotherhood of Man under the fatherhood of God, there could be no violence and no threat from foreign powers. For our variety of races and colours is perhaps our greatest asset.”
mid-June 2016
That issue was ignored by the government, which had hammered much of the black media in the days after the riots. So we – and our lawyers – were extra careful how we handled the following issue. Our vigilance was in vain. The state reaction stunned us all: the August 1976, issue of Drum was considered so inflammatory that the government didn’t just follow its usual practice of simply banning the issue from sale, but they decreed that possession of it was a criminal offence – an action usually reserved for the most extreme political journals (that ban remained in place for almost 25 years, until Mandela’s release in February, 1990).
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Yes, Drum’s rhetoric was angry, but it was reasoned, carefully-articulated, anger, not a wild scream for revenge or bloody insurrection. Motjuwadi had written, “Every adult South African, black and white should hang their heads in shame. The whole blood-curdling affair of Hector Peterson, only 13, riddled with bullets, stinks to high heaven. Every white South African finger drips with the blood of Hector for ramming Afrikaans down his throat.” That paragraph was cited by the censors as one of a plethora of nitpicking reasons for the banning, as was a photograph of a dead body, shattered rib-caged exposed, which was declared “offensive to public morals.” So it was confirmed: under apartheid, mowing down schoolkids was okay, but publishing photographs of their corpses was a sin! Ironically, the banning order made no mention of another quote in the magazine, from a speech by the Afrikaner Chief Justice Rump at a graduation of white students 56 days before the first shot had been fired in Soweto on June 16, “… social equality will have to be accepted and
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE
mechanisms for self-expression will have to be created. If there are whites who don’t like this, they had better go and find what they want elsewhere. In the long run, South Africa has a great future for all of us provided whites are willing to educate, qualify and recognise the non-whites … so that they may walk side by side into the dawn that has broken over Africa, a dawn which in South Africa will not turn again to darkness.” The vicious state reaction had an immediate, chilling, impact. Freelance photographer Alf Kumalo had handed me a stunning, but politicallyprovocative, photograph that no other publication had dared print as the townships blazed during the fragile days after June 16. I had already placed this image – showing the bodies of two dead Africans lying in front of a ‘hippo,’ an armoured combat vehicle extensively used by the security forces in black townships – as a double-page spread in the early pages of the September issue.
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After the banning, I killed the feature, but held on to the photo for several months, before splashing it across two pages to open Drum’s January, 1977 photographic round-up of the year, under the heading, Year of The Hippo. Then we held our breath, hoping it would slide past the government’s unpredictably censorious gaze. Fortunately, it did … from ColdType, June 2016 Read more, see more photographs … some of this article is an edited The South African state’s reaction to the next, August, issue amazed us all: it was judged to be so inflammatory that the government didn’t just follow its usual practice and ban the issue from sale, but made possession of it a criminal offence.
mid-June 2016
Read more, see more photographs ‌ some of this article is an edited excerpt from an essay in the catalogue for a photographic exhibition, Drum 1976-1980: An Exhibition From the Pages of Drum Magazine, held at Rhodes University in 2006 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Soweto riots of 1976.
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A pdf of the booklet may be downloaded from: http://coldtype. net/Assets.06/Essays.06/0606. DrumBook.pdf Tony Sutton is editor of ColdType. He was editor of the South African magazine Drum from 1976 to 1981.
From Drum, January 1977 Photograph: Alf Kumalo
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE
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mid-June 2016
Of cabbages and kings
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And whether pigs have wings SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE
TSOTSI ZUMA The employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct. Niccolò Machiavelli Sadly, some uncharitably even say inevitably, the ANC, that bright beacon of hope for a better South Africa, have failed the electorate by allowing their president to build up a nest of cronies around him ... but ultimately now for closing ranks to deviously protect president Zuma against the charges of corruption and fraud.
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford ... with a nod to Lewis Carroll
Falling into every racist’s dream Zuma, by his actions to ride roughshod over any legislative attempt to contain his excesses, shows that he does not give a damn – his behaviour would just seem to vindicate every racists’ gloating ‘they are not ready to govern’! All of Mandela’s sainted charm cannot undo this! To survive, if it can, the ANC must come clean, reorganise ... amandla ngawethu (power to the people!) The truth here is, power corrupts ... anyone given unchallenged power is likely to entertain ideas of grandiose pompous idolatory importance ...
ZUMA must go!
mid-June 2016
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D OUN HE R IN T
G E P E R A U Q AS
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
mid-June 2016
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Spinoza and Hume met up in the vestibule of St Verity the Cheesemaker’s Blouse, a cuddly priest shouted, ‘Owze it hanging ... you cheeky monkey?’ – forced to check each others garb by the remark, they fell out big time and both were arrested by the Osophy Police for flashing their egos.
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE
There are no ideas in Bristol only IDEALS The word ‘idea’ can have a variety of meanings. It can refer to any content of the mind, or the thought or mental representation of a particular thing, or a plan or intention to do something, or the characterisation of something in general terms, that is, a concept or category. For Plato, reality consisted of immaterial universals that he called forms or ideas. These were external to the mind, whereas for idealist philosophers, there is no external reality separate from the ideas that occur within the mind. Rationalists hold that we are born with certain innate ideas from which all knowledge can be deduced, whereas empiricists reject innate ideas, prefering that the mind only acquires ideas through experience of the external world. Instrumentalists hold that ideas are no more than tools for dealing with practical problems. from Big Ideas In Brief: Ian Crofton
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
‘A cabbage is truthful or not truthful (or both at once). Therefore by infallible demonstration a cabbage is a liar. For otherwise it will be both at once, which we know it cannot be, or else it must be truthful, which we know it is not. QED’ F. H. Bradley disappearing up his own arsehole, taken from volume 2 of Collected Works of F. H. Bradley, published by Thoemmes Press, Bristol 1999. THERE ARE NO IDEAS IN BRISTOL BECAUSE OLD BRISTOLIANS ADD AN ‘L’ TO SOME WORDS
mid-June 2016
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Paul RENNER 1876-1956 Typeface
FUTURA Paul Renner, like Jan Tschichold, wanted types that suited the modern age instead of being revivals from an earlier one. In this, his views were similar to those of the Bauhaus movement, whose ideals he shared and influenced without ever being a member.
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He established the Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucher (Advanced School of German Book-printing) in Munich and recruited fellow type designers Georg Trump and Jan Tschichold to teach there. Tschichold was removed from his post and interned by the Nazis for ‘subversive typography’ in 1933. Renner himself was dismissed under similar circumstances that same year. His best known typeface, Futura, is the archetypal geometric sans serif. The original design had a lower-case of experimental characters but these were all abandoned before its release by Bauer in 1927. It has proved the most popular of its type, eclipsing the earlier Erbar, and still retains its popularity today. Futura is the main font used in Sheep in the Road
mid-June 2016
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ANGLO-MYTHOLOGY of forage proportions
art: Nick Dyer
script: Richard Clements
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lettering: Jim Campbell
WORDS AS TURDS REFERENDUM INNUENDUM ONOMATOPOEIA
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CONSTIPATION MYTHINFORMATION DIARRHOEA
mid-June 2016
capitalism just does not work, i’ve just spent all my wages and i’m not pissed ...
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Socialist Worker Letters Page Dear comrade editor As a once active member and now long time supporter I note with some dismay Socialist Worker trotting out the same old ‘EU is a bosses club and cannot be reformed’ with mention of unelected bureaucrats to ram home your partisan LEAVE message and ... to all intents and purposes for everyone to see … share that flatulent argument and a putrid-smelling platform with UKIP and other assorted bigots. The EU is a bosses club, this we know, I have no illusions about the EU, but also have absolutely no illusions in the uk parliament, its voting system, or its unelected second chamber - the exclusive, up-your-arse house of lords (no capitals required!). This referendum is a distraction, since when have our government, and their paymasters (big business) allowed the citizenry to decide on anything supposedly this important? Either way the vote goes - they don’t give a shit - they believe ‘they’ will still be in the saddle!
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Artwork: Alan Rutherford
As internationalists we should be promoting joint cross-border worker action to break down big companies ability to play worker against worker by shifting work and money about the EU (and the world) for their profit-margins, arguing for active support of French strikers … this we can do better within the EU. To break the stranglehold the EU rightwing have on the rights and movement of migrants/refugees/immigrants, and deliver on Socialist Workers’ ‘They are all welcome’ message, we should be appealing to cross-border action, not proposing we side with those who want to skulk in an off-shore walled-up island patrolled by peak-capped border guards. We need to be in Europe arguing for no borders. We should be (and are) for the overthrow of ALL ‘bosses clubs’! Alan Rutherford ex-Cheltenham SWP
mid-June 2016
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Writing worth reading Photos worth seeing http://www.coldtype.net
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mid-June 2016
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WAFFLE LETTERS
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Dear Editor ... Absolutely damaged but still awake, I say again, well yes, again, because the letters page is so much of a hopeless failure ... Words fail me, what is the use of words when the person you are saying them to is unable to grasp your, and their, meaning? Worryingly, we are still heading down that irrational road, the one where stupidity reigns, and where basic facts and knowledge acquired over time are being replaced by entrenched banal myths, hearsay and superstition. The probability that this shit-faced fudge of complacency and mad spouters will be defended to the death before reason can be accepted again (if ever) is utterly terrifying. For evidence of this I direct your (giggling still) attention to Donald Trump and his campaign to become US President. As Britain’s government is a happy satellite of US mischief in the world ... and a blindly loyal follower of US foreign policy, what will our Cameron/Osborne/Johnson government do if Trump suceeds and begins his Term of Ignorance?
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Whilst I remain optimistic about the future I am absolute in my scepticism about whether the Euro (pro and sceptic)-business-arses and their sycophantic political stooges – or the US presidential circus and their flunkies – will come up with anything remotely of benefit to anyone other than the rampantly corrupt ruling class wankers intent on fucking us all.
mid-June 2016
HAND OVER FIST PRESS BOOKS • MAGAZINES • DESIGN at www.handoverfistpress.com
1 9 8 6 34 SHEEP IN THE ROAD (as magazine) #3 October 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 2 Alan Rutherford 2015
SHEEP IN THE ROAD Vol. 1 Alan Rutherford 2014
KAPUTALA The Diary of Arthur Beagle & The East Africa Campaign, 1916-1918 Alan Rutherford Updated 2nd edn: 2014
IRISH GRAFFITI some murals in the North, 1986 Alan Rutherford 2014
NICETO DE LARRINAGA a voyage, 1966 Alan Rutherford 2014
To read/view a book, or magazine go to website and click on their cover and follow the links ...
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER TWELVE
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD Issue 11
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June 2016
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SHEEP IN THE ROAD Issue 8
SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 7
SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 6
SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 5
SHEEP IN THE ROAD issue 4
March 2016
February: 2016
January: 2016
Xmas: 2015
December: 2015
Sheep in the Road as a magazine has writing, photography, cartoons and odd assemblages of ideas, rants and reviews ... eminating from a socialist and thoughtful core. Contributors included: Brian Rutherford, Rudi Thoemmes, Joe Jenkins, Robert Arnott, Cam Rutherford, Steve Ashley, Lizzie Boyle, Chris Dillow, Chris Hoare, Joanna Rutherford, West Midland Hunt Saboteurs, Chris Bessant, Craig Atkinson, Martin Taylor, Martin Mitchell ... A pleasure to produce ... thank you
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