In the week of the debate, Tryl received phone calls from MPs and life members of the Union, some advising him to cancel the debate, others to proceed. ‘At one point it felt like it was the president on one side and everybody trying to stop him on the other,’ recalls Edward Waldegrave, then on the standing committee, now a barrister. ‘It was an early manifestation of the no-platforming approach.’ A referendum was ultimately held in the Union in which at least two-thirds of members voted to go ahead. The police were briefed. On the morning of the debate, Tryl found ‘death-threat type notes’ in his pigeonhole.
Later, as protesters made their way towards the Union building on St Michael’s Street, he heard chants of ‘Kill Tryl’. He now takes these ‘very much in the spirit of them thinking this was a funny rhyme rather than meaning it’. At the time, Tryl says, he ‘went into autopilot’.
Demonstrators surrounded the place. Some succeeded in scaling the walls. Fearing a crush, Tryl had the police open the gates, so that the crowd – a mixture of students and non-students – could occupy the red debating chamber. The debate finally went ahead with Griffin and Irving speaking in separate rooms.
The furore that day was reminiscent of that which accompanied Oswald Mosley’s address in Oxford in May 1936. Speaking at a public meeting, the leader of the British Union of Fascists whipped up such strong feeling in his audience that a scuffle broke out. Steel chairs were hurled and punches thrown.
Oxford had already put itself on the map as a place where challenging ideas could be heard. Just three years earlier, in 1933, the Oxford Union hosted its famous King and Country debate, which pitched Quintin Hogg, son of the Secretary of State for War Viscount Hailsham, in the opposition, against the philosopher CEM Joad. Members voted by 275 to 153 in favour of the motion that ‘This House will in No Circumstances Fight for its King and Country’. The outcome made headlines internationally. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Winston Churchill went so far as to claim that this debate had ‘swayed many calculations’ in Germany, Russia and beyond, where the result, he felt, had revealed Britain to be ‘decadent’ and ‘degenerate’ and, by implication, a soft touch in the lead-up to war.
The question of how much students have to lose and gain from hosting events that propel them on to a public stage is as pertinent now as it was in 1933. For Tryl, the 2007 debate was all-consuming: ‘I lost two stone or something across the course of the term. [Looking back] I realise I wasn’t going to change the world through that debate. Free speech is important, it’s absolute, but just because you have the ability to have free speech doesn’t mean you have to invite people to speak on it. My advice would be to weigh that up.’
