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Early Topic gleaned from Alex Eaton's Report

In Tykes' News in 1990 Alex Eaton published a 3-part history of the founding of the Topic. It concentrates on the first couple of years and one day it would be good to have that all typed up and available here, but for now this is a a flavour of what the club was like in the very earliest times, with quotes from Alex's report.

The - initially nameless - club was started by Alex Eaton and friends in September 1956, and soon was involved in raising money for refugees of the Hungarian Uprising. It started with Friday meetings in a dingy top room of Laycock's Rooms in Albion Court (formerly Laycock's Temperance Hotel, where Kropotkin and William Morris had once spoken).

The name Topic was adopted in Autumn 1957. Topic Records was originally founded by The Workers' Music Association (WMA), though it is now long a separate business concern. Alex Eaton used to help sell their records in the 50s, and in the absence of other ideas he suggested using the same name for the folk club. "There was no great enthusiasm for it, but nobody could think of anything better," he says.

In the early days the club was sometimes "so packed we had to turn people away" and the fire brigade came round to warn the organisers not to have more than 100 in at any one time. "The average age of the audience was low, some were still at school, most had just left" and there no alcohol available - as evidenced by a raid in which the embarrassed police came up empty-handed.

The music was varied. Skiffle was very popular, and also on the menu were Negro spirituals, jazz and blues and North American folk, played on washboard and guitars and banjos, and with lots of singing; it was singers' and musicians' nights most of the time, with Dr John Hasted from London a regular guest. There was little recorded material around for people to learn from so they learned from each other and from printed sources such as FolksongUSA and Sing Out magazine from America, or, from Britain, Ewan McColl's 1954 industrial ballad collection, The Shuttle and the Cage.