The Red House Raid

Residents of the quiet Derbyshire village of Parwich, 110 miles north of London, had been curious for weeks about what was going on at "White Meadows," a red brick Edwardian mansion just outside of town. When it was sold last spring, its name was changed to "The Red House." Guards patroled the grounds, and no one from the place so much as set foot in the Sycamore Arms, the local pub. Late one night last week they found out. Switching on powerful floodlights, a force of 100 policemen raided the three-story house. While they made no arrests, they claimed to have made some interesting discoveries: nine .22-cal. bullets in a stairway cupboard (but no guns), books by Lenin, Marx and Engels, and 50 assorted members of a tiny Trotskyite group, called the Workers' Revolutionary Party, engaged in a political conversation. The party's most celebrated member: Actress-Activist Vanessa Redgrave.

La Redgrave, 38, is nothing if not determined. In last year's general elections, she polled a miserable 572 votes as a W.R.P. candidate in a London working-class district. Instead of dropping out of left-wing politics, she decided to focus her political consciousness-raising efforts on other actors. This summer, she and her brother Corin, 36, opened a clandestine school for revolutionaries at the Parwich house, which he bought on behalf of the party for $46,000. For a two-week course in the W.R.P.'s avowed aim, "the overthrow of capitalism," students are charged $60 and asked to observe strict rules, which include keeping blankets and sleeping bags folded neatly on the beds and staying out of the Sycamore Arms.

Who ratted on the Redgraves? It turned out to be W.R.P. Recruit No. 5005, better known to British TV and stage audiences as Irene Gorst, 28, a rising comedienne. The cops descended on the Red House soon after Gorst went to the London Observer with a tale about an "ordeal" she had suffered there at the hands of the Redgraves and their comrades. As she told it, she arrived late for the beginning of her two-week course at the Red House because an old beau had whisked her off to Maidenhead for lunch. This infraction of party discipline outraged the Redgraves, especially Brother Corin, who was then Irene Gorst's boy friend.

Eyebrow Pencil. She was interrogated for seven hours by the Redgraves and two other members of the W.R.P.'s central committee, who accused her of being a spy for the Special Branch (Britain's FBI). Corin added that she was "bourgeois, middle class and arrogant" besides. Gorst recalled that they made her empty her handbag and TV Producer Roy Battersby seemed particularly interested in her eyebrow pencil: "He kept peering down it as if he expected to discover a hidden microphone."

Gorst flung the ultimate Trotskyite insult at the Redgraves: "They are totally Stalinist." Vanessa, for her part, struggled to cast the Red House raid as a cause celebre. The police bust, she eagerly insisted during TV interviews, was "the biggest political attack on any political party since the offices of the Daily Worker were raided in 1945."

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