John Hopkins

John Victor Lindsay "Hoppy" Hopkins (15 August 1937 – 30 January 2015) was a British photographer, journalist, researcher and political activist, and "one of the best-known underground figures of 'Swinging London' " in the late 1960s. Life Hopkins was born on 15 August 1937 in Slough, Buckinghamshire, England. After attending Felsted School in Essex, Hopkins went on to graduate in 1958 with a degree in physics and mathematics from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which he had entered on a scholarship in 1955, and he began to work as a laboratory technician at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Oxfordshire. When he took a trip to Moscow to attend a Communist youth festival, his security clearance was revoked. Hopkins then re-located to London at the beginning of 1960, and began to work as a photographer for newspapers and music magazines including Jazz News, The Guardian, Melody Maker and Peace News. He photographed many of the leading musicians of the period, including The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Hopkins also recorded the seedier side of London, with photographs of tattoo parlours, cafés, prostitutes and fetishists. By the mid-1960s, he was at the centre of London's emerging underground scene and recorded many peace marches, poetry readings and "happenings", as well as photographing leading counter-cultural figures, including Allen Ginsberg and Malcolm X. Hopkins compiled and stencil-duplicated the names, contact details and interests of all of London's "movers and shakers". He then gave all of them a copy. This action is credited with greatly boosting the 1960s London-based underground movement.