John Hopkins (political activist)

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.

[2] 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.

As an extension of the Free School news-sheet The Gate, in 1966 Hopkins and Barry Miles co-founded the influential magazine International Times (IT).

This led to the publication in The Times on 24 July of a full-page advertisement that described the existing law as "immoral in principle and unworkable in practice", signed by Francis Crick, George Melly, Jonathan Miller and the Beatles.

Hopkins favoured the more anarchistic elements in the "underground" centred on Ladbroke Grove, such as former UFO doorman Mick Farren, who by 1967 was also working at the IT newspaper.

In the 1970s, Hopkins was involved in researching the social uses of video for UNESCO, the Arts Council of Great Britain, the Home Office and others, and edited the Journal of the Centre for Advanced TV Studies.