by Andy McSmith
By 1980, change was due. In the opening words of Hanif Kureishi’s novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), its fictional protagonist declares: ‘My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two histories. But I don’t care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it).’ For the first time, there were many thousands of teenagers and young adults of Asian or Afro-Caribbean descent who were either born in Britain or had arrived in the country so young that it was the only homeland they knew. The idea that there was a country to which they could be ‘repatriated’ was an insult. They had nowhere else to go, and no choice but to do what they could to make life tolerable in a white-dominated society.
The first sign of changing times was a campaign called ‘Scrap Sus’, which took off in the late 1970s, mainly in inner London. The Metropolitan Police had been making free use of the 1834 Vagrancy Act, which gave them the power to stop and search passers-by on the mere suspicion that they might be planning a crime. In 1978, 3,800 people were arrested on ‘sus’, the vast majority of them young blacks. The campaign against arbitrary arrest was so successful that one of the first pieces of legislation introduced by the incoming Conservative government was to repeal the Vagrancy Act. That success introduced young blacks to the idea that they did not have to accept unfair treatment from the police without resisting.
Anyone taking a walk through Brixton in south London in 1980 would have been struck by the noise and vibrancy of the neighbourhood. Inner cities can be silent and empty at night, but not Brixton. The average age of its inhabitants was several years below the norm, because the middle-aged property owners had decamped to quieter suburbs. Yet, despite a falling population in Brixton, there were far too many people packed into an inadequate supply of decent housing. About a third of the housing stock was substandard. Empty houses were used by the locals as gambling clubs, dope centres or venues for all-night blues parties. The triangle formed by Railton Road, Frontline and Mayall Road was a favoured location for left-wing squatters. Jobs were acutely short. These problems bore down particularly on the children of immigrants; half of the nineteen to twenty-one-years-olds in Brixton and 40 per cent of children of school age were Afro-Caribbean. Rather than hang around bored in their overcrowded homes, these teenagers lived out on the streets, built their own culture around dope and reggae music, and spoke their own patois.
To the police, all this noise and street activity looked suspiciously like a threat to law and order. In 1981, the Metropolitan Police was probably the most racially mixed force in Britain, yet the chance of seeing a black or Asian policeman on the streets of London was about 200 to 1. In a force of 24,000 officers there were 110 who were not white. The men, and the small number of women, patrolling London were the children of skilled workers, self-employed traders or shopkeepers, the same class of people who had moved out of places such as Brixton as immigrants moved in.
Police statistics recorded 10,626 serious crimes in the Brixton division in 1980, compared with 9,423 four years earlier, and including a disproportionate number of cases of robbery or violent theft. ‘Concern’, a local charity, disputed the objectivity of these numbers, claiming that they were exaggerated by the prejudices of those who compiled them.7 What is certain is that the commander of ‘L’ Division of the Metropolitan Police, which had its headquarters in Brixton, believed that there was an issue to be resolved about who controlled the surrounding streets. On six occasions in less than five years up to September 1980, officers of the Special Patrol Group (SPG) poured into Brixton, setting up road blocks and making early morning raids and random street checks. The local commander did not think it necessary to consult local liaison groups or elected representatives, or even tip off the local beat coppers, before sending the officers in. Lambeth Council, which under the leadership of Ted Knight was then arguably the most left-wing council in Britain, set up a working party to examine these tactics, the tenor of whose report can be deduced from the chapter headings and subheadings: ‘Army of Occupation’, ‘Intimidation’, ‘Misuse of Laws’, ‘Continual harassment’, etc. ‘Whilst us whiteys only get the occasional incident, West Indian people have it all the time,’8 one woman told them.
Sooner or later, some confrontation between the police and young blacks was almost inevitable. On 2 April 1980, a riot broke out in the St Paul’s district of Bristol with such ferocity that the police withdrew for four hours, leaving hundreds of exuberant black youths to an unrestrained display of reckless anger. Thirty-one people were reported injured. In London, the first overt trouble had its origins several miles from Brixton, in New Cross, south-east London. At about 5.50 a.m. on Sunday, 18 January 1981, fire broke out in a Victorian-built council house at 439 New Cross Road, where an all-night party – the joint sixteenth birthday celebration for Yvonne Ruddock and Angela Jackson – had been in progress. Fifty teenagers were still in the house. Within minutes, they were trapped in the flames or jumping from upstairs windows to escape. Walton Williams, aged nineteen, clambered out, clung to a drainpipe and tried to drag a friend to safety through the window, ‘but the drainpipe collapsed and the next thing I remember is lying on the pavement,’ he said in a BBC interview later that day. In hospital, he learned that his friend was one of eleven teenagers who had died in the flames. More than twenty others were injured. Yvonne Ruddock was pulled out with horrible burns, and died in hospital less than a week later. Her brother, Paul, brought the death toll to thirteen when he died from his burns early in February. One of the survivors suffered a trauma from which he never properly recovered; two-and-a-half years later he died after falling, or throwing himself, from a balcony.
After a tragedy of this magnitude, civic and political leaders normally send messages of condolence to the afflicted families. Five weeks after the New Cross fire, when a terrible fire in a discotheque in the Irish Republic left forty-eight dead, there were messages from the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, among many others. The Irish teenagers who had died so horribly were white. There were no such messages for the families of the victims of the New Cross fire, who were black. ‘Not one word of sympathy was offered to us,’ Nerissa Campbell, who lost a seventeen-year-old son in the fire, complained years later.9 She also repeated the frequently heard complaint that when the police investigated the fire they interrogated the traumatized young survivors ‘as though they were criminals’. A teenage girl told the police that she had seen a white man throw someone through the window of No. 439, but the police attached very little weight to her evidence. One survivor, Robert McKenzie, complained: ‘They gave me no respect and I felt like I had been arrested – not asked to share information. They didn’t want to listen to the truth.’10
A quarter of a century and two inquests later, it is now generally agreed that the police were right; the dead were not victims of a racially motivated attack, and the only way to find out why the fire broke out so suddenly and spread so swiftly was to question the survivors. Over time, a rift developed between the unfortunate woman whose house was No. 439 (she lost two children), and other bereaved parents, as the suspicion spread that sexual jealousy and a family quarrel had given rise to the catastrophe. At the second inquest, twenty-three years on, in May 2004, one witness seemed uncomfortable on the stand and, as she stepped down, a woman in the audience hissed at her ‘you murdering bitch!’11
Back in 1981 as the families struggled to come to terms with their losses, their initial response was to unite against a world that did not seem to care. Meetings were called and the New Cross Massacre Action Committee formed. The slogan ‘Thirteen dead and nothing said’ gained currency. On Monday, 2 March, up to 10,000 demonstrators from London, Bristol, Manchester and Birmingham assembled outside the burnt-out house, laid flowers in remembrance and marched for seven hours through some of London’s busiest streets, across Blackfriars Bridge and along Fleet Street, Regent Street and Oxford Street to a rally in Hyde Park, causing havoc for
the traffic on their way. At the rally, they stood in pouring rain as speakers, including the television presenter Darcus Howe, addressed them from the back of a lorry. A small number of those taking part objected to the heavy police presence and there were skirmishes. While the BBC and ITN reported the reasons for the march, paying little attention to the disturbances, the newspaper coverage was all about the ‘Rampage of a Mob’ (Daily Express); the ‘Day the Blacks Ran Riot in London’ (Sun).12 To others, the march was the first sign that one of the country’s ethnic minorities was gaining the confidence to organize itself and demand to be heard. A historian of London’s black communities has written that ‘the most important spur to the development and reception of black London history was the New Cross Fire’.13
Five weeks later, on Monday, 6 April 1981, the police launched another campaign to bring order and control to Brixton’s streets in an operation codenamed ‘Swamp 81’. This time, the SPG (Special Patrol Group) was not used as a concession to local feeling, but ten squads, each made up of between five and eleven police officers, flooded Brixton’s streets between 2 p.m. and 11 p.m. every day for a week. They stopped and questioned 943 people, more than half of whom were young blacks, and made 118 arrests.14 On the Friday evening, just after 6 p.m., a constable tried to stop a black youth who was running through the streets, but he broke free and ran on. The constable then noticed bloodstains on his uniform. Evidently, the youth had been injured, presumably in a fight. Two police officers gave chase, but he escaped. A message was circulated to all officers in the area to look out for an injured man on the run. A few minutes later, other officers saw him being helped into a taxi cab. They stopped the cab, bandaged his wounds and demanded to know how he had come by his injuries. Soon, a crowd of thirty to forty young blacks gathered. They did not believe the officers’ protestations that the injured youth was being given first aid, and that an ambulance had been summoned; they thought that the police were preventing an injured man from getting to hospital. They pushed the police aside to let him escape. More police were called in. Soon a running battle had developed along Railton Road, which lasted about half an hour, at the end of which six people had been arrested, six officers had been injured and four police vehicles had been damaged by flying bricks.
In the morning, the police were out in force, determined not to allow the rioters to rule the streets. ‘The cops usually patrol the Frontline, but on that Saturday they parked up and down the Frontline every fifty yards, just sitting in their vans waiting for something to happen,’15 one resident claimed. A rumour had gone round firstly that the injured youth had been injured by the police, and secondly that he had died. Both assertions were false, but they added to an incendiary atmosphere. Early in the afternoon, two young constables spotted the black driver of a parked minicab putting something into his sock. They suspected he was drug-dealing and challenged him. He laughed, and said that in Brixton, it was best to keep your money hidden. He agreed that they could see for themselves. The police searched him, but found nothing incriminating, just the folded notes in his sock. The officers evidently did not like being made to look silly. The older of the two, who was twenty-four, wanted to search the cab. The driver at first invited them to go ahead, but then did not like the officer’s demeanour and accused him of planting evidence. By now, a crowd had assembled. Words were exchanged, a youth was arrested, reinforcements called. When more senior officers arrived, irate residents told them that one of the officers involved in the confrontation had an iron bar hidden in a plastic bag he was carrying, and that two plainclothes officers on patrol were wearing National Front badges. The two NF sympathizers were identified and sent back to Brixton police station; the allegation about the iron bar was apparently not investigated.
The time for negotiations between police and residents had now passed, as Brixton went up in flames again. This time, it was not only bricks, stones and other debris being hurled at police; for the first time on the British mainland, the rioters threw petrol bombs. It appears that someone set up a makeshift bomb factory. As the police retreated down Mayall Road, the delighted rioters set fire to the vehicles they had left behind. ‘Up goes a cop’s van – wild cheers, laughter, dances of joy,’16 one participant recalled. In Railton Road, a local clergyman saw a group of ‘grimly determined’ black youths invade the George public house and then the newsagent next door, wrecking both. When the vicar tried to intervene, they explained their reasons: the landlord of the George, they alleged, had discriminated against black customers and the newsagent had refused to serve gays. On that day, 279 police officers reported receiving injuries, at least 45 members of the public were injured, 61 private cars and 56 police vehicles were damaged, with most set on fire, 82 people were arrested and 145 buildings were damaged, including 28 that had been torched.17
Sunday morning was quiet. In the afternoon, Home Secretary William Whitelaw arrived to tour the scene with the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir David McNee. Seeing the damaged buildings, Whitelaw said it felt like he was: ‘back in the war during the London blitz’.18 Their visit was perhaps not a good idea. Whitelaw and his party were jeered by residents, and within half an hour another riot had started as police clashed with a crowd outside a burnt-out pub in Railton Road. No buildings were set on fire that night, but there was some organized looting; it was thought that white criminal gangs had moved in to profit from the disturbances. By the end of the evening, another 165 people had been arrested, it was reported that another 122 police officers and 3 members of the public had been injured, and 61 police vehicles and 26 private cars were damaged.19
The Brixton riots were given a vast amount of publicity, making it an obvious risk that copycat riots would break out somewhere. In fact, there were six quiet weeks before riots suddenly broke out in almost every city centre in England. On Friday, 3 July, a group of white skinheads from London’s East End turned up for a concert at a pub called the Broadway, in Southall, West London, an area with a large Asian population. Some of them decided to engage in the sick sport of ‘Paki-bashing’, but this time, unexpectedly, the victims retaliated. When the police arrived, they were confronted by a large crowd of young Asians who wanted to mete out rough justice to the skinheads. The police tried to disperse them, and in no time the Southall riot was under way.
On that same Friday, in Toxteth, Liverpool, a youth named Leroy Alphonse Cooper fell off his cycle as the police were chasing him. A crowd of about forty black youths saw him being arrested and came to his rescue, pulling him away from the police. There was then a fight that went on for two hours, in which three officers were injured. The next day Merseyside police mobilized a large force with riot equipment, but the trouble they anticipated did not start until the evening, when three officers who were looking for a stolen car around Upper Parliament Street were attacked. Black and white youths rioted together, burning cars and buildings, and looting shops. A BBC television crew was attacked and a £12,000 camera stolen. The riot lasted through the night. At 7 a.m., the police baton-charged the crowd. On Sunday, it started again, and by about 2 a.m. it was clear that the police had been driven out of parts of Toxteth. ‘Scenes like this can never have been seen in a British city under the rule of law this century,’ the local Liberal MP, David Alton, declared.20 In the middle of the night, William Whitelaw was woken by a telephone call from Merseyside’s chief constable, Ken Oxford, asking permission to turn CS gas on the crowd, something the police had never done before on the British mainland. The imperturbable Mr Whitelaw gave his consent and went straight back to sleep.21
Even with CS gas in use, the rioting continued for a total of nine days, during which 468 police officers were injured, 500 people were arrested and at least 70 buildings were demolished.22 There was sporadic trouble for the rest of the month, including a notorious hit-and-run accident, in which a police vehicle pursuing stone-throwing youths knocked down and killed a twenty-two-year-old disabled man, and just drove on.
The argument about the caus
e of the rioting was more political in the case of Toxteth than any of the other riots that year. Liverpool was where a left-wing group called the Militant Tendency was strongest. This was a Marxist group inspired by the writings of Leon Trotsky, which by the mid-1980s had several thousand members. Unlike other Trotskyite organizations, it claimed not to be a political party, but an informal group of like-minded members of the Labour Party, united only in that they all read the weekly newspaper, Militant. This was a fiction that they maintained in the hope of avoiding being expelled en masse from the Labour Party. Militant controlled the Labour Party Young Socialists (LPYS) members, the official youth wing of the party. The LPYS put out a leaflet in Liverpool blaming the riot on ‘brutal harassment’ by the police, but despite allegations made at the time by David Alton and others, no evidence was ever found that the riots were politically organized. As in Brixton, there was a toxic mix of high unemployment, bad housing, racial tension and hostility to the police that underlay the violence. The Labour Party tended to blame unemployment. For several years, the number of registered jobless at the Toxteth dole office had been consistently around 18,000 or below; by June 1981, it was suddenly up to 21,000, though the figure was actually higher in neighbouring Croxteth, with its almost exclusively white population, where there was no riot. Toxteth’s MP, Richard Crawshaw, who had defected from Labour to the SDP, was adamant that the cause was neither unemployment nor bad housing, but ‘a genuine belief’ among black and white youths alike that the police were ‘not even-handed’.23