As many young black men told it, however, the real problem was the police. In March 1980 a poll of black residents found that seven out of ten had little or no confidence in the police and two-thirds feared there would soon be serious trouble. In Lambeth as a whole, one in three people stopped by the police in 1979 and 1980 was black. In Brixton, half of all arrests involved young black men. A particularly sore point was the Met’s ultra-aggressive Special Patrol Group, which had been deployed four times in Brixton since 1978, making hundreds of arrests. And although resentment of the police was hardly unknown elsewhere, everybody agreed it was especially intense in Brixton. ‘Everyone has a story which happened either to themselves or a relative or a friend,’ wrote Mike Phillips. ‘The police are the enemy.’23
It was against this background that on Monday 6 April 1981 the police launched a massive new operation, codenamed ‘Swamp 81’, designed to sweep Lambeth’s muggers off the streets. The name, intended for internal use only, could hardly have been more unfortunate, reviving memories of Mrs Thatcher’s controversial remark in 1978 about the fear of being ‘rather swamped by people with a different culture’. In fact, it derived simply from the police tactic of ‘swamping’ the area with more than a hundred officers in plain clothes. Later, in his official report on the Brixton riots, Lord Scarman said that Swamp 81 had been a ‘serious mistake’. At the time, though, the police considered it a great success, since in five days they stopped 943 people, half of them black, made 118 arrests and charged seventy-five people. But then, late on the afternoon of the fifth day, a lovely warm spring Friday, things suddenly went wrong.24
The spark came when a police constable spotted a 19-year-old black man, Michael Bailey, running across the road, pursued by two other men. The policeman cornered Bailey and wrestled him to the ground, only to find that his shirt was soaked in blood. It turned out that Bailey had a three-inch stab wound in his back, but he refused to tell the police what had happened. Eventually the constable, who had been joined by some colleagues, began to apply first aid and called for an ambulance. But by this stage a small crowd had gathered, most of them young black men who assumed, wrongly, that Bailey had been attacked by the police. Despite the fact that the police were trying to bandage his wound, the crowd bombarded them with bricks and bottles, dragged him from the car and spirited him away. By about 6.30 the mood had turned very ugly, with perhaps a hundred people hurling missiles at about forty policemen. After an hour or so the fighting subsided. But the police were jittery. That night, they decided to have twelve extra pairs of officers patrolling the streets the next day. They did not, however, cancel the Swamp operation.25
Saturday 11 April was another unseasonably warm day. With dozens of uniformed policemen patrolling the streets as well as almost fifty plain-clothes Swamp officers, the atmosphere felt swelteringly tense. ‘Everyone knew that something was going to happen after the Friday night,’ wrote Mike Phillips. ‘There was an intense throbbing vibe in the air, like feeling the bass on some incredible sound system pounding into action.’ Late that afternoon, near the top of Railton Road, two young plain-clothes detectives questioned a minicab driver, whom they suspected of dealing drugs. A small crowd gathered; the atmosphere became heated; a scuffle broke out between one of the detectives and a young black man. The detectives arrested the man, who was struggling ferociously, and threw him into the back of a police van. The crowd began to shout and shove, the police called for reinforcements, the first bricks began to fly – and suddenly the riot was on.26
A timeline published in the Guardian two days later captures the momentum of events:
5 pm: An abandoned police car is set on fire in Atlantic Road. Jewellery and clothing stores are broken into in the road and several police officers are hurt by flying bricks.
5.30: Fighting continues in Atlantic Road and spreads into Railton Road and Mayall Road. Police get out riot shields and form cordons at the east end of Railton Road.
6.30: The first petrol bombs are thrown, setting fire to police and private cars in Railton and Leeson roads.
6.40: Fire brigade summoned to the area to cope with petrol bomb attacks but are unable to get through because their vehicles are stoned …
7.40: A fire engine turntable set alight in Railton Road. Minutes later, youths commandeered a fire engine which they then drove up and down Railton Road.
7.45: A petrol bomb sets fire to the Windsor Castle pub in Leeson Road which is completely destroyed by 9.30pm. At the same time, the George public house in Railton Road is petrol bombed …
A white couple with two young children living just off Railton Road in a mixed street have their door kicked in by a group of eight black youths armed with knives who threaten them for money. A black family across the road try to dissuade the youths but fail.
Black crowds drive police down Railton Road towards Atlantic Road with missiles. Police group in Mayall Road and try to push the rioters back. Then a lull occurs. Buildings, including the post office, a car spares business, a plumber’s shop, an off-licence and a school in Effra Road all burn during this period. Serious looting begins.
9.30: The Windsor Castle pub collapses and electricity fails along Mayall Road.
10.0: Police begin to regain control of the area.
What this does not capture, though, is the shock of seeing barricades and petrol bombs on the streets of London, the terror of the police as missiles hailed down around them, the horror of the fire and ambulance crews as the mob turned its fury on them, the near-ecstasy of the crowd as they hijacked buses and fire engines, or the extraordinary, apocalyptic spectacle as black smoke billowed over the blazing cars and gutted pubs. ‘Red-hot debris dripped from a series of burning buildings along both sides of the road,’ wrote one reporter. ‘Amid the roaring of the flames and the crashing of collapsing buildings, there were screams and shouts. Despite the furnace of heat, figures could be seen running through the smoke, hurling missiles at unseen police.’ One policeman thought it ‘looked like World War III. Cars blazing, people running everywhere’. The Observer thought the scenes of burning pubs and rubble-strewn streets reminiscent of ‘the blitz or Belfast’. The Express called it ‘the bloody blitz of Railton Road’. Another officer said it was ‘like Beirut, not London. It was like another country.’27
The police did not regain control of Brixton until late on Monday evening, three days after the trouble had started. But by then the riots had already become the most violent and costly disturbances of the twentieth century, with more than 450 people injured, 207 vehicles damaged or destroyed, among them 118 police cars and four ambulances, 145 buildings burned or vandalized and 354 people arrested, at a total cost of more than £6 million. Afterwards, some residents talked of the ‘festival atmosphere’, the ‘buzz’ as the community united to fight the police. But the local residents who owned the plumbing store, the off-licence or the little shops in Brixton Market did not share their enthusiasm. And the Brixton riots were not victimless crimes, as the people kicked, robbed, beaten and stamped on would attest. One 25-year-old white woman, who had lived in the area for three years, opened her door late on Saturday night, thinking that the knock came from a neighbour who had offered to give her a lift. In fact, it came from a youth with a scarf tied around his face, who pushed her into the living room and raped her at knifepoint. After fleeing the scene, she returned to her flat the next day, and found that looters had stolen her jewellery and hi-fi.28
For the police, the weekend had been, as one put it, an ‘absolutely copper-bottomed fucking nightmare’. In total, some 110 officers were hospitalized, sixteen of them with head injuries, as well as twelve firemen and three ambulance men. Many freely admitted that they had been terrified. ‘I was as scared as hell,’ one 21-year-old constable, who lived in Brixton, told the press. ‘They were throwing everything at us. Lumps of concrete, iron bars and petrol bombs.’ ‘We tried to take cover,’ said a traffic policeman, who had been among the reinforcements, ‘but they were chanting and
shouting and it seemed that the whole world had gone mad. It was a very frightening experience. It was terrible.’ One WPC admitted that when it was all over and she had time to think, she just could not stop shaking. She suffered from ‘nightmares long afterwards’.29
Even before the fighting had died down, people were looking for explanations. A spokesman for the Met, vigorously denying that its aggressive policing had anything to do with it, claimed that the riots had been orchestrated by outsiders: a ‘lot of people, many of them white, with cameras, who were not press photographers’. This became a common theme in newspapers like the Express and the Mail, which were convinced that a hard-left cabal of ‘political extremists’ had directed the whole thing. But most shopkeepers and residents told a different story. Almost all blamed the police, both for flooding the streets on Saturday and for years of aggressive harassment. ‘When you get a lot of people who are treated as badly as this, what can you expect?’ remarked a local vicar. ‘This has been coming for twenty-five years,’ said a veteran black community worker. ‘It’s been coming a long time,’ agreed the head of a local community centre. ‘A lot of us have been saying this would happen for years and no one has been paying attention.’30
The Home Secretary, Willie Whitelaw, visited Brixton on Sunday. Jeered by local residents, he was visibly shocked by what he saw. Almost immediately he announced a public inquiry under the veteran judge Lord Scarman, but in the meantime he warned Mrs Thatcher that further ‘severe disorder’ was very likely. As a Home Office report put it, ‘increased militancy and large numbers of bored, unemployed youths may spark off disturbances in almost any large town, with the police a main target’. This, the papers agreed, was the most chilling thing about Brixton: not that it had happened at all, but that it would happen again. Unless something drastically changed, said the Express, ‘Bristol and Brixton will turn out to be but warnings of far worse to come. That is not an astrological prediction. It is an absolute certainty.’ The front page of the Mirror, which carried a huge picture of policemen sheltering from the mob, made the same point in three words. Its banner headline read simply: ‘THINGS TO COME.’31
It was twelve weeks, however, before the inevitable sequel arrived. The setting this time was Toxteth, Liverpool, one of the most deprived, depressed and dangerous areas in Britain. Even in a city scarred by unemployment and petty crime, Toxteth stood out. As skilled white working-class families left for the suburbs, it had become a ghetto for the poor, the old and the marginalized. Many of its terraced houses, wrote a local politics lecturer, had been ‘vandalised beyond repair, boarded up or torn down, all adding to the atmosphere of decay’. As in Brixton, its black residents – who numbered 30,000 – felt abandoned and alienated. As in Brixton, the local unemployment figures were horrific, with at least eight out of ten black men out of work. And as in Brixton, relations with the local police were characterized by incomprehension, suspicion and outright hostility. When, in 1980, sociologists at the local university prepared a report for the Commons Home Affairs Committee, their verdict could hardly have been bleaker. ‘Time is running out,’ they concluded. ‘A combination of one of Britain’s bleakest unemployment areas with one of Britain’s most disadvantaged black communities could be disastrous.’32
The detonation came on the night of Friday 3 July, and in many respects it was Brixton all over again. The trigger this time was an altercation with a young black man on a motorbike, which the pursuing police wrongly believed had been stolen. When the man fell off and the police tried to arrest him, an angry crowd gathered and pelted them with bricks and stones. In the confusion, the man got away, but for the next two hours the crowd bombarded the police cars with more missiles. Night fell and the fighting died down, but on Saturday afternoon, as police reinforcements poured into Toxteth’s narrow terraced streets, battle resumed in earnest: barricades and bottles, petrol bombs and pickaxe handles, looting, burning and beating.
Sunday was even worse. By now the police were out in force, some 800 strong. But as a contemporary account records, they were totally overwhelmed:
Rioters commandeered milk floats, a stolen fire engine and a cement mixer and drove them straight into police lines. They were armed with every conceivable weapon, including lengths of scaffolding which they thrust at the riot shields like medieval knights. One policeman was speared in the head by a spiked six-foot railing. As a blanket of smoke rose into the sky, the rioters pressed forward yelling ‘stone the bastards’ and parading their trophies – police helmets and riot shields. At one point they managed to seize a fire hose which the police had been using on them and turn it on the officers.
As in Brixton, the police seemed powerless, huddling behind their shields while rioters and looters ruled the streets. Witnesses reported seeing children as young as 5 crawling through broken windows, encouraged by their parents. ‘They brought shopping carts to ship it out,’ one said. ‘Refrigerators, dryers, you name it. I even saw one lady hold up a piece of carpet and ask if anybody knew if it was 6ft by 4ft.’ In the end, during a lull while patients were evacuated from a local hospital, the Chief Constable, Kenneth Oxford, ordered his men to fire tear-gas canisters. Never before had the police used tear gas in mainland Britain; indeed, Oxford was breaking Home Office rules, which stipulated that it could only be used against armed criminals. But the ferocity of the violence, he argued, had left him with no choice.33
By the time peace returned to Toxteth, the riots had caused £4.7 million worth of damage, while 244 people had been arrested and hundreds more injured. These figures did not capture the extraordinary intensity of the violence, which many observers thought even more vicious than in Brixton. The police were prepared to face bricks and stones; they were not prepared, however, to face rioters with axes and sledgehammers, trying to run them down with cars and fire engines, or dousing them with petrol and trying to set them alight. ‘No amount of training can prepare you for that. I hope to God I never see anything like it again,’ one said afterwards. ‘I realised, standing there with a shield, that people out there wanted me dead.’ Many complained that their strategy had been far too passive, leaving them trapped behind their shields while petrol bombs exploded around them. ‘I don’t know how you can describe the smoke and the flames and the terror, absolute terror,’ another constable said. ‘It went on for so long. I was dreaming about it. I had to see a psychiatrist.’34
What was really shocking, though, was the fact that the riots now seemed to be part of a national trend. On Friday 3 July, the night the disturbances broke out in Toxteth, several hundred skinheads were in Southall, west London, for a concert at a local pub. To Southall’s large South Asian population, already alarmed by skinhead harassment and the rise of the National Front, this seemed an intolerable provocation. Outside the pub, hundreds of Asian men, most of them Sikhs, built barricades to lay siege to the skinheads, and as the night drew on the confrontation escalated into a pitched battle, the Asians pelting the police and the skinheads with bricks, milk bottles and Molotov cocktails. At one stage, while black smoke from burning buildings drifted overhead, the rioters even commandeered a police bus and tried to break through into the pub forecourt. Yet these were not, by and large, unemployed or alienated young men. Britain’s Sikhs were famously law-abiding, while Southall was a relatively affluent, well-integrated suburb, with high levels of education and home ownership. When local Asian leaders were asked to describe their neighbourhood, the word they often used was ‘friendly’. If this could happen in Southall, where would be next?35
The answer came four days later. Late on Tuesday 7 July, there were reports of clashes between police and black youths in the deprived, crime-blighted neighbourhood of Moss Side, Manchester. The following evening Moss Side saw more trouble, with about a thousand people laying siege to the local police station, smashing windows, hurling bricks and overturning cars. It took three nights for the police to regain control, but by this stage the rioting seemed to be spreading uncontrollably. On Friday 1
0th there was trouble in Handsworth in Birmingham, as well as in Wolverhampton, Nottingham, Sheffield, Hull, Preston, Slough, Ellesmere Port and Reading. Saturday was even worse. With rumours spreading and shopkeepers anxiously boarding up their windows, there were reports of rioting not just in Handsworth and Brixton, but in Southampton, Portsmouth, Luton, Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield, Blackburn, Preston and Blackpool, as well as countless other cities and towns across the country.36
In retrospect, some of this was almost certainly exaggerated. Drunken rowdiness in High Wycombe, Gloucester and Aldershot was not in the same league as rioting in south London, while a single petrol bomb being thrown at a car in Cirencester was hardly the same as a hail of incendiaries on the streets of Liverpool. In most towns the trouble lasted only for a night or two, and a fortnight later the nation’s attention switched to the coming wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. Yet to most of the press, this felt like the End of Days. ‘Looting, arson, riots – now we’re reaping the progressive whirlwind,’ shrieked a front-page editorial in the Daily Express on Tuesday 7 July:
How many riots in how many cities? How much pillaging, looting and arson in how many decayed streets and urban wastelands?
How many more weekends like the past one is this civilised country to suffer before authority reasserts itself?
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