by David Renton
56 Jones, Lonely Boy, p. 221.
57 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, p. 25; ‘Fascism’, JOLT 1 (January 1977); also ‘Off your rocker’, JOLT 3 (August 1977).
58 H. B. Poulsen, ’77: The Year of Punk and New Wave (London: South Bank House, 2005), p. 28.
59 Jones, Lonely Boy, p. 221.
60 J. Savage, The England’s Dreaming Tapes (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), p. 340; also see Siouxsie’s interview with Jill Nichols and Lucy Toothpaste in Spare Rib, July 1979.
61 ‘Skins’, Temporary Hoarding 6.
62 Hebdidge, Subculture, pp. 56, 58, original emphasis; J. Clarke, ‘The Skinheads and the magical recover of community’, in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance Through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-war Britain (London: Routledge, 1993 edn), pp. 80–83.
63 R. Forbes and E. Stampton, The White Nationalist Skinhead Movement: UK and USA, 1979–1993 (Los Angeles, CA: Feral House, 2015), pp. 34, 40, 54.
64 Marshall, Spirit of ’69, p. 73.
65 Huddle and Saunders, Reminiscences, p. 199.
66 Huddle and Saunders, Reminiscences, p. 83.
67 G. Bushell, Sounds of Glory: Volume Two, The Punk and Ska Years (London: New Haven Publishing, 2016), p. 185.
68 Rock Against Racism, ‘Dub Conference’, pp. 7–11.
69 Richard Lees, Propaganda: Hull Rock Against Racism Posters 1979–1982 (Hull: Rock Against Racism, 2007).
70 Bushell, Sounds of Glory, p. 185.
71 Rachel, Walls Come Tumbling Down, pp. 33, 34.
72 I. Birchall, Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (London: Bookmarks, 2011), p. 369.
73 Huddle and Saunders, Reminiscences, p. 111.
5
LEWISHAM
From spring 1977, the clashes between the National Front and its opponents grew more frequent. In Doncaster, Front supporters clashed with anti-fascists outside the Vine public house.1 On 23 April, a 1,200-strong Front march through Wood Green in North London was opposed by some 3,000 anti-racists, including supporters of the Labour Party, the IWA, trade unions, members of RAR and the Socialist Workers Party. While Communists and churchmen addressed a rally at one end of Duckett’s Common,2 younger anti-fascists broke away and subjected the NF column to a barrage of flares, eggs and rotten fruit. Some eighty-one people were arrested, all bar seven of them anti-fascists. Richard Atkinson recalls an angry, confident counter-demonstration: ‘Someone had the wit to set off a smoke bomb. There were Turkish, Greek and black kids fighting against the Nazis.’ Anna Sullivan also found herself at Wood Green and recalls watching the young throw anything they could at the Front: ‘All the shops lost one shoe in every pair.’ Jerry Fitzpatrick was one of the organisers of the breakaway: ‘I’d come from an Irish background. I had been at Derry in 1969. I had seen the resistance on the Bogside; that was a factor. We wanted to organise in the same way.’ The smoke bombs that Atkinson recalls were in fact marine flares:
I bought them from a boatyard. I thought they would make an effective public spectacle. We sought a non-violent context. But we were willing to sharpen the demonstration, to give a sense of colour and cover as people confronted the Nazis.
Dave Morris was a supporter of the Haringey and Islington Claimants Union, a libertarian group which emphasised the struggle of benefits claimants against the state. He saw the anti-fascists confront the NF but remembers that the Front were able to regroup and continue on their way. He also saw the police removing protesters from the pavements at the side of the Front march:
Somehow, I got through, seemingly the only one who did at that time. For half an hour I walked alone alongside the fascist demonstration as it completely dominated the streets, protected by police who cleared away most of the public in general. It was eerie . . . After getting increasingly funny looks from cops and marchers despite my innocent whistling and humming and pretending to admire the cracks in the paving stones, I sloped off.
Another anti-fascist protester, David Bennie, was even closer to the National Front. His diary provides a vivid record of the day’s events:
We walked to Turnpike Lane where the counter-demonstration was assembling in the presence of vast numbers of police . . . We watched the Front march form up a hundred yards away, with plenty of verbal exchange between the two sides. It seemed incredible to me that the police could allow such an obviously explosive confrontation to occur . . . A little way along Wood Green High Road the march was attacked. Red smoke bombs filled the air and a battle was soon under way. Everything that could be thrown was thrown at the fascists in an attempt to stop the march. Police horses appeared on the pavement and if shoppers got in their way that was hard luck.
The National Front was holding a rally in a local school:
I suggested that we try and go inside. At this point Steve said we were crazy and left. There was some dispute at the door about whether to admit us but finally we got in and I heard a couple of minutes of the meeting. ‘If they’re black, send them back.’ The atmosphere was one of rabid anti-intellectualism, clearly thought was a sign of weakness. Then somebody said, ‘they’re commies’, and we were recognised as anti-fascists, which I thought was obvious anyway. The mood was ugly so we made to leave but they weren’t able to restrain themselves, we were jostled and pushed out. Robin, a yard behind me, received a number of blows and kicks until blood was running from his nose. Some of this happened outside but the police stood around nearby, ignoring it.
The experience of seeing the Front at close hand convinced Bennie that the Front were a serious antagonist: ‘Any illusions I may have had about non-violent means of opposing them were destroyed in that school.’3
Ted Parker took part in the Wood Green protest: ‘What I remember . . . is how close we came. The Front were brought in by the police, with a lot of protection, a lot of secrecy. We didn’t really think we could stop them. But one day, we would.’
Jerry Fitzpatrick was also thinking towards the future:
I drew two lessons. First, we needed logistics, more supporters in the set area, more street planning and a better sense of what the police tactics would be. Second, there had to be an intense effort towards organising among the local community.
In the aftermath of Wood Green, campaigners from a range of left-wing groups made a serious attempt at establishing a respected, national, anti-fascist network. In 1977, Danny Reilly was a former member of IS now working at the Institute of Race Relations near Kings Cross. His plan was to launch a national anti-fascist campaign, based on the solidarity that had been seen at Wood Green: ‘People came from all different backgrounds and for a time there was good co-operation.’ In May 1977, some twenty-three anti-fascist committees in London came together to form an All London Anti-Racist Anti-Fascist Co-ordinating Committee (ALARAFCC), which adopted CARF, the paper of the Kingston Campaign against Racism and Fascism, as its bi-monthly journal.4 A joint meeting was organised and all factions on the left invited:
We tried to organise a big conference at Middlesex Poly. Loads of people came but somehow it didn’t gel. Perhaps we were too liberal. We allowed resolutions from all over. There were so many motions, compositing, it felt like student politics. There were lots of different elements represented, old Communist Party, trades council types, women’s groups and the gay movement, which was very hostile to the left . . . the movement was too disparate.
Even with decades of hindsight, Reilly is unsure what went wrong. ‘We were local groups with scant resources . . . We were trying to organise from the bottom up.’
Two weeks after the protests at Wood Green, the National Front attempted to hold an election meeting at Shoreditch School in east London. Five hundred people turned out to prevent them.5 In that spring’s GLC elections, the Front won over 100,000 votes, averaging over 15 per cent of the vote in Hackney and Tower Hamlets. The mood of popular racism, going back to the previous year’s events and the press campaign against the threatened arrivals from Malawi, was not yet exhausted.
The polic
e against black youth
The roots of the protest in Lewisham go back to a police campaign against street robberies. In May 1977, eighteen people were arrested and charged with conspiracy to steal purses. Every suspect was black. Paul Foot described their arrests:
5.30 Monday Morning. Six policemen break down the door of 21 Childeric Road in Deptford, South East London, with an axe. Another six smash down the back door. They pour inside, overturning furniture, ripping open drawers and turning people out of their beds. Christopher Foster, aged 16, is frog-marched into the road in his underclothes . . . He and four other young people in the house are rushed to Penge police station. These include Cathy Cullis, a young white girl. She is stripped to her underwear in a cell. Two policemen come and joke about the ‘disease’ she has caught living with black people.6
Tony Bogues and Kim Gordon of the SWP black members’ group Flame7 met with David Foster, the father of Christopher Foster. According to Bogues:
David [Foster] was an ordinary, nice fellow who had believed in the early stages of his life the myths about British justice but on arriving in Britain he was immediately aware of the question of race . . . We sat down and talked with him for days. His house became the community house. There were large meetings, quiet meetings. The question of self-defence from the fascists and the police came up in discussion with the youth. We spent a lot of time, a lot of time, persuading people to work with us.
David Foster’s home can be seen in Syd Shelton’s photographs of the Rock Against Racism campaign. The wallpapers are lurid oranges and browns, reminiscent of Islamic tiles. David Foster is photographed beside his wife and son. Foster smokes at home, he wears a tie and his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows. One of Foster’s sons, perhaps Christopher, is at the centre of the image, polite and respectful in the company of a guest, not even daring to make eye contact with Shelton.8
Later, Prince Charles was visiting the Moonshot Youth Club when Kim Gordon approached him and spoke about the ill-treatment of the Lewisham defendants. The prince suggested a meeting between the police and the defence committee.9 Gordon met with a senior officer but the police refused to drop the charges.
Tony Bogues recalls with pride the work done by black revolutionaries in building up a mass movement in support of the detainees:
There was a way in which you talked with working-class people. You started from what they thought. It was a different style from the British left. We didn’t leaflet people. We asked what they thought . . . I made initial contacts, with the people in Flame and also with family, friends, the sorts of people you drink with in the bar . . . The International Marxist Group had a guy called Fitzroy, from Nigeria. There was the Black Marxist Collective in Croydon. It was a different kind of politics, based on the immigrant cultures.
News of the campaign spread beyond the borough and in June 1977, the Front announced plans for an anti-mugging10 march through Lewisham.
Leila Hassan was a member of the Race Today Collective. Amongst political clubs, youth networks and even sports teams, she recalls, plans were being made to protect south London from the National Front:
In those days there wasn’t social media, there was a lot of phone calls. It was all word of mouth. You just got to hear about things. And so we knew, the fascists were coming. In terms of how it was mobilised, it was word of mouth. It just spread. It was very interconnected, the black community of the time. We thought we were on the move.
‘Lewisham was the climax’, Tony Bogues recalls, ‘of a series of activities in the black underground.’ It drew in energy, he suggests, from a dozen different campaigns taking place across the whole of London. The highest-profile of these activities was Grunwick, a photo-processing laboratory in north west London, where picket line clashes were reported on the news throughout the summer of 1977. The strike had begun a year earlier when the employer George Ward dismissed one of his employees, Devshia Budhia, for slow working and others including Jayaben Desai walked out in his support. The workforce was almost entirely Asian and largely female.
Grunwick also saw significant solidarity action by white trade unionists. Over months of picketing, the numbers protesting slowly grew and strikers approached the union APEX for support. Workers in the factory were expected to work 50 hours a week for wages of just 70 pence per hour. By June 1977, the dispute had become a fixture in the national news. On 15 June, 1,500 people joined a mass picket in support of the striking workers. Meanwhile George Ward was supported by the National Association for Freedom, a free-market organisation on the Tory right. On 9 July, NAFF turned out 250 volunteers and 150 vehicles to ferry strike-breakers across the picket line. Two days later, on 11 July, the National Union of Miners called for a day of action in support of the Grunwick strikers. Several hundred miners travelled from Barnsley bringing their brass bands and banners. A young left-wing miner from Yorkshire, David Douglass, was watching as Arthur Scargill arrived, ‘Arms outstretched at the head of the throng . . . looking like Jesus at the last supper.’ There were clashes with the police and Scargill was arrested. But the miners’ leader was not yet as well-known to the state as he was among the workers and one of the policeman told him, ‘We’ve got him . . . that leader of yours Arthur Scargill.’ ‘You’d better take a firm hold of him,’ Scargill is said to have answered. ‘He’s a slippery character.’11
The sky darkened
The Front was following the same approach as it had in 1972 at Mansfield Hosiery and in 1974 at Imperial Typewriters. The NF saw a group of black activists campaigning in response to a grievance and assumed that there would be a backlash against them. Yet one difference between its protest at Lewisham and these earlier campaigns was that in 1972 and 1974 the Front had been able to draw on a well of local support. At Mansfield Hosiery and at Imperial Typewriters, black workers were campaigning for a pay rise and equality with whites. The Front was able to present itself as the advocate of white workers who benefited from the status quo. At Lewisham, the police did not need the Front to advocate on their behalf. Nor was there are any other local campaign with which the Front could ally. There was no right-wing equivalent of the family of David Foster. The Front was bringing its members to Lewisham for an all-London mobilisation. They felt like strangers coming into Lewisham from outside.
The left, by contrast, had well-rooted local activists and a cause around which to mobilise. Ted Parker was the organiser of a local branch of the SWP. He had been brought up in Folkestone, in a patriotic ‘services’ family. He had joined the Royal Air Force at age 16, before deciding that he sided with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Parker was court-martialled, given an eight-month sentence and expelled from the RAF. He later ended up at the London School of Economics during the heady years of 1966–1969. In 1967, he toured South Africa, delivering clandestine leaflets for the banned African National Congress.
Anti-fascists in Lewisham had to decide whether or not to call for a ban on the NF march. Under the Public Order Act 1936, such powers were available to the Home Secretary and the Morning Star called on Labour’s Mervyn Rees to use them. Metropolitan Police Commissioner David McNee let it be known that he would support a ban but only if it was to last for three months, and prohibit all political demonstrations, not just those of the far right.12
Parker attended meetings with the council which discussed whether these powers should be used. He was interviewed in the Lewisham Mercury. He spoke against a general ban and called on local people to protect their area from the Front: ‘I tried to draw parallels with the Battle of Cable Street in the 1930s. Mosley had been anti-Semitic and violent. In Germany, the fascists were allowed to march. But in Britain, at Cable Street, they had been stopped.’ He was asked about the police. ‘I said I had a friend in the police who hated the Front as much as I did. But if the Front march and the police protect them, we’re ready to fight if that’s what it takes.’
Another person working on the anti-NF protest was Jerry Fitzpatrick:
A group of us
set up headquarters in a building on Clifton Rise. We occupied a house and used it as an organising centre. Norma, a local activist, was central to this organisation and Ted Parker. We created an atmosphere among black youth. People came in to collect leaflets and posters. You got a sense of people organising things themselves.
Lewisham was and is a mixed working-class area, with a high proportion of African and Caribbean families as well as many people from an Irish background. Fitzpatrick recalls the part the latter played in the run-up to Lewisham: ‘There was an Irish hall next to our centre. We were allowed into there and into the Irish pubs and dances, to raise money, to speak about the National Front as the latest incarnation of British imperialism.’
Through summer 1977, Parker recalls, the left and the right repeatedly clashed, with the Front trying to close down left-wing paper sales:
We had been selling Socialist Worker in Lewisham town centre. The Front would storm in and break us up. We had to rally as many people as we could to protect us. People used to come down from east London to help us out. There was one estate in Catford, where most of the Front lived. It became notorious for racist attacks. They also attacked a Sikh temple in Woolwich.
On 18 June, members of the Front attacked a Socialist Worker sale in Lewisham. John Sturrock’s photographs of the day, taken from behind the attacked socialists, show a man in his twenties crouched, ready to defend himself. The Front attackers have long hair and are dressed in denims and striped jackets.13
The same day, the central committee of the SWP wrote to their counterparts in the Communist Party suggesting that there should be ‘joint meetings of the committees of our two parties responsible for anti-racialist activities, with a view to launching a joint campaign within the Labour movement to drive the fascists off the streets’.14 Events on the picket lines at Grunwick may have influenced the first suggested area of joint activity; the build-up to Lewisham shaped the second.