by David Renton
O’Callaghan was also at the clock tower:
The police attempted to clear this area several times but without success. Then they brought out the horses. This was the first time I’d ever encountered police horses. It’s quite a frightening experience but together with some other comrades we got the people to link arms facing the police lines . . . At that time the pavements along Lewisham High Street were being newly paved with conveniently-sized bricks. These were used to pelt the police. It was quite terrifying at first. We were occupying the street facing a line of police. Behind us were large numbers of young blacks who were lobbing half-bricks over our heads into the middle of the police – miraculously none of us seemed to be hit. The police would charge us, our line would part and the young blacks would simply melt away into the side streets. Then the whole thing was repeated facing in the other direction. At some stage the police brought out the riot shields, the first time they had been used on the ‘mainland’.
Now that the fascists had left, the conflict that remained was between anti-fascists and the police. According to Langford:
I saw the riot shields in use outside the Odeon cinema and later further south towards Ladywell there was a police motorbike abandoned, covered with green paint and on fire. Lots of dented and scratched police transits with big holes in their windows were zooming round but there was no other traffic whatsoever.
Dave Widgery describes the mood after the day had ended:
We were frightened and we were brave and proud and ashamed at the same time. As the day became more brutal and frightening and the police, furious at their failure, turned to take revenge on the counter demonstrators, there was one big flash of recognition on the faces in the groups: between dread and socialist, between lesbian separatist and black parent, between NME speedfreak and ASTMS branch secretary. We were together.30
Faith Foster, the mother of Christopher, was also upbeat:
The National Front couldn’t march through Lewisham. We wouldn’t let them. We stuck to our word, ‘They shall not pass.’ I caught the bus into Brockley with my friend to see the end of the march, as I couldn’t go all the way; my daughter had only just come out of hospital after having her appendix out and couldn’t be left for long. We walked down Ladywell Road and what I saw, my heart was laughing inside. I had not been happy for so long.31
The evening news featured a frightened old woman sitting with her feet on the pavement, clearly dazed and incapable of standing. The decontextualised image failed to name her as an NF supporter, Esther Sizer, a veteran of previous protests who had marched, by her own account, ‘expecting trouble’.32 ‘That night’, wrote the Sunday Telegraph’s Sally Beauman, ‘on television; the NF appear[ed] model citizens and the left wing opposition, throwing bricks at police, look[ed] terrifying.’33
Newspapers ran with the hundreds arrested and the fifty policemen injured, portraying the conflict as a senseless battle between two parallel sets of extremists. The front page of the Sunday Times reported Metropolitan Police Commissioner David McNee condemning the ‘determined extreme element’ of the left for preventing a ‘lawful march’ from taking place.34 The Sunday People featured the headline, ‘Bobbies pay the price of freedom’. A leader in The Times blamed the SWP, ‘whose members and adherents, some of them armed with vicious weapons, came prepared to fight. That their belligerent intent so soon transferred itself from their avowed enemy, the Front, to the police is an appalling indictment of their true philosophy.’ The Daily Mail used a front-page picture of a policeman holding a studded club and a knife, weapons supposedly found at Lewisham and beside him was the headline, ‘After the Battle of Lewisham, a question of vital importance, now who will defend him?’ The Daily Express went further: ‘We have no time or sympathy for the Front . . . All the same, the Front does not go in for violent attacks on the police or on authority.’ Hugo Young told the Sunday Times that the SWP was ‘a forerunner of the forces of darkness’. Tory leader Margaret Thatcher informed the press that ‘Your Communism is the left foot of Socialism and your Fascism the right foot of it.’35
Several Labour Party voices agreed. The Daily Mirror claimed that the SWP was ‘as bad as the National Front’, while Michael Foot, a left-winger since the 1930s, insisted that ‘you don’t stop the Nazis by throwing bottles or bashing the police. The most ineffective way of fighting the fascists is to behave like them.’ A spokesman for Prime Minister Jim Callaghan let the press know that he was considering a prohibition on left-wing marches.36 Syd Bidwell, the Ealing Labour MP and a former member of IS/SWP’s distant predecessor the Socialist Review Group, announced that he had time neither for the Front nor ‘for those crackpot adventurers who have yet to take their part in responsibility in the real Labour movement. We cannot counter them by a strategy of trying to out-thug the thugs of the National Front.’37
Despite these criticisms, anti-fascists remained upbeat. ‘A lot came out of the events at Lewisham,’ writes Widgery:
The black community, who had successfully defended their patch, had had a glimpse of a white anti-racist feeling which was much bigger and more militant than the liberal community-relations tea parties might suggest. A lot of ordinary people thought it was a Good Thing that the little Hitlers had taken a bit of a stick. Every little racialist was made smaller.38
According to the paper CARF, such was the scale of the setback that ‘if I was a National Front member I’d be hitting the bottle by now’.39
‘Two-thirds of the people who marched with the NF at Lewisham’, claims Red Saunders, ‘never marched again. Lewisham pulled back the Union Jack to show the swastika underneath. If you’re not ready for confrontation, you never come again.’
Among the Front, the mood was in fact polarised by age. The party’s newest supporters remained bullish. Joe Pearce was 16 years old. A recent recruit to the Front, his recollection of Lewisham was of exhilaration in the aftermath of the fighting. As Pearce saw it, he had been tested but was not afraid. A month later, Pearce would bring out the first edition of an NF youth paper, Bulldog. Yet even in Pearce’s upbeat memories, there is a passing acknowledgement of the Front’s future difficulties. He notes that prior to Lewisham, the Front had been capable of pulling together crowds of several thousand supporters. The crowd at Lewisham was younger. ‘In the future,’ he writes, ‘the older, respectable NF supporters . . . would stay away.’40
John Bean was typical of the older generation; he was already withdrawing from the National Front after twenty-five years of political activity on the far right. The Front’s march through Lewisham, he believed, was a grotesque piece of political stupidity. The NF ‘had marched through an immigrant area deliberately to stir up trouble’. It was obvious to him that the Front would take the blame.41
Martin Webster’s justification of Lewisham, published in Spearhead, appears to have had these criticisms in mind. Some three-quarters of Webster’s article was given over not to the events at Lewisham or his plans for what would follow but a retrospective justification for calling the march. ‘The Activists’, he wrote, [i.e. the members of the Front who planned the event] ‘felt that as, over years, the Police had always allowed SWP/IS members, International Marxists and Reds of various other stripes to “militantly demonstrate” against [the Front’s] marches . . . the Police would give equal counter-demonstration rights to the National Front.’42
In a letter to Prime Minister James Callaghan, John Tyndall warned against any ban on future Front demonstrations. ‘The violence at Lewisham’, Tyndall insisted, ‘was organised, not by the National Front itself but by its extreme opponents.’ He and his party were the victims, he insisted:
The question has been asked if we were not intending to ‘provoke’ why did we march through an area where there is not a large immigrant population? The simple answer is that it is in the major urban areas of this country where most of our active support lies and there is scarcely any major urban area left where there is not a large immigrant population.
; Writing as if he genuinely believed he had the ear of his intended audience in Downing Street, Tyndall went on to list what he suggested were a series of alternatives to an anti-Front ban. It would be far better, Tyndall argued, if the Labour government instead proscribed the SWP who were responsible for events at Lewisham. After that, the government should ban the Notting Hill Carnival.43
In the aftermath of Lewisham, both the left and the right faced the problem of intense, hostile, press scrutiny. The tactics of anti-fascists were to change dramatically. The Front, by contrast, attempted to carry on without change.
Notes
1 D. J. Douglass, The Wheel’s Still in Spin (Hastings: Read ’n’ Noir, 2009), p. 405.
2 M. Walker, ‘Left buries its differences to oppose National Front’, Guardian, 22 April 1977.
3 D. Renton, K. Flett and I. Birchall, The Battle of Wood Green (London: Haringey Trades Council, 2002), pp. 15–17.
4 CARF 1 (May 1977), p. 4.
5 ‘Forward to a command council’, reproduced in Race Today, July–August 1978.
6 P. Foot, ‘Police on racist rampage’, Socialist Worker, 11 June 1977.
7 T. Bogues, K. Gordon and C. L. R. James, Black Nationalism and Socialism (London: SWP, 1979).
8 S. Shelton, Rock Against Racism (London: Autograph, 2015), pp. 41–42.
9 ‘A mugging – but the police look the other way’, Socialist Worker, 25 June 1977.
10 This was not the first occasion on which the Front had called a demonstration around that issue. An October 1975 anti-mugging demonstration through the East End is recorded in S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 edn), p. 327.
11 Douglass, The Wheel’s Still in Spin, p. 406.
12 E. Smith, British Communism and the Politics of Race (Leiden: Brill, 2017), p. 185; Morning Star, 10 August 1977.
13 Bishopsgate Institute archive, LHM/93.
14 ‘An appeal for united left action’, Socialist Worker, 18 June 1977.
15 G. Roberts, ‘The strategy of rank and filism’, Marxism Today, December 1976; D. Hallas, ‘The CP, the SWP and the Rank and File Movement’, International Socialism 95 (February 1977).
16 Statement of the London District of the Communist Party, The London Campaigner (Bulletin of the London Communist Party), 19 June 1974.
17 Morning Star, 12 August 1977.
18 Smith, British Communism, p. 190; Socialist Worker, 9 July 1977.
19 South London Press, 7 October 1977. There is a fictionalised account of this conflict in R. Creffield, Days of Hope and Broken Dreams (Wadebridge: Inky Little Fingers, 2018), pp. 3–8.
20 D. Peers, ‘Poison!’, Socialist Worker, 9 July 1977.
21 National Front Lambeth branch, bulletin, August 1977, Searchlight Archive, Northampton University BRI/02/24.
22 W. Ellsworth-Jones, J. Ball and M. Bilton, ‘214 seized, 110 hurt in clashes at Front march’, Sunday Times, 14 August 1977.
23 D. Widgery, Beating Time: Riot ’n’ Race ’n’ Rock ’n’ Roll (London: Chatto and Windus, 1986), pp. 45–47, 45.
24 C. Rosenberg, ‘Labour and the fight against fascism’, International Socialism Journal 39 (1988), pp. 55–94.
25 Widgery, Beating Time, pp. 46–49.
26 Shelton, Rock Against Racism, p. 52.
27 Shelton, Rock Against Racism, pp. 52–53; Alex Carter estimates the number of anti-fascists at Lewisham as 3,000–6,000, writing that ‘many’ carried blunt instruments and knives but while the fascists in Shelton’s image show disorientation, confusion – and possibly – the signs of physical attack, notably, none of the images show knife wounds: A. Carter, ‘The dog that didn’t bark? Assessing the development of “cumulative extremism” between fascists and anti-fascists in the 1970s’, in N. Copsey and M. Worley (eds), ‘Tomorrow Belongs to US’: The British Far Right since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2018), pp. 90–112, 100.
28 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 50. Thirty years later, Howe was to recall seeing himself in photographer Don McCullin’s photo of the same scene: ‘I cannot remember being excited that August afternoon in 1977. Passionate? Yes. Pleasantly victorious? That too’: D. Howe, ‘Don McCullin’, New Statesman, 13 August 2007.
29 ‘John Tyndall’s vision’, Camerawork, Lewisham: What Are You Taking Pictures For? (London: Half Moon Photography Workshop, 1977), p. 6; Widgery, Beating Time, p. 48.
30 Widgery, Beating Time, pp. 45–47; Rosenberg, ‘Labour and the fight’, pp. 55–92, 75–79.
31 Women’s Voice, September 1978; CARF 3 (October–November 1977), p. 11.
32 P. Dobbie and D. Meilton, ‘March victim’s secret’, Evening News, 15 August 1978; The back-cover of M. Webster, Lifting the Lid Off the ‘Anti-Nazi League’ (London: NFN Press, 1978) reproduces a photograph of the 72-year-old Ms Sizer, who is said to have marched only because she was ‘fearful that she [would] be a mugger’s victim’, the same source also acknowledges that she had been a member of the NF for five years.
33 S. Beauman, ‘What lies behind the Front’, Sunday Telegraph, 2 October 1977.
34 Ellsworth-Jones, Ball and Bilton, ‘214 seized’, Sunday Times, 14 August 1977.
35 Sunday People, 14 August 1977; Daily Mail, 15 August 1977; ‘Thug law’, Daily Express, 15 August 1977; New Statesman and Nation, 29 September 1977; D. Bence and P. Connew, ‘Why the Union Jack ran red with blood’, Daily Mirror, 15 August 1977.
36 C. Reiss, ‘Jim puts ban on marches’, Evening Standard, 15 August 1977.
37 C. Bambery, Killing the Nazi Menace (London: Bookmarks, 1992); p. 33; ‘Liberals call for ban on Front marches’, The Times, 15 August 1977; Rosenberg, ‘Labour and the fight’, p. 77.
38 Widgery, Beating Time, p. 49.
39 CARF 3 (October–November 1977), p. 10.
40 J. Pearce, Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love (Charlotte, NC: St Benedict Press, 2013), p. 51.
41 J. Bean, Many Shades of Black: Inside Britain’s Far Right (London: Millennium, 1999), p. 214. The plan is also criticised by a later NF member in T. Simms, Match Day: Ulster Loyalism and the British Far-Right (London: Create Space, 2016), pp. 70–71.
42 M. Webster, ‘The Lewisham outrage’, Spearhead, July 1977, p. 17.
43 J. Tyndall to Rt. Hon. J. Callaghan, 18 August 1977, National Archives, HO 418/26.
6
EVEN GOD HAS JOINED THE ANTI-NAZI LEAGUE
Although, after Lewisham, much of the press coverage was hostile to the anti-fascists, some voices were raised in the protesters’ defence. In the NME, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons wrote that ‘Too few people are carrying the responsibility for all of us. But perhaps you think this wasn’t your battle. Tell it to the blacks. Tell it to SWP. Tell it to Rock against Racism.’ Tom Picton of Camerawork criticised the national press: ‘None of [the papers] will accept that it is a violent act to march through any community, mouthing racist slogans and carrying racist placards.’ The IMG’s Socialist Challenge argued that Lewisham had been ‘a defeat for the police and government’. In the Jewish Chronicle, a paper which had often been critical of the left, Philip Kleinman wrote that ‘When [the National Front] marches through an area with a large immigrant population, its purpose is precisely the same as that of Mosley’s blackshirts; to stir up communal strife with the hope of reaping an electoral advantage.’ He insisted that ‘whatever their defects, the Trotskyists have the right attitude to the National Front and should not be left alone to stop its provocations’.1
After Lewisham, the SWP proposed an anti-fascist pact. Before the protest, this had been conceived either as an alliance of the Trotskyist groups or as a united front with the Communist Party. Now what was considered was a much broader alliance, to include middle-of-the-road Labour MPs. The most detailed account of the unity proposals appears in Dave Widgery’s book, Beating Time.2 ‘The SWP’, he writes, ‘made the decision to broaden the base of the anti-fascist movement by initiating the Anti-Nazi League.’ But w
hy was this extra breadth needed?
The SWP’s publications gave the impression that in the aftermath of Lewisham the far left had achieved a heroic and probably decisive victory over fascism. This was the message of Socialist Worker: ‘We stopped the Nazis — and we’ll do it again!’3
It would be more accurate to say that the left was poised between threat and opportunity. In the short term, socialists were confronted by a wounded opponent, with the NF having every motive to escalate its violence. In August and September 1977, National Front supporters threatened socialists including Wandsworth Labour MP Tom Cox,4 and attacked and set fire to the SWP’s headquarters.5 In November, National Front parliamentary candidate George Wright was fined after smashing the windows of Bradford’s Left Club. In the same month, another Front supporter in Bradford, Charles Appleyard, was jailed for eighteen months after stabbing a member of the SWP, Gary Whiting.6 With around 12,000 members, the National Front’s membership outnumbered the SWP’s at least three to one. The Front’s supporters were predominantly male, relatively young and unafraid of using violence.
In the aftermath of Lewisham, the SWP’s central committee was divided, with no coherent shared perspective. The range of opinions among the leadership spanned from those who believed that the organisation needed to defend itself, preparing for an unforgiving period of arrests and harassment from the Front, to those who thought that their party was in the news and should seek to recruit rapidly, with a view to doubling its membership in no more than a few weeks.7
The emphasis on recruitment was backed up by articles in SWP publications. Members of the group would speak to contacts made during anti-fascist demonstrations and encourage them, at the very least, to subscribe to Socialist Worker.8 Among those who joined after Lewisham was Albie Lythgoe in Merseyside, the son of an anti-racist docker. No long before, a number of black kids at his school had been bullied by Front supporters. Albie and his friend Joe stood up for them. He recalls that ‘Lewisham had a real impact on me. We were looking for a left group to join. On the telly it said that the SWP were the boot-boys of the left, and we were boot-boys in Liverpool. We said we’ll have a bit of this.’ But those SWP members who expected their party to grow were to be disappointed. Earlier in the decade it had acquired a modest but real industrial cadre and now, in circumstances of trade union decline, the party was having real difficulty just in holding what it had. The SWP’s membership peaked at a little less than 5,000 at the end of 1975 and was down to 2,000–3,000 by the decade’s end. The influx of younger recruits could not make up for the loss of older members affected by redundancies.9