by David Renton
Perminder Dhillon was in a small crowd of anti-fascists hiding in a restaurant. The people demanded that the owner switch on that evening’s news:
Their wounds still bleeding, people saw the Commissioner of Police, the Home Secretary and other ‘experts’ on the black community condemning the people of Southall for their unprovoked attack on the police! As usual, only pictures of injured policemen were shown – nothing of the pregnant women being attacked and the countless other police assaults.20
Blair Peach
Also caught up in the events at Southall on 23 April was Blair Peach, a 33-year-old schoolteacher from New Zealand. Derek Melser, who knew Peach in Wellington and then in London, recalls Peach as a young man who stammered in ‘a variety of explosive repetitions, facial tremors and contortions, sudden rushes of words, gasps, sighs, extended vowels, bodily jerks’. He had ‘a certain cheerful hopelessness and a lack of social ambition or pretension coupled with a wryness and sometimes bitterness, born of struggle’. Peach wrote poems and edited a poetry magazine, Argot, for which he approached an older New Zealand poet, Louis Johnson, who later recalled ‘the slight youth – Jewish perhaps – / a dark tousle of hair and owl-size spectacles / who came to my house in the early sixties / for poems for his student magazine’.21
Peach emigrated to London, after which he taught at the Phoenix School for (in the contemporary term) ‘delicate’ children. He was still working there at the time of the Southall protests. Peach was by all accounts an inspirational teacher who immersed himself in the lives of his pupils, visiting them at home and providing reading classes in the evenings and school holidays.
Peach was a consistent anti-racist. Meetings of his NUT association ended with a drink at the nearby Railway Tavern in Grove Road, Bow. One evening, the teachers were told that the publican refused to serve black customers. Challenged by them, the landlord said that blacks were ‘pimps, queers and prostitutes’. The teachers left the pub and toured round other nearby pubs, finding supporters. Returning to the pub, they picketed it and spoke to the publican again. He called the police, who arrested Peach, who was taken by the police to be the ringleader of the crowd.22 Peach was arrested and charged with threatening behaviour but acquitted. Twice in 1978–1979 he was attacked by supporters of the National Front as he cycled home from teaching at the Phoenix School and suffered black eyes, bruising and cuts.
On 23 April 1979, Blair Peach travelled to Southall by car with various friends – Jo Lang, Amanda Leon, Martin Gerald23 and Françoise Ichard. Arriving in Southall at about 4.45 p.m., they made their way to the Broadway and remained there until 7.30 p.m., when the police coach forced a way through demonstrators’ lines and escorted members of the National Front into their meeting.
After the bus had passed, the police removed the furthest cordon on the Broadway and made repeated efforts to clear the area. Some protesters tried to escape by heading south into Beechcroft Avenue. But the road was no safe haven. It turned at its southern end onto another road, Orchard Avenue, taking demonstrators onto Uxbridge Road, back towards the town hall and the worst of the fighting.
At around 7:45 p.m., Peach, Leon, Gerald, Laing and Ichard decided to leave the Broadway. They turned left (south) into Beechcroft Avenue, which was not blocked by the police. Peach and Leon, who had agreed to stick together, were behind the others. Leon later told the inquest that she heard police sirens and saw a row of police officers with truncheons ready. She saw a police officer hit Peach from behind.24
Another witness, Ms Atwal saw the attack on Blair Peach. On her account, Peach was walking around the corner from Beechcroft Avenue into Orchard Avenue, when a police officer with a shield in his left hand and a truncheon in his right hand hit him. She then saw Peach sit down, when a police constable came over to him.
Peach was now sitting against a wall, where that officer Constable Scottow (on his account) took him to be hiding from the police. Scottow neither asked Peach if he was well nor called an ambulance but shouted at him to move on.25
Blair Peach was taken into 71 Orchard Avenue by members of the Atwal family. They let Peach lie on their sofa and gave him water. An ambulance was called at 8.12 p.m. On arrival at hospital, Peach was transferred into intensive care, where he was found to have swelling on the outer membrane covering his brain. He died at 12.10 a.m. on 24 April. The cause of his death was a fractured skull.
The justice campaign
In the aftermath of 23 April, the courts were arrogant in their use of power:
A 14-year-old Sikh boy appeared before a magistrate at Ealing juvenile court. He had been charged with ‘threatening behaviour’ and being in possession of ‘offensive weapons’ at 6.20 p.m. on 23 April 1979 . . . The defence produced several witnesses. These included a white doctor, a white solicitor and a white ambulance man. They all testified that the boy, at the time, was being treated for a hand wound and had suffered a severe loss of blood . . . But defence witnesses, even respectable ones, are not permitted to obstruct ‘the due process of law’. The boy was found guilty and fined £100. The defence argued that he had no job and no source of income. The Magistrate replied, ‘Let him find a job.’ The defence retorted that it was a criminal act for a 14-year-old to gain employment. But the Magistrate had meant a ‘paper round’ or something like that. The boy . . . will be paying 75p a week for the next two years.26
The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and Daily Telegraph all made the events at Southall their front-page lead. The headlines were ‘Battle of Hate. Election Riot: Police Hurt, 300 Arrested’, ‘Race Rioters Battle With Police Army’, ‘300 Held In Riot At NF Demo’ and ‘300 Arrested At Poll Riot’. One edition of the Daily Mail went furthest in confusing the racists and the anti-racists, proclaiming, ‘Race Rioters Battle With Police Army’. The papers depicted anti-racists as violent thugs.
Local papers were, if anything, even worse. The Hereford Evening News was critical of Southall residents: ‘However understandable the resentment of the large Asian community in the west London suburb where the National Front chose to stage a deliberately provocative election meeting, there can be neither excuse nor forgiveness of their violent attacks on the police.’ According to the Oxford Mail, ‘Because this is a free country, where even detestable organisations have to be allowed to hold election meetings to support their candidates, a big force of police was present. The organisers of the demonstration caricatured this as police repression.’ The Swindon Evening Advertiser claimed that ‘The Anti-Nazi League, which was originally sponsored, in part, by a number of respectable people who did not stop to think twice, has now degenerated into an umbrella for extreme left malcontents.’ The Nottingham Evening Post bemoaned the fact that ‘If the extreme political nut-cases want to behave as they have done, in this country of free-speech, there is little we can do to stop them, short of banning them completely.’27
A number of papers called for bans against the far left. According to the Oldham Evening Chronicle, ‘the real consensus in Britain is to get the rabble of both Right and Left off the streets’. The Bradford Telegraph and Argus asked, ‘What price the Anti-Nazi League when the people it persuades to demonstrate use Nazi methods?’ The Oxford Mail termed anti-Nazi protesters ‘enemies of democracy’. Finally, the Lancashire Evening Post developed this phrase, suggesting that while the political right were irresponsible, the left were more dangerous: ‘In the short term they are more dangerous than the National Front because they hide their revolutionary and totalitarian aims behind a noble cause.’28
Mark Steel was caught up in events at Southall. Back home afterwards, he experienced a complex of emotions, ranging from shock at the news of Blair Peach’s death, to remorse that he had been excited by the clashes with the police and guilt that he had escaped when someone else had died. What angered him most was the press:
Every paper, news bulletin, politician, police officer and respectable member of society was yelping at how this demonstrating mob must be stopped . . . From the way it
was reported, there must have been people who thought, ‘What on earth made those violent Anti-Nazi people want to kill that poor teacher?’29
As after the previous protests at Red Lion Square and Lewisham, anti-fascists were forced onto the defensive and widely blamed for the disturbances. The means they chose to defuse this hostility was to campaign repeatedly for a public inquiry for Blair Peach and for the prosecution of the police officers who had killed him.
Rock Against Racism put on a two-day benefit for Peoples Unite at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, with the Ruts, the Clash, Misty in Roots and Aswad playing. RAR also brought out a leaflet, ‘Southall Kids are Innocent’:
There have been police killings before . . . But on April 23rd the police behaved like never before . . . The police were trying to kill our people. They were trying to get even with our culture . . . What free speech needs martial law? What public meeting requires 5,000 people to keep the public out?30
Fifteen thousand people marched on Saturday, 28 April, in honour of Blair Peach, with thirteen national trade union banners taken on the demonstration and Ken Gill speaking on behalf of the General Council of the Trades Union Congress. He said that the SPG should be disbanded. ‘Every one of us’, he concluded, ‘must take up this call.’ Workers at the Sunblest bakery raised £800 for Peach’s widow Celia Stubbs.31
Jim Nichol recalls travelling to spend an afternoon with Stubbs and being with her as she received visitors: ‘The door went more than once. There were people with turbans on and they had buckets, full buckets. They had taken a collection round the factories. So many people had contributed that the men could hardly lift the buckets.’
According to Balwinder Rana, for the week after Peach’s death, anti-fascists were everywhere – flyposting, speaking, organising and discussing the lessons of the police riot. The police did not dare to stop them from organising. It was almost as if the police were shamed by the enormity of what they had done.
For eight weeks, Blair Peach’s body remained unburied. The day before the funeral, he was accorded a ‘lying in state’ at the Dominion Theatre in Southall. Mike Barton had the job of protecting Peach’s body overnight:
At dawn, we were supposed to open up the building. There was already a queue of people. Later, two police showed up, an officer and a sergeant. They were asking to see Paul [Holborow] . . . I was rather unhappy but I didn’t have the gumption to stop them. After five minutes, the sergeant came out, walking quite quickly. There was the officer, after him, looking straight ahead. Then Paul’s head poked out, ‘And don’t you ever come back!’ In the circumstance of a large community and attacks on a white demonstrator who had been killed, the police quite clearly felt out of their depth.
On 13 June 1979, Blair Peach was finally buried. Between 8,000 and 10,000 people joined his funeral procession.32 On his gravestone were words chosen from the Victorian socialist and artist William Morris, ‘Let them remember for all time this man as their brother and as their friend.’
In June 1979, two months after Southall, a memorandum placed in the House of Commons Library by the new Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw gave Peach’s cause of death as a fractured skull and referred to a series of occasions prior to Peach’s death when objects had been thrown at police officers, implying that the police charge along Beechcroft Avenue was justified as a means to deal with anti-fascist violence:
[I]t was necessary to deal with a large group of youths near Alexandra Avenue. The throwing of missiles increased and it was necessary for police to use protective shields. It was at this time that an officer at the junction of Northcote Avenue and the Broadway was hit by a brick, which was thrown by someone in a crowd which had gathered in Beechcroft Avenue opposite. His jaw was fractured in three places. Assistance was then summoned to disperse the crowd and Mr Blair Peach was seen at the junction of Beechcroft Avenue and Orchard Avenue having sustained an injury to his head.
Alexandra Avenue and Northcote Avenue, where these objects were said to have been thrown, are on the north side of the Broadway. They are normally just a minute’s walk from Beechcroft Avenue but in the crowded tumult of 23 April, they were at least five minutes and several hundred people away from where Peach died.
The inquest into Peach’s killing was presided over by John Burton. The coroner was capricious in court, interrupting those acting for Blair Peach’s family,33 and behaving as if his primary business was to distract everyone from the only credible explanation for Peach’s killing, namely that he had been struck on the head, accidentally or deliberately, by a member of the SPG, the only police officers in the vicinity at the time.
Three of Burton’s decisions, in particular, were criticised at the time and have become, if anything, even harder to justify over time. First, the coroner refused the request of Peach’s family to have the case heard by a jury. By tradition, juries were mandatory at all inquests. Since 1926, they had been optional, save where the death occurred in prison, where it was caused by an accident, poisoning, or disease requiring notice to an inspector or government department, or where it occurred in circumstances whose repetition would be prejudicial to public health or safety. The refusal to call a jury was reversed by the Court of Appeal.
The second was Burton’s refusal to show the jury the police report into Peach’s death.
Third, midway through the inquest, Burton told the jury that there were two ‘extreme’ theories as to how Peach had been killed. The first, which he referred to for the first time in court (no witness having ever suggested anything close to it), was that a left-wing demonstrator had stood next to Peach and struck him on the head in order to create a martyr. The other, equally ‘extreme’, theory was that Blair Peach had been killed by the police. Burton failed to go on to explain that this ‘extreme’ theory was the central finding of the Cass Report and of the investigation into Blair Peach’s killing which had already been carried out by the police themselves.
The results of an independent post mortem showed that Peach’s death had been caused not by a conventional police baton, but by some kind of home-made weapon, a cosh or a hosepipe filled with lead.34 The jury were told about a raid on the SPG officers’ lockers which found offensive weapons including a leather-covered stick (PC Bint), two knives (PC Woodcock), a large truncheon (Inspector Hopkins), a crowbar, a metal cosh, a whip and a whip handle (PC White) – twenty-six weapons altogether. There was, moreover, no rational basis on which to deny that Peach had been killed by a police officer. The only matter which would still have been in dispute, had the inquest been properly conducted, was whether the killing had been lawful; had the officer who killed Peach had a lawful reason (such as self-defence) for striking him?
Many of the police officers who had been called as witnesses to the inquests barely cooperated at all, with several denying that they remembered anything about the protest. Yet the most striking feature of the evidence, from the point of view of the jury, must have been that none of the officers incriminated each other, none owned up to attacking Peach, and none admitted being anywhere near him when the blow was struck. The two barristers for Blair Peach’s family and for the ANL, without Cass’s report with its forensic analysis of the officers’ history of incriminating admissions, had nothing specific to tie any officer to Peach’s death.
The verdict of the jury was death by misadventure – in other words, that the jurors did not accept that there was a deliberate assault on Blair Peach. But the jury added significant riders to their verdict. First, they found that SPG officers should be more closely controlled by senior officers and liaise more closely with ordinary police officers in future. Second, they suggested that police officers should be issued with maps before major demonstrations. And third, there should be regular inspections of police lockers to check for any other unauthorised weapons.
The Cass Report
Kept from the inquest jury and from public view until 2010 were the findings of Commander Cass, the police officer who conducted the initial investigation. Acc
ording to his report, Blair Peach had been at the junction of Beechcroft Avenue and Orchard Avenue when he was struck. The blow fell as Peach turned into Orchard Avenue:
After being hurt it is reported Peach was pushed around the corner and fell to the ground, getting up after the police had gone and making his way unsteadily across the road to No. 71 from which he was later taken to hospital.35
Altogether, 14 witnesses had seen a police officer strike Peach on the head, while no witness had seen Peach struck by anyone else. But which officer had struck the fatal blow? Cass noted that there were six officers in vehicle U11 who disembarked and who could have assaulted Peach and he named Officers E (Cass refers to him as an Inspector and Inspector Alan Murray was the only officer of this rank in vehicle U11), H (who must be PC Greville Bint, who accepted at the inquest leaving the vehicle at the same place as Murray), G (PC James Scottow), I (PC Anthony Richardson), J (PC Michael Freestone) and F (PC Raymond White), in that order of probability. He placed Officer F, the driver, at the end of his list.
Cass asked if it was possible that any officers other than those of the SPG could have carried out the killing. His conclusion was ‘from enquiries it is now obvious that the officers concerned were Special Patrol Group and there is no credible evidence that any other officers were actually at the scene’.36
Officer E, Inspector Murray, eventually admitted leaving the vehicle immediately at the junction of Beechcroft Avenue and Orchard Avenue – in other words, exactly at the place where Ms Atwal had seen an officer strike Peach. His presence was not explained in his first statement. Cass was not impressed by this change of account, terming the original version a ‘concoction’. Murray also said in his original interview that there were other (non-SPG) police officers ahead of him at Beechcroft Avenue. This turned out to be another lie.37