My Battle of Lewisham
13 August 1977
The tube disgorged us at the end of the line. New Cross. The National Front were marching on the streets of London, and my friend Johnny and I had taken it on ourselves to stop them; obviously not on our own.
We arrived early and made our way to the clock tower at New Cross where five roads converged in front of the town hall. We joined a couple of hundred other demonstrators, and within an hour the numbers had swelled to a few thousand. The Wikipedia entry for “Battle of Lewisham” puts the crowd at 5,000 including the mayor and a couple of bishops. Of course back then we didn’t have Wikipedia. We didn’t even have digital watches. Mind you, we still had Elvis. Just.
At the edges of the crowd an assorted band of newspaper sellers were propagating the various party lines that we all knew, loved and hated so well. Somewhere towards the middle of the crowd a faint megaphone was trying to give some semblance of order and discipline to the crowd as the local Labour MP tried to rally us with a speech which was unfortunately largely unintelligible.
It was getting to that stage in demonstrations where the initial excitement and euphoria was giving way to boredom, aching feet and the suspicion that you might be missing something good on the telly. So, to raise our spirits the police ran through their rehearsal for the Royal Tournament.
Shrieks from the far edge of the crowd preceded mounted police officers riding their snorting chargers into the crowd. Following them was the extraordinary sight of helmeted police rushing forwards wielding riot shields and batons. Riot police had never been seen on the streets of London before. I’m sure that riot police have a place in today’s world. A riot, for example, would seem a fairly suitable place for them to be.
The dictionary defines a riot as “a violent disturbance of public peace by three or more persons” which seems a fairly workable and uncontentious definition. There were certainly three or more persons in the square that Saturday afternoon but the peace, as far as I could see anyway, was far from being disturbed. And even if it was, there was no sign whatsoever of violence.
Their batons swung down onto people’s heads and into their chests as the horsemen scythed into the crowd. Faced with a situation reeking of revolution, we revolutionaries naturally turned and fled. Johnny and I pushed our way out from the centre of the crowd towards the edge by one of the roads — New Cross Road — that led away from the town hall. As we got to the edge it was clear what was happening; the horses were a diversion. A few hundred yards down the road, coming out of a side turning and heading away from the demonstration was a slender line of fluttering union flags guarded on one side by an equally slender line of police. Crack a few leftie heads, but let the Front have their march. It’s a free country after all.
We started to run. The call went up and as one the demonstration turned and ran down the hill towards the Front. This was it: the confrontation, and Johnny and I were quite literally the front line. We ran. Christ, how we ran; faster and faster; blood pounding in my ears. The flags came nearer and nearer, until I could see the faces — twisted, ugly faces, faces of hate. No, faces of fear. There were skinheads inevitably, but mingled amongst them were old soldiers with their chests decked with medals and families, even children. And they looked fucking scared, because there were three thousand people running towards them. The police looked scared. The children looked terrified. But for the first time — the only time — in my life, I was fearless. I was gripped by anger, an immense overwhelming anger.
And this anger all focused on these horrible people and the filthy ugly flags of hate that they used to signify their brutality. This wasn’t my flag. It was theirs and they were welcome to it.
“YOU FUCKING SCUM.”
It takes quite a lot to get me angry: around 200 Nazis generally does it.
Let us just freeze that scene for a moment: 200 Nazis holding union flags looking scared, protected by a few bobbies hopelessly outnumbered by Johnny and I now just feet away from them, appearing to lead an angry and baying mob. No need to freeze it just in your imagination, because the Hornsey Journal froze the real thing. Front page on Monday. Me and Johnny leading an angry and baying mob. But freeze it we will and step back seven months to January 1977 to understand why I was there and why I was so angry.
The Law Centre had agreed to the idea of a student placement to help them research into the incidence of racial attacks in the East End of London.
On my first afternoon came my first job. Equipped with a woman’s name and address, I was to go alone and interview her about being attacked on the street. After a rapid briefing in interview technique by one of the barristers I set out down the road to a council estate.
Her name is forgotten, but the experience is still vividly remembered. It was a pre-war estate with a few broken windows, some boarded up, and kids gathered in stairwells. Refuse was piled next to huge battered bins. Her flat was on the ground floor of the four storey block, the door opening straight onto the concrete square formed by three adjoining blocks. The door was the same faded, flakey green as all the others. Half of one of the windows was boarded up. I rang the bell and waited.
A young woman with long jet black hair opened the door on the chain and I somewhat nervously explained who I was. She let me in and led me through to the living room. Against the wall facing the partly boarded window was a large sofa, sitting on the end of which was a frightened woman. Her two young children sat by her on the floor. They remained silent the whole time that I was there. A chair was pulled up opposite her. As I eased myself uncertainly into it, the young woman spoke in Bengali to the older woman that I was the man from the Law Centre. As she listened to who I was and why I was there, her dark wide eyes studied me critically. As I looked back I realised that she was older, but certainly not old. Maybe thirty. I was looking for bruises or some other evidence of the attack, but I saw none. The evidence of her pain only became clear when she spoke.
With the younger woman translating, she started to describe the events that occurred nearly two months previously, and I hurriedly took notes. Within two minutes I stopped writing. Thirty five years later I can still remember every word.
It was a Friday morning in early November when, at about eleven, she set off with her two children to shop at the market. It was getting harder to do the shopping and maybe in a couple of weeks one of her friends would have to do it for her, as the baby was due in just over a month. Wheeling the younger one in front of her in a push chair, the older child walked at her side as they proceeded across the courtyard, down a short alley, and towards the new shopping centre. A pedestrian walkway led from a street of terraces through to the small centre, which was grouped around the base of two tower blocks. Fifty yards ahead of them was the point at which the walkway opened onto a quadrangle filled with market stalls. Between them and the opening were three skinheads.
She had become used to such people. Most times she went out, young white boys would shout at her and although she didn’t understand what they were shouting, especially on the occasions that they spat at her, she got their drift. It sounded similar to what they shouted outside her front door after dog shit had been put through the letter box, which was similar to what they had shouted last week after a piece of metal piping crashed through the living room window.
Their pace slowed as the taunts began. From fearsome faces loud unintelligible sounds roared out. Her older child, still small, grabbed at her coat while the younger one started to cry. She had been told that the best thing was to just keep walking and not to look at them. But they blocked her path. She stopped in front of them.
The shouting continued as one came up to her and spat in her face. As she wiped it away she felt tears — tears of fear — well up in her eyes. He pointed at her swollen belly, shouting louder and pulling the pushchair out of her grasp. She cried out and struggled towards it, but he held her back. She felt his boot crash against her leg and crumpled in pain to the ground. She lay there listening to the laughter and feeling the spit land on her face. Then they started to kick. She curled up to protect her unborn baby, but the boots found their target. They kicked at her head, her back, her belly. They howled and hooted and spat. And as she felt the blood run down her face and pain wrack her entire body, she finally heard their boots make off away down the walkway.
She felt the frightened hug of her child and heard his sobbing close to her face. The younger one she could hear screaming a few yards away. She couldn’t move and she couldn’t see. She tried to speak, to ask if they were alright, but she couldn’t speak. The pain was excruciating.
Now she heard other voices. Foreign voices. They came closer. They didn’t sound bad voices, not like the other ones. Then she heard nothing at all. Silent. Black.
When she awoke it was still black. Her eyes wouldn’t open and they hurt. But she could smell the hospital and she could feel the familiar hand of her husband holding hers. She whispered his name and she heard him say that he loved her. He told her that the children were alright. They were frightened, they were very frightened, but they were unhurt. But before he said it, she knew that her baby was dead. And she cried herself silently to sleep. And when she awoke she cried again.
The young woman showed me out. As I left the living room the woman sat at the end of the sofa, a hand resting on her belly, staring at the boarded window with eyes that ran with tears. Her two children were cuddled up next to her under her arm. I couldn’t speak. I knew that there were questions I had to ask, but there was a big ball in my throat. If I was to speak the ball would break and so would I. I had to ask, though.
“So, until the people ran over from the market, there were no witnesses who could identify the skinheads?”
“Oh yes,” the young woman replied. “All during the attack people were walking past going to and from the market.”
“And nobody did anything? Nobody helped or tried to stop them?”
“No. People don’t help pakis.”
Now let us fast forward back to New Cross. Me and Johnny.
I was there on the street full of anger because of what these hateful people holding their vile flags were doing — and (let’s be honest here) getting away with — to people like the Bengali woman. And this woman was not an isolated incident. Far from it. Everyday people were being attacked all over the East End of London. And the police were doing nothing about it.
It was, I believe, a contingent of the Socialist Workers Party that saved the Front from whatever anger I could visit upon them. Bricks rained down — not on the Front, but on us. From about fifty yards away a group of people had ditched their armloads of Socialist Workers and were dissembling somebody’s garden wall. Full marks, then, for initiative. Clearly bottom of the class though when it came to trajectory physics. Falling short of their intended target by a few yards, bricks thudded against my arms and back.
“You’re hitting us you stupid bastards.”
But when Trotskyists get a foolish idea into their head, there’s no shifting it, and the bricks kept coming. Johnny and I struggled back away from the front line and the hail of bricks. The Front, together with their police escort, were heading off down the road and the safety of a larger police cordon.
But it was clear by this point that a real battle was raging around us. Riot police wielding shields and batons were advancing towards demonstrators. The violence we witnessed was mild, although we later met up with people who had been severely beaten by the police. For us, though, this was enough.
We stood on the platform, slightly shaken, waiting for the tube. I stared at a cigarette end thinking about the day. I thought about their faces, their ugly foul faces. I thought about how they had perverted their children. Would I have hit them? I really don’t know. I felt frustrated. Soiled. They’d filled me with their own poison.
13th August 1977
Two days later Johnny and I made the front page of the paper.
And the day after that Elvis bit into a burger for the very last time.
13th August 2017
Forty years later I look back on that day as the moment my country’s flag became in my mind such a powerful symbol of hatred, intolerance and injustice — and I feel the same about all flags to be honest. Without exception. Nationalism together with all that it stands for became an idea of such overwhelming repugnance to me. And that has stayed with me ever since, and indeed has become stronger.
The other instinct strengthened by that day is that of solidarity. We stand with those who are not served by justice, who have no recourse to the law, who are under attack and oppressed. That is fundamental.
And we take to the streets when we need to — because that actually does change things, which is precisely why the police try to stop you doing it. Not sure I’d be up for another Battle of Lewisham, but I’d probably help out by working the social media or making sandwiches. I do remember feeling very hungry on our way home.
Forty years on many things have changed for the better. But one thing has not. We still have to remind people that Black Lives Matter, we have the obscenity of Grenfell Tower, we still have people being attacked and murdered because of their ethnicity. As a young man I thought that by the time I reached my sixties, all that would be history.
It isn’t. It’s the state of Britain in 2017.
We must never give up on the idea of creating a better future.
