by David Renton
There were other aspects of Murray’s behaviour which also troubled Cass: after the incident with Blair Peach, the SPG officers had gone along Orchard Avenue to the junction with Herbert Road, where an ITN crew had been present: ‘Here Officer E and a television camera crew had what it termed a “heated exchange” . . . there is no doubt that Officer E was not as cool as he should have been and the strain was showing’.38
Cass produced a second report in September 1979. By now, Murray’s behaviour had become even more erratic. He refused to attend an identification parade. He attended for duty in August with a black eye, which he claimed to have suffered while playing badminton and with a beard, changing his appearance.39
Cass identified Inspector Murray as the primary suspect for Peach’s killing. His reasons were as follows: Murray, White and Bint had all given an original version of their story, which they later admitted was untrue. The effect of their story was to exculpate Murray and Bint. Why would they have worked together to fabricate an untrue version of events unless one of them had struck the fatal blow?
Of each of Murray, White and Bint, Murray was the most likely candidate to have manufactured the story: he was intelligent. He had a strong and dominating personality. He left the vehicle immediately where Peach was standing. After Peach’s killing, Murray took lengthy absences. He sent a solicitor to see Cass, asking for him to be interviewed by a more junior and less demanding questioner.
Just three weeks after the appearance of the Cass Report, the Director of Public Prosecutions, Sir Thomas Hetherington, announced that despite what Hetherington described as Cass’s ‘very thorough’ report, there would be no prosecutions of any police officers.
Shaping the memory of the events
Blair Peach’s coroner, John Burton, has been widely criticised over the years for the part he played in the inquest, with campaigners accusing him of having covered up the circumstances of Peach’s death. It is an allegation which takes on even greater force if it is remembered that Burton had in his possession the best single evidence as to how Peach died – the Cass inquiry – and that it showed that the most likely cause of death was the very theory which Burton had labelled ‘extreme’: namely, that a police officer, most likely Inspector Murray, had killed Peach.
Through 1979 and 1980, anti-fascists kept up the pressure, demanding that Peach’s murderers be brought to justice. A month after Peach’s death, TUC General Secretary Len Murray addressed police cadets at the Metropolitan Police centre at Hendon, demanding the disbanding of the SPG. In the New Statesman, the journalist Paul Foot put the case for a public inquiry.40 In October 1979, The Guardian published an advertisement signed by thirty trade unions and several hundred people calling for an inquiry into Peach’s death. In January 1980, the Leveller magazine reported the names of the six SPG officers who Cass had identified as the main suspects.41
Writers including Edward Bond, Michael Rosen, Louis Johnson, Sean Hutton, Tony Dickens and Siegfried Moos wrote poems in Peach’s memory. Chris Searle was a friend of Peach, a fellow teacher and union activist. This is how he recalled Peach:
His was a precious, loving life.
He built his passion with great bridges
from the farthest islands of the southern seas
to the mist that clears in the classrooms of Bow –
Life was too short to stand injustice,
to stand the insults that he saw around him.42
Mike Carver, Hazel O’Connor and Ralph McTell released songs commemorating Peach’s death. This is Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Reggae fi Peach’:
Everywhere you go it’s the talk of the day
Everywhere you go you hear people say
That the Special Patrol them are murderers (murderers)
The artist Peter Kennard designed a postcard to raise money for the campaign. It shows an ordinary-seeming postage stamp with a Dixon of Dock Green-type figure addressing two young children. Superimposed over the same is the image held through a magnifying glass; it shows the same policeman striking Peach on the head.
A Friends of Blair Peach Committee43 called a march to commemorate the anniversary of Peach’s death and produced posters naming the police suspects with the words, ‘Wanted for the murder of Blair Peach’. Pickets were held outside around fifty police stations, sparking complaints from the Police Federation and calls for the protesters to be prosecuted.44 Several thousand people attended the march. On the walls of Phoenix School where Peach taught, letters were painted in yellow graffiti six feet high, ‘Southall Remembers’. They are still there, forty years later.
On the first anniversary of Peach’s death, Southall resident Parita Trevidy was interviewed by New Zealand’s Listener:
Southall is ours. For us it’s one place in England where we know we’re relatively safe because we’re among our own people. It’s like you going back to New Zealand. We came here for a better life. But now we face racism of the worst sort, from the state, in the form of police brutality, indiscriminate violence from the police force, such as happened on April 23. That’s why Blair Peach died. He was in the firing-line . . . between the police and us.’45
Notes
1 A. Mackinnon and C. Shaar Murray, ‘RAR: It’s number one, it’s top of the Agitprops’, New Musical Express, 24 March 1979.
2 Quoted in D. Renton, ‘Anti-fascism in the North West 1976–1982’, North West Labour History 27 (2002), pp. 17–28.
3 J. Pearson (Tameside CARF) to Richard Buckwell (FFAN), 14 December 1978.
4 D. Hann and S. Tilzley, No Retreat: The Secret War Between Britain’s Anti-Fascists and Far Right (Manchester: Milo Books, 2003), p. 38; S. Birchall, Beating the Fascists: The Untold Story of Anti-Fascist Action (London: Freedom Press, 2010), p. 35.
5 J. Pearce, Race with the Devil: My Journey from Racial Hatred to Rational Love (Charlotte, NC: St Benedict Press, 2013), p. 54.
6 ‘Reds stage bogus “racist bombings” to get NF banned’, National Front News 15 (winter 1978).
7 ‘NF flat a bomb “plant”’, Guardian, 12 December 1978.
8 ‘“Anti-Nazi League” crumbles into squabbling farce’, National Front News 16 (spring 1979); National Front News 23 (June 1980).
9 K. Leech, Brick Lane 1978: The Events and Their Significance (Birmingham: AFFOR, 1994 edn), p. 88; National Council for Civil Liberties, Southall 23 April 1979, Report of the Unofficial Committee of Inquiry (London: NCCL, 1980), p. 190.
10 H. Mahamdallie, ‘The day the police murdered Blair Peach’, Socialist Worker, 24 April 1999.
11 ‘No Nazis in Southall’, Socialist Unity, April 1978.
12 S. S. Grewal, ‘Capital of the 1970s?’ Southall and the conjuncture of 23 April 1979’, Socialist History 23 (2003), pp. 21–43, p. 16.
13 NCCL, Southall 23 April 1979, p. 38.
14 Pearce, Race with the Devil, p. 65.
15 ‘Southall 23 April 1979’, in Blair Peach Primary School, Re-naming Ceremony (London: Blair Peach School, 1994), p. 37.
16 S. Silver, ‘Remember Blair Peach’, Searchlight, April 1999.
17 A. Nehmad, ‘Statement of witness’, 30 June 1981.
18 NCCL, Southall 23 April 1979, p. 41
19 Women’s Voice, May 1979.
20 P. Dhillon, ‘They’re killing us in here’, in M. Rowe (ed.), Spare Rib Reader (London: Penguin, 1982), pp. 461–463.
21 H. Manson, ‘Blair Peach: the making of a martyr’, The Listener (New Zealand), April–May 1980; D. Renton, ‘Who was Blair Peach?’, RS21, 23 April 2014.
22 ‘The report of Commander Cass into the events surrounding the death of Blair Peach in Southall, west London, on 23 April 1979’ (‘The Cass Report’), enclosures, p. 357.
23 Gerald’s memories are summarised in Anti-Nazi League, Who Killed Blair Peach? (London: Anti-Nazi League, 1979), p. 1.
24 Cass Report, enclosures, p. 259.
25 Cass Report, enclosures, p. 143.
26 Guardian, 24 September 1979; Southall Defence Committee Bulletin 1 (
January 1980); ‘Amnesty for Southall’, leaflet, January 1980.
27 Hereford Evening News, 24 April 1979; Oxford Mail, 24 April 1979; Swindon Evening Advertiser, 24 April 1979; Nottingham Evening Post, 25 April 1979.
28 Oldham Evening Chronicle, 24 April 1979; Bradford Telegraph and Argus, 24 April 1979; Oxford Mail, 24 April 1979; Lancashire Evening Post, 24 April 1979.
29 M. Steel, Reasons to be Cheerful (London: Scribner, 2001), p. 45.
30 Campaign Against Racism and Fascism/Southall Rights, Southall: The Birth of a Black Community (London: Institute of Race Relations and Southall Rights, 1981), pp. 1–3, 56–57; Rock Against Racism, Southall Kids Are Innocent (London: RAR, 1979); the RAR leaflet was based on A. Xerox (D. Widgery), ‘Long time, see them a come’, Temporary Hoarding 9; Daily Telegraph, 24 April 1979.
31 Campaign Against Racism and Fascism/Southall Rights, Southall, p. 59; Mahamdallie, ‘The day the police murdered Blair Peach’; D. North, ‘Blair Peach’, Socialist Worker, 28 April 1978; Anti-Nazi League, Who Killed Blair Peach?.
32 ‘Eight thousand mourn Blair Peach’, Daily Express, 13 June 1979; Ken Leech noted that there were at least five priests in attendance, at least one of them singing the Internationale: Letters, Guardian, 15 June 1979.
33 D. Ransom, The Blair Peach Case: Licence to kill (London: Friends of Blair Peach Committee, 1980), pp. 19–21.
34 ‘The cops and the cosh’, Sunday People, 10 June 1979; also ‘Riot death: cops find cosh’, Daily Mirror, 8 June 1979
35 Cass Report, p. 11.
36 Cass Report, p. 63.
37 Cass Report, p. 73.
38 Cass Report, p. 21.
39 Cass, Second Report, paras 288–290.
40 ‘London Diary’, New Statesman, 15 June 1979; ‘Call to publish Southall Report’, Morning Star, 13 July 1979.
41 ‘Who killed Blair Peach?’, Guardian, 9 October 1979; ‘Six names out of the blue’, Leveller 34 (January 1980).
42 Socialist Worker, 28 April 1979.
43 There was also a Southall Defence Committee tasked with defending the 342 people facing criminal charges in the aftermath of the protests. Suresh Grover of the Southall Monitoring Group (today the Monitoring Group) criticises the decision to launch a Friends of Blair Peach campaign, arguing that it diverted attention from the community campaign and blaming the SWP. ‘It was difficult . . . You’d think individual organisations . . . because of the severity of what happened would come together to save a town. But actually self-interest still dictated on a large basis’: A. Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movement (London: Pluto, 2013), p. 53.
44 ‘Peach group name police on “Wanted” poster’, The Times, 22 April 1980.
45 H. Manson, ‘Blair Peach: the making of a martyr’.
9
KEEPING ON KEEPING ON
As the May 1979 general election approached, the leadership of the National Front was showing ever more difficulty in responding to public opposition. The public marches which the Front had once used to win new recruits, were becoming fewer; the risk of street opposition was too great. Meanwhile, such was the extent of anti-fascist opposition that even the normal forms of democratic politics – street meetings or public addresses by election candidates – became harder and harder to organise. A growing number of inner-party critics could be only silenced by the promise of the Front’s leaders that their party was on the verge of an electoral breakthrough. This was the answer the Front’s leaders gave to any sort of challenge. Whether it was the ANL outside their meetings or disgruntled Front supporters inside, the solution to any difficulty was the election. A high vote would solve their problems.
Articles in Spearhead insisted that elections were ‘the activity around which all else in the National Front revolved’ and that their organisation was ‘a serious and seriously-taken political entity’.1 By standing in excess of three hundred candidates, the Front guaranteed itself party political broadcasts.2 The Front told journalists that it expected to receive in excess of half a million votes.
The members of the NF were unable to put their message across: their graffiti was painted out and they could not march without fear of disturbances. The National Front also had increasing difficulty in hiring halls outside election periods. According to one supporter of the party, Tony Simms, ‘The trouble we had booking rooms for meetings was unbelievable . . . We had to lie about who we were.’ Front branches obtained bookings under false names: in Redbridge, it was ‘Woden Football Club’, and members were instructed to remove their badges and not talk politics in the bar afterwards.3 When contacted by the Front, Labour-controlled local authorities such as Newham refused to accept their bookings; requiring the Front to take these councils to the courts in an attempt to reverse the bans.4
Ray Hill, a British Movement supporter turned anti-fascist mole, attended a National Front election meeting in Leicester in early 1979 which was addressed by two local speakers, Tony Reed-Herbert and John Peacock:
Both Reed-Herbert and Peacock presented themselves as the sweet and reasonable face of the party. How outrageous, they declared, that they should be branded as Nazis by their opponents . . . They intended no harm to black people. They would repatriate them humanely, not to say generously. Their gripe was not against Jews as such but only against those who misused their power and influence against the interests of Britain and its people.5
In March 1979, music journalists Angus Mackinnon and Charles Shaar Murray interviewed the members of the RAR collective for NME: Red Saunders (‘big, bearded and ebullient’), Syd Shelton (‘wiry and compact’), John Dennis (‘gaunt . . . thoughtful’), Lucy Toothpaste (‘uptight’) and Kate Webb (‘friendly’). They asked Widgery if RAR was capable of integrating a wider variety of musical forms: heavy metal for example, or disco? ‘We don’t have any ideological bans on any kind of music,’ he answered. ‘We’ve just found it easier to reach certain types of bands.’6
In April, Merseyside Anti-Racist Alliance and the ANL organised a joint protest outside a Front meeting in New Brighton, with a thousand people taking part.7
On 21 April, the Labour Party took out advertisements in every major music paper: ‘Don’t just rock against racism . . . Vote against it. Vote Labour.’ Red Saunders wrote to the NME in response:
Don’t just what? We’ve just rhinoed around the country, arguing and playing our unmistakeable anti-racist message and it’s left us seven grand in debt . . . Ok, it seems like most of us will be putting our shaky little crosses in Labour’s box on May 4th. Rock Against Thatcher – we mean it! But no illusions. We’re looking forward to seeing Labour start to really Rock Against Racism: ending the racist immigration laws, abolishing Sus, etc.8
As the May 1979 elections approached, local papers increasingly sided with the anti-Nazis. Even the Leicester Mercury, which had previously been willing to run articles warning of the impact migration would have on local services, finally answered its critics and came out against the NF: ‘To give the National Front the chance of power to implement its cruel policies would be a rejection of humanity.’9
The proximity of the election did not lead to any discernible moderation of the Front’s politics. The party’s general election leaflet contained a declaration of the Front’s war against Communism and an allusion to the conspiracy theories which proclaimed that behind Communism stood a Jewish influence:
We must recognise that the object of this wider movement of which Communism is a part is to subject us to the rule, not of Russia as such, but of a cosmopolitan elite, of whose aims Russia is merely an instrument and America an instrument of a different kind.10
In May 1979, the Front stood 303 candidates.11 This slate was more than any minor party since 1918. Yet every Front candidate lost his or her deposit; those alone cost the organisation £50,000 and for months after the election, local groups were doing little more than fundraise to make up for the loss.12 The 190,000 votes obtained by the Front represented a result of just 600 votes per seat or an
average vote share of around 1.6 per cent. In every seat where the Front had stood in both the October 1974 and the May 1979 elections, its support fell by a minimum of a quarter and in some cases three-quarters of its previous vote.
By May 1979, the historian of migration Colin Holmes writes, ‘the prospect of the National Front becoming a serious political force, a prospect which could not have been ruled out in the early 1970s, had evaporated’.13
For Andrew Fountaine and others of the National Front old guard, the explanation for the Front’s poor showing in the 1979 election was Tyndall’s association with Nazism, which had proved repugnant to voters. The answer, it followed, was to purge Tyndall himself and ‘To ensure that the image of the Party presented to the British people is at all times one which they recognise as a reflection of their own and not having its origin in other places at other times’.14 When it became clear that Fountaine could not find a majority in the Front’s Directorate, he left, forming a break-away National Front Constitutional Movement.
‘It was extraordinary how fast the Front declined after the election,’ recalls Steve Jeffreys. ‘Where they had been active, you hardly saw them at all.’
Correspondence between Front supporters shows their demoralisation. In summer 1979, Jenny Doyle, a founder member of the Front, wrote to another member, Richard Verrall – these days best known as the author of the Holocaust Denial pamphlet, Did Six Million Really Die? – but wrongly perceived by Doyle as a moderate and an ally. Tyndall and Webster, Doyle complained, were ‘nonentities’, guilty of repeated error of judgement. She argued that ‘the only way the Party can succeed is without them’. Doyle criticised Tyndall and Webster for having stuck to a policy of compulsory repatriation, a policy which required a level of violence that ‘the British people’ would never accept: ‘Tyndall and Webster were trying to sell the unsellable, no wonder they [i.e. the Front’s critics] call us the party of hate.’
