As the 1980s ground on, many of these centres closed or were scaled back due to funding cuts. One example of this was the Leicester Unemployed Workers Centre (upstairs at 138 Charles Street), where among other things meetings were held in 1984/85 in support of striking miners. In March 1987 council plans to reduce the scope of the centre led to a month long occupation.
I visited the occupation and recently came across this leaflet in an old diary, setting out the basic demands: 'We, some of the unemployed users feel this is reducing the limited facilities available for the unemployed people of Leicester... Basically we want the Unemployed Workers Centre to be run by the unemployed for the unemployed'. Another occupation leaflet quoted in Workers Press article below, says 'We are oppressed by property and the human lottery of unemployment' and criticises decisions made by people 'with no personal experience of long-term unemployment and without consultation with the "experts" (the unemployed)'.
According to a report in Counter Information, occupiers set up 'a free food kitchen and workshops, with the result of more people than ever using the centre'. There were tensions between occupiers and what Counter Information describe as 'trade union bureaucrats and Labour Party hacks' and I remember there was some discussion about whether decisions in the occupation should be just for the unemployed or whether paid workers at the centre could be involved. There were also some of the problems familiar to anybody who has been involved in organising open access spaces - one person had to be evicted for stealing from the occupation fund and a woman occupier was sexually assaulted. The occupation seems to have finished on 7 April 2025, by which point around 30 people were involved according to local paper the Leicester Mercury. The centre continued afterwards until at least 1990.
Counter Information, July 1987
Workers Press, 14 March 1987
Workers Press, 21 March 1987
Other 1980s Leicester bits...
I had some close friends living in Leicester in the 1980s and spent quite a bit of time there. It had a radical bookshop, Blackthorn Books, with a cafe in the basement (Bread & Roses) and I recall a lot of us hanging out there in 1985 as there was a threat of it being attacked by the British National Party on the day before a planned Bloody Sunday demonstration in the city. The next day (3/2/1985) the Bloody Sunday event went ahead and was followed by a picket of Leicester prison in support of Irish Republican prisoners (see full report of this here).
The following year one of the Unilever animal rights trials was held in Leicester and I went to to the prison to visit one of those jailed, the late Gari Allen. Also in 1986 (20th January), I noted that I had 'Shouted abuse at my second cabinet minister in 4 days, when I joined a demo of about 200 people outside Leicester Poly where Keith Joseph [Thatcher's education secretary] was visiting'. A few days earlier I had heckled Thatcher herself when she was on a visit to Luton.
Leicester visits also sometimes involved dancing at the university student union Mega Disco or the Leicester Poly equivalent, and I remember seeing Chumbawamba's Danbert Nobacon playing in the uni's Mandela Bar, singing a song in support of the Silentnight strikers. The latter dispute, involving bed makers at factories in Lancashire and Yorkshire, was one of the longest strikes in British history lasting from June 1985 to April 1987.
Artist Catherine Chinatree's 'Grow Room' exhibition at Quench gallery in Margate features paintings and treated video drawing on her memories of raving and reflections on its wider significance. As she puts it '“Leicester, 1998 I attended my first ever jungle rave - Urban Shakedown’s ‘Hysteria’. A found video online depicting this moment inspired me to capture this sense of hope & revolution, to create paintings using the film’s visuals, in conjunction with sound works and moving image, re-animating scenes from Hysteria.”
I really like that the flyer for the exhibition is based on the flyer for the rave in question.
'it highlights optimism and transformative moments that can alter society'
'The rave beckons and the moon shines... A portal brimming with promise. A labyrinth of sound. And in between each laser beam WE is found' (Alicia Charles)
Original cassette pack from Urban Shakedown with Randall, Bryan Gee etc.
Long ago and far away (well mid 1980s Luton) there was a great punk band called Karma Sutra. I hung out with them and made a few squiggly noises on my wasp synth on one of their 1985 demo tapes. Now 35 years later said demo tape and others from that time have appeared on vinyl as an album 'Be Cruel With Your Past And All Who Seek To Keep You There' put out by Sealed Records (listen/buy it here). It comes with a great booklet with interviews and flyers. For me Karma Sutra were a portal into anarcho-punk and its associated activism, perhaps in particular hunt sabbing as I explain in the following
I’d had the Crass records, the Conflict badges, and a mohican, I’d been on a Stop the City demo too but my real initiation into the world of ‘anarcho punk activism’ didn’t come until September 1st 1984 when I went to a Hunt Saboteurs benefit gig at Luton library theatre arranged by local band Karma Sutra. Headliners Antisect from Northampton were one of the more metal tinged punk outfits, with heavy guitar riffs and gruff vocals growling “why must I die?” (The “I” in question being a laboratory animal of course).
If the extremism of
noise and content was impressive it wasn’t unexpected. What really amazed me
was what was going on off the stage. I’d been to loads of gigs where I’d steamed
in with my mates, bought some drinks, watched the bands, and left with the only
interaction with others being some slam dancing at the front. Here there were
people talking, and busy bookstalls from the Hunt Saboteurs and from Housman’s,
the London radical bookshop, with a selection of anarchist papers and other
publications (I later found out that several people from the Luton scene were
working the odd shift there, and eventually I did the same myself).
Hunt Sabs benefit at Luton Library Theatre September 1984, flyer advertising Antisect, Karma Sutra, Ring and Danbert Nobacon. Not sure if this was the actual line up on the night - in my diary I noted seeing Antisect, Karma Sutra, The Sears (from Walsall) and The Remnants (Luton punk band). The night ended up with somebody being stabbed in the hand, though not seriously injured, I think linked to skinhead trouble - earlier a skinhead had jumped on stage and given a nazi salute. As discussed below, violence from far right skinheads was an ongoing threat at this time
I chatted with someone
about hunt sabbing and within a week I was standing in a field in
Northamptonshire at 8 am in the morning at the beginning of the fox cub hunting
season. It was the start of a couple of years of intense activity, with
countless hours spent in the back of a white van hurtling between punk gigs,
hunts, demonstrations and protests. I'd been politically involved in various left wing movements before but this was a different intensity of activism.
Of course these were
tumultuous times across the world – the days of Thatcher vs. the miners, of
Reagan and the new Cold War, of uprisings against Apartheid in South Africa.
And in towns and cities across the UK, some of the most determined opposition
to the state of the world came from groups of young, invariably black-clad
punks. This article is a snapshot of one of those scenes, in Luton, but similar
stories could be told about many other places.
Punk in Luton
Thirty miles north of
London, Luton in the mid-1980s was still an industrial town dominated by the
Vauxhall car factory, as it was to remain until General Motors stopped making
cars there in 2002. There had been a punk scene in the area since the early
days: The Damned played one of their first gigs at Luton’s Royal Hotel in 1976
and the Sex Pistols played at the Queensway Hall in neighbouring Dunstable in
the same year. Luton’s first punk band, The Jets, featured on the famous Live
at the Roxy album in ’77.
The best known punk band
to come from Luton was UK Decay, formed in 1979. The band had some association
with Crass - in December 1979 they played with Crass and Poison Girls at a gig
in a tin Nissan hut at Marsh Farm in Luton, and their final record – the ‘Rising
from the Dread’ EP - was released on Crass’s Corpus Christi label in 1982. But while
UK Decay released the great anti-war track ‘For my country’, they weren’t
really part of that anarcho-punk protest scene as such. Along with
Northampton’s Bauhaus they were developing a proto-goth aesthetic, referencing
horror themes and plundering Edgar Allen Poe and Herman
Hesse for inspiration. Indeed the reference to them as ‘the face of punk
gothique’ by Steve Keaton in Sounds (February 1981) is credited as being one of
the originators of the term ‘goth’ for this emerging sound.
UK
Decay were influential stalwarts of the indie charts, and among other things
supported The Dead Kennedys on their 1980 UK tour. For a while they were
involved in a short lived punk/new wave record shop in Luton town centre,
Matrix, which closed down shortly after a party where the Kennedys and other
party goers ran amok in the Arndale Centre car park.
By
1984 UK Decay had split up, giving rise to a couple of splinter bands (Furyo
and In Excelsis) and the post-punk scene too had begun to fragment. The town’s
sub-cultural outcasts tended to congregate at one pub in particular - The
Blockers Arms in High Town Road (of which more here). Among the punky types there
were different factions, albeit overlapping and coexisting peacefully – some
slightly older first generation punks, early goths, what would later be called
indie kids, and what might be termed ‘anarcho-punks’.
Luton Marsh House Free Festival, September 1984 with Newtown Neurotics, Attila the Stockbroker, Nick the Poet, Karma Sutra, Black Mass (St Albans anarcho punk band) and Snatch - a memorable day, it poured with rain towards the end and loads of us got up on the stage for shelter and joined in singing with Attila.
There
were no strict borders between these groups - every individual had their own
combination of politics, music tastes and hairstyles - so it’s perhaps
misleading to talk of a discrete, separate anarcho-punk scene. But within this
continuum there was a definite current that was more overtly political and
musically more into the bands like Crass and Conflict.
I
don’t think most people like this would have defined themselves then as anarcho-punks
or even necessarily as anarchists, but there was a shared, loose
anti-authoritarian politics, with a strong focus on being against war and militarism
and for animal rights. People were typically vegan at a time when supermarkets barely
catered for vegetarians - these were the days of homemade houmous.
It
would be misleading too to use the term ‘Crass punks’. Crass had certainly been
very influential earlier on but they were coming to the end of their active
life, playing their final gig in 1984 – a miners’ benefit in Aberdare. At the
thrashier end of things Conflict were now the most influential band, but the
scene had become much more musically diverse. Bands like Chumbawamba with their
harmonies, Slave Dance with their situationist squat funk sound, and No
Defences with their tricky time signatures were a long way from being Crass or
Conflict copyists.
In
Luton, the house band of the scene was Karma Sutra. They had been included on
Conflict’s 1984 Mortarhate compilation ‘Who? What? Why? When? Where?’ with
their track ‘It’s our World Too’ and were later to release an album ‘The Day
Dreams of a Production Line Worker’ on their own Paradoxical Records. Another
Luton band on a similar wavelength, Dominant Patri, had already split up by
1984. The other main ‘anarcho’ band in the town at the time was Penumbra Sigh, who formed I
believe in 1985, and there were also like-minded bands in nearby towns, such as
Medical Melodies in St Albans.
I
sometimes operated the slide projector at gigs for Karma, and I occasionally
turned up at their rehearsal space with my wasp synth – you can hear it on one
of their demo tapes from the period recorded in Luton's Midland Road studio. But mostly I just travelled around with
them and others to gigs – squat gigs in London such as in the Ambulance Station
on the Old Kent Road, a pub in Brixton or a bus station by Kings Cross; gigs in
far off places like a CND benefit supporting Chumbawamba in Stockport, gigs in
nearby towns like Welwyn Garden City and St Albans; gigs with Conflict, Chumba,
Antisect, The Sears, Blyth Power, Flowers in the Dustbin, Slave Dance, State Hate, No
Defences, Sacrilege, Brigandage, Black Mass, The McTells, The Astronauts and many more. But
the music was only part of it and here I want to focus on some of the other
things we got up to.
Chumbawamba, Karma Sutra and Sacrilege, CND benefit at Scunthorpe Baths, 1 March 1985 (I remember burning my hand on the slide projector as well as some great music!)
Hunt Sabbing
‘It’s normally a
quiet Northamptonshire lane – but on this occasion it looks more like a
battlefield. Furious members of the Grafton Hunt are blocking the road with
their horses and refusing to move. Angry hunt saboteurs rev their cars, hoot
their horns and demand that the horses get out of the way… A battered van and
an assortment of old cars appeared and about 30 mainly young protestors dashed
down a track close to the wood. A genuine Cotswold hunting horn, blown by a
saboteur, did a good impression of the Grafton’s rallying horn, while the rest
of the party joined in with fake shouts and calls…There’s another whirling
confrontation and a young female saboteur is lying unconscious in a ploughed
field – knocked flat by a horse… another saboteur is thrown into a stream by
hunt followers, and there are more scuffles’ (When the hunters become the
hunted’, Alex Dawson, Chronicle and Echo, September 10 1984)
The fine art of
preventing hunters killing foxes and other animals dated back to the formation
of the Hunt Saboteurs Association in 1963. Luton had been home to a
particularly militant sabbing group in the early 1970s, from which emerged the
Band of Mercy to take direct action including sabotaging hunt vehicles. This
group, which included Ronnie Lee, was to become one of the founding cells of
the Animal Liberation Front.
The mid-1980s Luton
sabs operated across the Beds, Bucks, Herts and Northantscountryside with occasional forays further
afield. Our nearest fox hunt was the Enfield Chace, in pursuit of which we
would head out of town having scoured Horse and House magazine for intelligence
of where they were to be found of a Saturday morning.
We quite often went out
with the Northampton group, sabbing the Pytchley, Grafton or the Vale of
Aylesbury fox hunts.. There was also a group in Bedford but even though there
were some sound people in it we didn’t entirely trust them because we suspected
that their van driver had dubious fascist connections (she later ended up as a Labour councillor in Milton Keynes, I guess people can change).
The biggest events were
national and regional ‘hits’, when sab groups from across a wide area would
converge on one hunt. Sometimes these would feature spectacular clashes, with
red coated hunters on horseback, hunt followers, police and a hundred or more
brightly haired sabs scuffling and chasing each other, and sometimes a fox, across
fields and through woods. I remember being in the woods near Sole Street in Kent, disrupting the East Kent hunt with sabs from Canterbury, Thanet, Brighton and Surrey in March 1985. It felt like being in a medieval peasants revolt with sabs carrying sticks charging at the hunters deep in the trees - it was the week that Kent miners returned to work at the end of their strike and class war was in the air.
Ideally the hunt would be delayed by stopping it
moving off, or blockading the kennels where the hounds were kept. At the start
of the 1985 season for instance, around 100 sabs blockaded the kennels of the
Cambridgeshire Foxhounds, preventing the van carrying the hounds from leaving
on time [I believe the pictures below are from that day, I recognise a couple of Coventry sabs in them including all in black John Curtin].
The guy on the right rode his horse straight at me, so I was knocked on the ground a couple of seconds after taking this photo!
At other times,
sometimes with as much effect, it would just be a handful of us, hardly seeing
the hunters but distracting the hounds from a distance blowing hunting horns or
spraying anti-mate on the ground to obscure the scent of the fox.
There were also less direct tactics - there were tales of some sabs doing magic rituals to protect the fox before setting out on a Saturday morning. This was the first time I had heard of such 'magical activism' and shortly afterwards I was introduced to the work of Starhawk - hanging around court while watching one of the Unilever trials (arising from a mass animal liberation league raid on a Bedfordshire laboratory) someone was reading 'Dreaming the Dark: Magic, sex and politics' which described the work of witches in the US peace and anti-nuclear movements.
Whatever the numbers out sabbing the conflict was usually uneven with the hunting cavalry facing the animal rights infantry. On my very first hunt, a sab was knocked out by a horse from the
Grafton Hunt near Slapton in Northants. On another occasion I was knocked
flying by a horse, but escaped serious injury. A few years later, in 1991, hunt
saboteur Mike Hill was to be killed by a hunt vehicle used by the Cheshire
Beagles. In 1993 15 year old Tom Worby was killed when he was dragged under the wheels of the Cambridgeshire's houndvan (and indeed in 1995 Jill Phipps, who I remember meeting at that first
hunt at Slapton, was killed by a lorry during an animal rights protest at
Coventry airport).
My first time hunt sabbing - a woman lies injured after being hit by a horse from the Grafton Hunt. Her friend comforts her - note Crass patch on trousers (Chronicle and Echo, September 10 1984).
The police generally
turned a blind eye to any violence inflicted by hunt followers on sabs, and it
was the latter who tended to get arrested if there were any clashes. For
instance in March ’85, eleven sabs were arrested as we tried to stop the Old
Berkeley Beagles hunting hares near Thame in Oxfordshire.
Sometimes the hunt could not be found at all, and there would be fruitless tours of country lanes in the back of a van. Where large numbers of sabs were gathered together with nothing to do the temptation to mischief elsewhere was strong. In March 1986, a big group of sabs who had originally gathered to oppose the Warwickshire hunt headed to Leamington Spa town centre. After a sit down in McDonalds, we moved to a couple of local fur shops, The Sunday Mercury reported (16.3.1986): ‘A crowd of 70 demonstrators caused disturbances throughout the afternoon in the centre of Leamington. Some burst into Brians Specialist Furriers in Regent Street and grabbed expensive fur coats from racks before hurling them outside into the road’. 12 people were arrested including three women from Luton who were detained over the weekend - one of whom was slapped in the face by police for refusing to answer questions. A ‘Leamington Dirty Dozen Defence Fund’ was set up to support them.
Report of Leamington Spa animal rights protest from Luton Animal Rights bulletin no.2, April 1986- one person was later jailed for 6 weeks for assault
On another occasion, in November 1986, Luton sabs headed off for a national hit near Leicester with around 150 sabs from Coventry, Leamington, Birmingham, Sheffield, Northampton, Rugby, Leicester and Lincoln. After chasing after the hunt, aided by CB radios, fog stopped play and the hunt went home early without a kill. The sabs headed into Leicester to join an anti-fur demo, with one of the Luton group being arrested for ABH after a scuffle during a sit in at a fur shop.
Not all sabs were punks of course, but our group was predominantly so, as were others. As well as the sabbing itself, keeping it going involved raising funds for van hire, petrol, materials and the occasional fine. Jumble sales and benefit gigs were the main source of income, including an amazing hunt sabs benefit we put on back at the Luton Library Theatre in 1985 with Chumbawamba, No Defences and Karma Sutra. Karma also played a benefit gig for the Leamington defendants at Luton’s Cock Inn (May 1986) along with Medical Melodies, Herb Garden and Kul.
1985 Luton Hunt Sabs benefit with Chumba, No Defences, Karma Sutra and Penumbra Sigh. What a great gig that was, No Defences' mesmerising performance was fortunately recorded for posterity
Report from Luton Animal Rights newsletter no.4, December 1986 - mentions Leicester fur shop demo following national 'hit': 'We went inside the shop and staged a sit-in, some people stayed outside the shop chanting. While inside some protestors had a slight scuffle with an irate shopkeeper'
Luton hunt sabs jumble sale 1986
Report from Luton Animal Rights newsletter no.1, December 1985 - 'On November 23rd we were one of eleven van loads of sabs who went to sabotage the Pytchley, another vicious gang of fox killers who were hunting near Northampton'
The donkey-jacketed Luton Hunt Sabs march through the mud near Pulloxhill in Bedfordshire, January 1985. I think this may be the day described in diary extract below
'26th January 1985: about 12 of us went in a hired van to Pulloxhill where the Enfield Chace were hunting. When we arrived the local sherrif, sorry police officer, tried to run us out of town. He said we had no right to be there, and told us to drive home. Needless to say we ignored him'
[This is an edited extract, with newly added pictures, from my article - Neil Transpontine, Hyper-active as the day is long: anarcho-punk activism in an English town, 1984-86 in 'And all around was darkness' edited by Gregory Bull and Mike Dines, Itchy Monkey Press, 2017. The full article goes on to look at more Luton activism covering animal rights, anti-apartheid, the peace movement, Stop the City, the miners strike and more. The book is an excellent collection of participant accounts of the scene including The Mob, Crass, Flowers in the Dustbin, anarcho-feminism and Greenham Common etc. You can buy copies of it here and recommend you do if you are at all interested in this kind of stuff. You can also download a copy from Hitsville UK]
Update November 2024:
Ian Trowell has written a great piece on hunt sabbing in South Yorkshire in this period: A Field in England: Anarcho-punk, anti-fashion and the thrill of the chase. I liked his reflections on hunt sabbing style, including some anarcho-punks appropriating the country look of Barbour jacket (I do remember some people doing this, though our group was defo more black donkey jacket):
'On top of the all the recollections of fights, near scrapes, slinging insults, bloody messes, antics with glue, tipping sugar in fuel tanks, minor victories, mud, explosive profusions of swear words back and forth, boring hours sat in the back of a van, more boring hours in broken down vans and occasionally the physical exertions of the hunt, the thing that sticks most clearly in my memory involved a scene at a another joint meeting – a common event where different hunt-sab groups met up to jointly target a hunt... On this particular day our Sheffield van met others, including a small group from Lincoln who arrived in their own battered Land Rover. I vividly recall the palpable collective gasp from our motley crew (generally slightly worse for wear from a late-night Friday) as the three Lincoln hunt-sabs made their choreographed appearance as the rear doors of their vehicle opened. They were pristine and box-fresh, resplendent in Barbour jackets with matching long hair combining a mini-mullet and floppy asymmetric fringe (the hunt-sab look), stunningly coloured in bright henna hair dye which was radiant in the winter sunshine. It was surreal – more like a foppish pop band (Duran Duran or Gene Loves Jezebel) emerging from the stage doors to admiring fans and flashbulbs. Or an advert for shampoo in a post-punk parallel universe. It oozed the popstar cool of Mick Jagger captured in Richard Hamilton’s famous image Swingeing London 67(f). I thought, that’s how to do hunt-sabbing - with style'.
Also added additional Leamington Spa press clippings
On January 30th 1972, the British state killed 13 unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Derry (a 14th died as a result of their injuries a few months later). The dead, who included seven teenagers, were:
John (Jackie) Duddy (aged 17)
Patrick Joseph Doherty (31)
Bernard McGuigan (41)
Hugh Pious Gilmour (17)
Kevin McElhinney (17)
Michael Gerald Kelly (17)
John Pius Young (17)
William Noel Nash (19)
Michael M. McDaid (20)
James Joseph Wray (22)
Gerald Donaghy (17)
Gerald (James) McKinney (34)
William Anthony McKinney (27)
John Johnston (59)
The Bloody Sunday massacre of 30 January 1972 came after four years of popular insurgency in the north of Ireland, sparked by the civil rights marches of 1968. The immediate lead up to the day was described in the text 'From Bloody Sunday to Trafalgar Square' which I had a hand in producing following the 1990 London poll tax riot:
"What became known as Bloody Sunday then has often been, and frequently still is believed to have been, an act of undisciplined slaughter perpetrated by blood-crazed Paras. This assumption though is wrong and to a large extent lets the British establishment off the hook. By assuming that soldiers "ran amok" it puts the blame on individual soldiers who pulled triggers and killed people. Bloody Sunday was a planned, calculated response to a demand for civil rights, designed to terrify organised protesters away from protesting. It fits easily into the catalogue of British involvement in Ireland as a quite logical and even natural event" (Fred Holroyd, ex-British Army Intelligence Officer.)
In August 1971 internment without trial was introduced. On the tenth, Operation Demetrius was launched. 342 people were arrested and nine people killed by troops. In this period experiments in sensory deprivation torture were carried out on some people arrested, with the aim of psychologically breaking them. With hoods placed over their heads, they were made to stand spread-eagled against a wall balanced on their fingertips. They were kept like this for four or five days, being bombarded with white noise and beaten if they moved, denied food, drink, sleep, or access to toilets. At intervals they were taken up in a helicopter and thrown out while just a few feet off the ground having been told that they were hundreds of feet up (they were still wearing their hoods).
In protest at internment, a rent and rates strike was organised which attracted the support of some 40,000 households. By October this had escalated to non-payment of TV, radio, car licences, road tax, ground rent, electricity, gas and hire purchase (this a good idea that we should imitate- after all why stop at not paying the poll tax?). In response to this crisis the Payments of Debt Act was passed, allowing debts to be deducted directly from benefits- no doubt our rulers remembered this idea when they dreamt up the poll tax.
The introduction of internment was accompanied by a 12-month ban on all demonstrations. Despite this, on January 30 1972 tens of thousands of people attended a demonstration in Derry. The state's response to this act of defiance was a cold-blooded massacre. CS Gas and water cannon had already been used by the time the Parachute Regiment came onto the streets and opened fire on the crowd. The Army claimed that they were returning fire, but forensic tests on the 14 people killed showed that none of them had had contact with weapons and no weapons were found anywhere near the bodies'.
The official Bloody Sunday Inquiry eventually concluded in 2010 that the dead were innocent. But for years, the authorities attempted to hide the truth, with an earlier official investigation (the 1972 Lord Widgery report) including all kinds of smears and false claims that the soldiers had come under attack from gunfire and bombs. The fight for the truth was carried on for years by the victims' relatives and their supporters in the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign. For many years too the main mobilisation of the Irish solidarity movement in Britain was for the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march.
Bloody Sunday in Leicester 1985
The first Bloody Sunday event I took part was in Leicester in 1985, called by the Leicester Bloody Sunday Mobilising Committee. The plan was to hold a march in the city, finishing at Leicester Prison to 'offer solidarity to the Irish political prisoners held in Leicestershire' as well as remembering Noel Jenkinson, an Irish prisoner who had died in Leicester prison in 1976. Following threats of far right counter demonstrations all marches in the city were banned that weekend.
On the day before there were fears of an attack by the British National Party on Blackthorn Books, a radical workers co-op in Leicester. I remember hanging out at the Bread & Roses cafe in the bookshop's basement in case they turned up. On Sunday 3rd February 1985 the Bloody Sunday march was replaced by an indoor rally at Highfields Workshop, after which people made their way to Leicester Prison where around 500 of us staged a picket. A small BNP anti-IRA protest at the prison with around 20 people had left shortly before we arrived. Another far right group, the National Front, marched in nearby Market Harborough on the day. All of this was going on in the middle of the miners' strike, with the Leicester Mercury reporting that at the Bloody Sunday rally 'Several speakers alleged that tactics used by the security forces in Northern Ireland were being used in this country against striking miners'.
As reported in Red Action (April 1985), fascists attacked a bus on its way to the demo at Watford Gap service station.
Red Action, April 1985
1990s Bloody Sunday Marches in London
Most of the Bloody Sunday marches in England in the 1990s took place in London, and I went on these. They typically attracted between two and five thousand people and started or finished in a north London area with a high Irish population like Kilburn or Archway.
Report of 1991 London Bloody Sunday demo from An Phoblact, 7th February 1991. The march went from Kilburn to Hyde Park, stopping at the Paddington Green police station in Edgware Road, notorious as the place where many people were taken after being arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Speakers included Paul Hill, one of the Guildford Four who has been framed for bombings in the 1970s and released after a long campaign in 1989.
Report of 1991 demonstration - Troops Out, March 1991
As in Leicester in 1985, a feature of the Bloody Sunday marches was that the far right (BNP etc.) often mobilised to oppose them, so that in the pubs and streets surrounding the demonstrations there would be skirmishes between anti-fascists and racists. In 1990 for instance, three Anti Fascist Action (AFA) members were jailed after notorious Nazi skinhead Nicky Crane was dragged out of a taxi in Kilburn in the vicinity of the Bloody Sunday march. The biggest trouble was on the Bloody Sunday march in 1993, when hundreds of fascists attempted to attack the march at the assembly point in Hyde Park and then again along Edgware Road. 376 fascists were arrested before the march made it to Kilburn where the speakers included Gerry Duddy, whose brother Jack was killed in 1972.
1993 flyer for march called by Bloody Sunday March Organising Committee (Troops Out Movement, Irish in Britain Representation Group, Women & Ireland Network, Black Action and the Wolfe Tone Society)
Report of the 1993 Bloody Sunday March in London
(written at the time by European Counter Network, London)
'On Saturday 30 January 1993 around 2000 people took part in the annual Bloody Sunday march in London. The march commemorates the day in 1972 when 14 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by British paratroopers in Derry in the north of Ireland.
This year the British National Party and other fascist groups had announced their intention to stop what they called an "IRA march". For weeks before the march they leafleted football matches and other venues in an attempt to mobilise support.
On the day more than 350 fascists were arrested by the police, although only five were subsequently charged. The police delayed the start of the Bloody Sunday march, supposedly because of the fascist presence along the route. Eventually the march organisers informed the police that the demonstration was going to start, whether the police allowed it or not. At this point the police backed down and made no further attempt to stop the march.
As the march made its way from Hyde Park to Kilburn, small groups of fascists made occasional pathetic attempts to attack and provoke the march. However nobody was injured, and no demonstrators were arrested.
At the rally at the end of the march there were a number of speakers. These included the brother of one of those killed on Bloody Sunday, a speaker from Sinn Fein, Jim Kelly from the Casement Accused Relatives Committee (whose son is serving life imprisonment in relation to the killing of two soldiers at a Belfast funeral in 1988), and a speaker from the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism who compared the situation in Ireland to the rise in fascist attacks in Germany and elsewhere'.
Report from Troops Out, March 1993. Speakers on 1993 London Bloody Sunday demo included Jim Kelly of the Casement Accused Relatives Committeee, Unmesh Desai (Campaign Against Racism and Fascism), Ken Livingstone MP, Mick Conlon (Sinn Fein) and Gerry Duddy whose 17 year old brother Jack was shot dead on Bloody Sunday
1994 demo leaflet
The 1994 London Bloody Sunday demonstration
Report of 1994 demo with speakers including Ken Livingstone MP, Jeremy Corbyn MP and Hossein Zahir of Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (from An Phoblact, 4 February 1991)
1998 London demo flyer
1998 demo in London
Martin McGuinness speaks in London on 1998 Bloody Sunday demo
Bloody Sunday March in Manchester 1995
In 1995 the national Bloody Sunday march took place in Manchester. I noted at the time: ‘The march went well, it was as big as any of the recent London ones (about 2000), and there were four flute bands from Scotland. Two of them were right next to each other which made an amazing soundclash especially when we stopped under bridges'. There were clashes between AFA and fascists in the Clarence pub and along Oxford Road.
'Justice for the Casement Accused' banner in Manchester - an infamous miscarriage of justice case in Belfast.
Derry 1992: the twentieth anniversary
In Ireland, one of the biggest remembrance mobilisations was in Derry itself in 1992 on the 20th anniversary. I was there and wrote this report for the 56a Info Shop Bulletin (May 1992):
'My first real taste of the British military presence came when the bus bringing us from Blefast was stopped at an army checkpoint outside of Derry. Troops boarded the bus, with one soldier walking slowly up the bus pointing his rifle at the heads of passengers. In Derry itself the 'security forces' were keepong a low profile (by Irish standards), presumably because of the large international press presence. A low profile involved three helicopters in the sky, armoured police land rovers following the march and heavily armed RUC officers overlooking the route.
The march, organised by the Bloody Sunday Initiative, came at the end of a week of events in the city on the them 'One World, One Struggle' to mark the anniversary of the massacre. Thousands of people marched from the Creggan Estate, through the Bogside and into the Guildhall Square in the City Centre - the planned destination of the 1972 demonstration. As well as contingents from different parts of Ireland, there were supporters from Britain, Germany and elsewhere. A huge 50-foot long banner proclaimed 'We are the people of struggle, ours is the culture of chnage'. Relatives of those killed in 1972 marched at the front, and pictures of the dead were carried by marchers, as well as being displayed on murals along the route). At the end of the route a large crowd listened to speeches from Gerry Adams and Bernadette McAliskey.
Young children threw bottles and stones at the police vehicles (already colourfully decorated by paint bombs), but apart from this traditional local custom there was no trouble. However on the way back to Belfast, a window was smashed in our bus by Loyalists. Two people had to go to hospital to have their eyes examined for glass injuries. Within ten days of the demo three people had been killed by an RUC officer at Sinn Fein's Falls Road offices in Belfast, and five more people had been killed by a pro-British loyalist gang in a bookmakers shop in Belfast's Ormeau Road'.
Relatives lead the 1992 Derry march
So is Bloody Sunday now only of historic interest? No, it is a reminder of the murderous ruthlessness of the establishment when it thinks it may be losing. Prime Minister Edward Heath and the top brass of the army sent the soldiers in that day, and none of them were ever held to account. And in these times when we are supposed to believe that all soldiers are 'heroes' and to welcome the army without question into our schools and our streets, we should not forget that one of their historic functions is to kill civilians when the police lose control.
Bernadette McAliskey told the 1992 rally: ' I remember coming down that hill on that day 20 years ago. People were thinking "What can they do to us?", we are still here after internment and after gassing. But Billy Gallagher said to me "There will be murder in this town before the day is out'. And there was... On that day we knew real, naked fear for the first time. When the bullets were fired, people dived to the ground and crawled away like dogs in fear of their masters... Something else, an innocence died on Bloody Sunday. It was then that we realised that governments kill people'.
Sunday Bloody Sunday
The best known song referring to the events is U2's somewhat ambivalent Sunday Bloody Sunday. John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded a different song with the same name on their 1972 album Some Time in New York City:
Is there any one amongst you
Dare to blame it on the kids?
Not a soldier boy was bleeding
When they nailed the coffin lids
Bloody Sunday (This is a Rebel Song) by Hot Ash (1991):
At the Free Derry Corner the slaughter began
Some people fell and some people ran
Our civil rights banner was stained bloody red
At the barricades there they shot three people dead
[post updated 10 June 2022 with additional photos - I have donated photos, leaflets etc. to the Mayday Rooms archive, who are collecting material related to the Troops Out Movement and related Irish solidarity organisations].
[last updated 6 October 2025 with section on 1985 Leicester events]
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