Anti-fascism 1962 - the real battles of Ridley Road and Trafalgar Square

The BBC series 'Ridley Road' (2021) is a fictional drama which draws on real historical events - the activities of Colin Jordan's neo-nazi National Socialist Movement in Britain in the early 1960s, and the efforts of its opponents, especially Jewish ones, to stop it through intelligence gathering, demonstrations and ultimately physical force. The series adapts Jo Bloom's novel of the same name and its main story line of a Jewish infiltrator going to the extent of sleeping with Jordan may be a fictional device. But it needs to be restated that much of the action in the series is based on actual events - especially as some including a Daily Telegraph columnist have complained that it is BBC propaganda that overstates the threat of the far right in order to whitewash left-wing anti-semitism. The latter certainly exists in some quarters but to deny the menace of organised far right anti-semitism seems perverse - we are talking about people who actually burnt down synagogues.  

Here's some contemporary documentation of episodes featured in 'Ridley Road'

Colin Jordan and George Rockwell

Colin Jordan founded the National Socialist Movement in 1962 having split from the far right British National Party because they weren't explicitly Nazi enough for him. He was a leading figure in the international neo-nazi movement and in 1962 hosted a visit by the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Rockwell. The latter was deported from the country in the aftermath of a far right camp in the Cotswolds.

The camp in Guiting Wood 'was stormed by 100 Cotswold villagers'. A swastika flag 'was hauled down after its centre had been blown out by a 12-bore shotgun, and as the villagers wrecked the camp the party followers fled' ('Fuhrer hunt hots up as Nazis routed', Aberdeen Evening Express, 8 August 1962). The Daily Mirror termed this 'The Battle of Dead and Bury Hollow' after the part of the wood where the fighting took place ('Village Army Routs Nazi Camp', Daily Mirror, 8 August 1962).

Daily Mirror, 8 August 1962

(it seems the Cotswolds anti-fascist mobilisation was started from by a party from The Farmers Arms, Guiting Power, Gloucestershire, including its landlord Walter Morley. The pub is still there today if you want to raise a glass to them!)

Rockwell boasted shortly afterwards that he and Jordan 'had made certain arrangements which will "shock the world within six months''' (Belfast Telegraph, 10 August 1962). It was during his 1962 visits that Jordan and Rockwell established the World Union of National Socialists.

Jordan was married to Françoise Dior

Françoise Dior was the niece of French fashion designer Christian Dior, though as an international nazi activist she was denounced by her family - Christian's sister Catherine (Françoise's aunt) had been sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp for her activities in the French resistance. Dior and Jordan are believed to have met in 1962 and married the following year in Coventry, to anti-fascist protests:

'British National Socialist movement leader Colin Jordan and his French bride Françoise Dior were bombarded with eggs, stink bombs and pieces of turf by part of an angry crowd of about 500 after their marriage at Coventry registry office today. Jordan (40) and his 31 year old bride – she is a niece of the late fashion designer Christian Dior – greeted the crowd with Nazi salutes after the 15 minute ceremony. They were met by a chorus of boo and jeers, and the crowd surged forward in the attempt to break through the police cordon' (Belfast Telegraph, 5 October 1963).

Dior was an enthusiast for Synagogue burning, and was involved in an arson plot by NSM members to put this into action. She was jailed in 1967 in relation to arson and attempted arson attacks against 10 synagogues in the London area in 1965, having told  police that she 'would like to make an Act of Parliament to burn down all synagogues by law'. Among the buildings targeted was the Brondesbury Synagogue, extensively damaged in March 1965 and the Herbert Samuel Hall Synagogue in Notting Hill in June of that year (Belfast Telegraph, 7 September 1967). 

Trafalgar Square

London's Trafalgar Square was a flashpoint in 1962, with two major confrontations in July of that year. Jordan's NSM held a 'Free Britain from Jewish Control' rally there on 1 July. There was mass opposition: 'speakers were almost drowned by jeers from the 2,000 strong crowd' which 'charged hurling eggs, fruit, tin cans and coins'. The NSM's truck was stormed and its banner 'broken and burned'. 21 people were arrested' ('Battle of Trafalgar Square: Fury at Fascist Meeting', Daily Mirror, 2 July 1962).

A few weeks later on 22 July  1962 another far right organisation, Oswald Mosley's Union Movement, tried to hold a meeting in Trafalgar Square with similar results: 'Stones and tomatoes were thrown, placards and flags torn down and police cordons made helpless by a crowd of 7,000'. There were 55 arrests ('Mosley Meeting Wrecked, Birmingham Daily Post, 23 July 1962).

Illustrated London News, 28 July 1962 (check out cool shoes of anti-fascist throwing a stick, cuban heels a year before The Beatles first LP!)

Ridley Road 

Ridley Road, Dalston was a key battleground between fascists and their opponents in 1962, just as it had been in the 1930s and 1940s as an area with a well established Jewish community. Just a week after being driven out of Trafalgar Square,  the Union Movement attempted to meet there but were opposed by a large crowd:

'Sir Oswald Mosley was hurled to the ground and then punched and kicked in London's East End last night. The 65-year-old leader of the Union Movement was jumped upon as he arrived for a meeting at Ridley Road, Dalston - scene of many clashes with Blackshirts in the 1930s. The rally last night turned into a three-minute-fiasco - that was the time Mosley was allowed to speak before police were forced to stop his meeting because of rioting. And after the meeting police arrested 48 people including Mosley's ginger-haired son, Max. For an hour before Mosley arrived, the police had struggled to control the 1500 strong crowd of jeering, shouting East Enders... Chants of 'Down with Mosley' and 'Sieg Heil' drowned his words. Rotten fruit, stones and coins were hurled at the grey-suited Union Movement leader' ('Mosley beaten up again, Daily Mirror, 1 August 1962).

('The magic words "Mosley Speaks" will spark a riot anywhere... in this stronghold of anti-fascism their appearance was a guarantee of  trouble... they cried 'Down with Mosley and down he went'  - Pathe newsreel of Mosley in Manchester then in Ridley Road in July1962 - still below shows anti-fascists being held back by police in Ridley Road)

With plans for further fascist meetings on 2 September, the Home Secretary banned all demonstrations in the area -  affecting planned events from the British National Party and the anti-fascist Yellow Star Movement, though static meetings were not covered by the ban. Following the announcement there was an explosion outside a synagogue in Stoke Newington described by Rev. Sargent of the Yellow Star Movement as 'fascist activity' (Coventry Evening Telegraph, 1 Sept 1962). Sargent was the vicar of Holy Trinity Church in Dalston and one of the founders of the anti-fascist group who held a position of non-violent opposition to the far right - disagreement with this position led some to form the 62 Group, a militant Jewish organisation set up in August 1962 and who were the main inspiration for the Ridley Road drama. They were to play a major role in fighting the far right for the rest of the decade.

On 2 September the Yellow Star Movement occupied Ridley Road to prevent the BNP holding a meeting. The BNP had gathered nearby in Balls Pond Road where 'they were attacked by several hundred men' - probably one of the first actions involving the new 62 Group. 

Birmingham Daily Post, 3 Sept 1962

On the same day, Mosley's Union Movement was forced to abandon a meeting in Victoria Park Square, Bethnal Green, after two minutes. A crowd of 3000 broke through police lines and Mosley faced 'Boos,  blows, eggs and stink bombs'. There were 40 arrests (Birmingham Daily Post, 3 September 1962).

There were further clashes on 16 September, when Hackney Young Socialists occupied the space in Ridley Road where Mosley's supporters were planning to rally.  As fascists 'marched into the Young Socialists rally... Fighting broke out immediately. It spread through the crowd in Ridley market and spilled out into Stoke Newington High Street' (The Newsletter - Socialist Labour League, 22 Sept.1962)

The Newsletter, 22 Sept 1962

Colin Jordan was jailed for 9 months in 1962 having established 'Spearhead' as a paramilitary force linked to the NSM. The latter was relaunched as the British Movement in 1968. In the same year he was 'beaten up in a well-planned attack by a group of men in Birmingham... Jordan was in Waterloo Street in the city centre with four other men handing out leaflets for a meeting when about 30 men came running round the corner and set upon them' (Aberdeen Evening Express, 11 September 1968).  

Jordan remained an active neo-nazi until his death in 2009. While some of his erstwhile collaborators attempted to tone down their public rhetoric and present themselves as simple British patriots, Jordan never disguised his Hitler worship and virulent anti-semitism. 

The events of 1962 sparked not only militant anti-fascism but a wider call for legislation against incitement to racial hatred. More than 100,000 people signed a Yellow Star petition calling for this, and 'Three hundred teenagers from Jewish and non-Jewish youth clubs in the Hackney area' marched from Ridley Road to Downing Street in support of this.

Association of Jewish Refugees Information, November 1962

See also: 

Radical History of Hackney for more on this and the 62 Group

A history of the 62 Group from Searchlight, 2002

Dance Can't Nice - exploring black music spaces at the Horniman Museum

In '696 - Dance Can't Nice' at South London's Horniman Museum,  the artist Naeem Dxvis explores London's Black music spaces with an installation recreating four kinds of spaces - a church, a 1970s front room, a barber's shop and a late 1990s teenage bedroom.

The focus on more private/domestic spaces is in itself a reflection that Black musics and Black people have often been excuded from public music venues and clubs, down to the Metropolitan Police's Form 696 which discouraged grime nights.

'Bedroom - A place that encapsulates the bedroom DJ culture that birthed grime, garage and drum n bass... it has served as a recording studio, a rehearsal and conference room, as radio station and sometimes even the club. Bedrooms like this are also spaces for young people who don't have safe space to perform or showcase their work'

'

'Church: The original Black music space that has birthed countless Black British musicians and genres. The church has housed music that creates connected communities'

'I want to evoke a sense of nostalgia and create value for the forgotten. I want to honour our spaces... Each space replicates the imagined and lived utopias of club culture as sanctuary and the everyday domestic and social spaces that infuse the foundation of Black British music' (Naeem Dxvis)

The title of the exhibition comes from a line in General Levy's Incredible ('Dance cyan nice unless we name pon de bill').

 

Sophie Richmond on the politics of punk (1977)

So many words have been spilt about first wave UK punk and politics over the last 45 years, but one of the most lucid contemporary assessments came from within The Sex Pistols camp. Sophie Richmond worked for Malcolm McLaren's Glitterbest management company. Amidst all the chaos somebody had to make sure the bills got paid (or not), but she did a lot more than  admin. She was part of a collective effort around the band, also including her then partner Jamie Reid who designed the Pistols' art work. 

It's quite remarkable that in the midst of all this she should take time to consider the political significance of it all for an obscure libertarian communist magazine, Social Revolution (no.7, 1977) . The group behind it had been formed in 1975 and was soon to merge with the longer established Solidarity group. Political threads from this current led back to a shared heritage with the Situationists in the group Socialisme ou Barbarisme - the Situationists being an influence on McLaren and Read among others. Plainly Richmond, then 25 years old, had her own political perspectives that predated punk and the Pistols.

Her conclusion from the heart of the storm is succinct and accurate - music on its own can't change the world, romantic myths of heroic outsiders are a dead end and punk was inevitably on the road to being assimilated. And yet it was expressing something real, addressing how many young people felt, and opening a door of possibility where interesting things might happen before the door slammed shut once again. 

Extracts from article:

'Labels are inescapable and punk isn’t such a bad label really. Something for kids to identify with that sounds a bit vicious and tough, definitely anti the shit/ideology they try to shove down your throat at school.

Punk says “I’m a lazy sod“ and “I wanna be me“. It’s the latest in the glorious line of teenage rebels… From James Dean and Marlon Brando in the postwar American movies through the Teds, the mods, the ever present greasers, the skinheads and now the punks. Someone’s going to ask me why I left out the hippies. Can’t you feel the difference? (the hippies and alternative culture is what I grew up with so my view is jaundiced anyway, but it seems as though it was all very middle-class; it gave us the alternative society; it gave us peasant clothing and beads; but I don’t think it really gave us a lot of help in solving, or even helping us think about the problems of living in and changing a distinctly urban and industrialised country.

Anyway. Punk is teenage rebellion again. So the question to ask isn’t so much “How much potential for social change is there in punk rock?” as “how much potential for change is there in the teenage rebellion syndrome?” So we look back. No, nothing really changed much did it? The rebels have died (James Dean, Gene Vincent) have got assimilated, became successful (Rolling Stones) and have nothing to left to say to their still alienated audience. There are two things here – 

1. the expression of frustration, alienation and pissed offness felt by kids growing up in USA and UK who found the future is even more unattractive than their present. 

2. The eventual failure of those who voiced those feelings to escape assimilation and equally, the failure of the kids who dug it to escape their fate.

The lesson, I suppose, is that culture can only take you so far. Be you ever so pissed off and alienated, if all you do is sit down with your stereo and play "My Generation" a million times, you’re not going to get very far. The value of the Stones, Who, Vincent, Sex Pistols is it they can create a climate, put ideas into people's heads, at their best give off enough energy and enthusiasm to make people feel like they’re doing more than buying the next super duper album.

Because ultimately it’s up to the audience to decide if they’ll buy the action as well. And it’s up to the activists and militants to use the energy, the honesty, to grasp it and take things further and say look, we can do this, it’s not just fantasy.  Because attitudes don’t threaten, not in the cradle of free speech and liberalism. Attitudes are easily defused, rock ‘n’ roll ain’t revolution.

But there’s a point in time, before the media has jumped on your backs and exposed every hypocrisy and contradiction, before it’s become clear that you’re just another rock band, easily bought off by money and fame, when attitudes are potentially threatening to the system. And these kids and bands certainly aren’t upholding it. The Sex Pistols want  anarchy (their meaning clear enough in the song “I wanna be anarchy… I wanna be an anarchist, get pissed, destroy");  The Clash want a riot of their own in the song “White Riot" written in envy and admiration after the Notting Hill riots last summer. The Buzzcocks from Manchester sing about boredom and alienation (can’t stop using that word)… 

“I’ve been waiting in the supermarket, standing in with the beans (ketchup),  I’ve been waiting at the post office for silly pictures of the Queen (stick up), now I am waiting for you to get yourself good and ready (make up),  I’ve been standing in the standing room and I’ve been waiting in the waiting room, no one told me about the living room gonna forget what I came for here real soon" [Buzzcocks, Time's Up]

Great. At least it’s a bit real again. I’m sick of silly love songs which don’t have any meaning when you know, however passionately you’re in love, that your chances of getting a place you can call your own or a job with enough money to support your kids aren’t too hot.

But in some ways the punk bands are carrying on establishment myths of antiheroes, losers, dead enders. Romantic but slush. To be avoided. Liberal containment myths. But there’s a few encouraging things… The sudden emergence of a dozen or more young bands in the steps of the Pistols, not too hot musically or politically but at least a nice reaction against the progressive rock of the last 10 years, so overloaded with technology that it can’t go on the road with less than 40 articulated lorries and a cast of one million technicians. I like the whole do it yourself philosophy which shows in the clothes as well as the music [...]

Bands like the Sex Pistols… The punk bands in this country… Talk a little about reality, however little gets said before it’s all neatly tied up and put in little packages by the record companies, before the dying dinosaur of the music biz jumps in in search of a fast buck, before the posers start cashing in on the image (I see them on the horizon). That’s their value'.

There's a 2013 interview with Sophie Richmond here

Sophie Richmond's diaries of her time with the Pistols are quoted from extensively in Fred and Judy Vermorel's book 'Sex Pistols: the inside story' (1978). 

War Inna Babylon at ICA

'War Inna Babylon: The Community’s Struggle for Truths and Rights'  at London's Institute for Contemporary Arts (7 July – 26 September 2021) is an exhibition curated by community organisation Tottenham Rights, together with independent curators Kamara Scott and Rianna Jade Parker. They say:

'Ten years on from the UK-wide riots sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan, this exhibition shines a light on the vast range of collective actions, resistance and grassroots activism undertaken by Black communities across the U.K in response to over seven decades of societal and institutional racism. 

Using the ‘symbolic location’ of Tottenham, a neighbourhood that has received much attention in recent years due to its history of racial conflicts and heavy-handed policing; this exhibition combines archival material, documentary photography, film and state-of-the art 3D technology to ‘act as a window to the past and as a mirror for our present-day social climate’.  War Inna Babylon will chronicle the impact of various forms of state violence and institutional racism targeted at Britain’s Black communities since the mass arrival-upon-invitation of West Indian migrants in the late 1940'.

The exhibition is strikingly displayed in a way which does justice to its somber subject matter, including al list of deaths at the hands of the police and Forensic Architecture's detailed investigation of the police shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011 

"Frontlines, as they are affectionately known by locals, were the only tangible public spaces where Black people felt relatively safe enough to convene, especially as they were ostracised from mainstream venues. As so, the police would invade these locations... 'Symbolic locations' were determined by PC Kenneth Newman, Commissioner of Police for the London Metropolitan force from 1982 to 1987. In various speeches and articles he would offer: Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, Railton Road in Brixton and All Saints Road in Notting Hill as prime examples of 'no go' areas...

[In the aftermath of the 1980s riots] "...Oliver Letwin - then an adviser to Margaret Thatcher - advised her not to believe that the uprisings stemmed from systematic inequalities. Letwin blamed unrest on 'bad moral attitudes' and dismissed suggestions to fund communities, claiming that Black business owners would set up a 'disco and drug trade'. The police sought on occasions to restore  - 'take back' - these neighbourhoods. And so, community-led Frontlines where Black people were able to practice a level of autonomy were subjected to intense surveillance and military-style operations, quickly becoming sites of resistance"

Archive material in the exhibition: 1981 leaflets from the New Cross Massacre Action Committee and the Brixton Defence Campaign.

 

Lunch magazine- London gay disco 1972

Lunch magazine ran from 1971 to 1973, starting out as a newsletter put out by Campaign for Homosexual Equality members in London and expanding to become a well designed 'magazine for the new homosexual man and woman' reflecting the range of gay activist opinion at that time. As part of its great LGBTQ+ Archives, Bishopsgate Institute has scanned the entire print run and made it available online. 

It's a fascinating read, with news, debates and interviews (including David Hockney, Holly Woodlawn and George Melly)

Lunch, June 1973 - cover star Holly from Warhol's factory
('Holly came from Miami, F.L.A.. Hitch-hiked her way across the U.S.A.')

I had a quick trawl through to look at what it tells us about nightlife in a transitional period when publicly advertised gay discos were taking place but the commercial gay club scene had not yet really taken off. Fulham Town Hall in west London was a venue for disco nights and balls organised by CHE and the Gay Liberation Front and where, as reported in Lunch, people were sometimes subject to violent attacks

'Grand Masked Ball' - CHE event at Fulham Town Hall (Lunch, December 1971)

'Full Moon Disco' in aid of Campaign for Homosexual Equality at Fulham Town Hall
(Lunch, April 1972)

GLF Notting Hill Group night at Fulham Town Hall wtih 'Disco-Lights-Freak Outs'
(Lunch, July 1972)

Violent mobs of hooligans are terrorising the "gay" people of West London. Members of the Gay Liberation Front claim they are being subjected to brutal, callous attacks by roving gangs of thugs every time the hold a dance at Fulham Old Town Hall' (West London Observer report, reproduced in Lunch, September 1972)

An account from June 1972 describes direct action against discrimination in a Notting Hill pub (wonder which one?): ''Not so long ago in Notting Hill Gate, GLF were being charged 20p per pint of beer, as against 14p for heterosexuals. We eventually staged a sit-in at the pub concerned, the police were called and said they could not eject us for wearing our badges. The landlord had to ask us all to leave one by one (300 of us) which, when we refused, the police carried us all out quite peacefully, accompanied by the strains of 'All things bright and beautiful' being sung by our brothers and sisters already removed, sitting outside the pub. Next week we were charged 14p per pint and allowed to come and go as we pleased, badges or not'.

'A Fancy Dress Rave... Drag or Casual' at Porchester Hall (Lunch, December 1972)

'Mike Winter, the non-stop disco-king of the East End, tells us there's another scene going now. It's at the Kings Arms - 213 Bishopsgate.... Meanwhile the already established disco at the Father Redcap, Camberwell Green recurs every Thursday and Sunday' (Lunch, March 1972)

David Hockney interview from Lunch, September 1972 'he looks like a wise blond owl' - Hockney mentions going to a couple of Gay Liberation Front meetings but finding them a bit boring.

Barcelona in Soho: a 1940s Surrealist hangout

17 Beak Street in Soho is at the time of writing a branch of the Flat Iron steak restaurant chain. But for at least 40 years it was home to the Barcelona Restaurant, at one time the social HQ of British surrealist artists.

In 1938 it was reported that the Barcelona was one of only five Spanish restaurants in London. At this time the Spanish Civil War was still raging, with supporters of Franco's fascists meeting for a sherry party at Martinez in Swallow Street. The unnamed manager of the Barcelona struck a melancholy tone stating that 'There is nothing to celebrate' as the war entered its third year.

(Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 18 July 1938)

The manager was Joaquim Carbonell (1895-1950), recalled by George Melly (see below) as a Spanish Republican sympathiser. 

1939 England and Wales Register for 17 Beak Street.

It was here that the Belgian surrealist artist Édouard Mesens summoned British surrealist sympathisers in the early days of the Second World War intending to mould them into a coherent  grouping dedicated to 'proletarian revolution' and exclusively surrealist artistic practice. Remy records that 'On Thursday 11 April 1940, E.L.T. Mesens called a meeting at the Barcelona restaurant in Soho's Beak Street of all surrealists living in London' with those attending including John Buckland-Wright, Herbert Read.. Roland Penrose, Humphrey Jennings, J.B. Brunius, Ithell Colquhoun, Eileen Agar, Edith Rimmington, S.W. Hayter, A.C. Sewter, Reuben Mednikoff , Grace Pailthorpe, John Banting, Gordon Onslow-Ford and Charles Howard. Not all of these continued to participate in the London Surrealist group but a number of them took part in the group's exhibition in June of that year at the Zwemmer gallery (26 Litchfield Street) alongside guest artists including Lee Miller and Paul Nash (Michael Remy, Surrealism in Britain, 1999)

Regular meetings continued in the upstairs dining room of the restaurant, where in addition to the  Surrealist core others would pop by: 'Dylan Thomas and Lucien Freud occasionally put in an appearance' (Levy).  The young George Melly, soon to be a key figure in the British jazz scene, joined the group around this time, with painter Conroy Maddox recalling later: 'When George Melly was on leave from the navy he would join us too. Invariably he would get terribly drunk and would start to recite his poems. One poem finished with 'it's raining knives and forks' and George would enact this line by throwing the restaurant cutlery over himself. We were then thrown out' (quoted in  Sivlano Levy, The Scandalous Eye: The Surrealism of Conroy Maddox, 2003). Incidentally, in a memoir published later - 'Don't Tell Sybil: An Intimate Memoir of E.L.T. Mesens' - Melly mentions that he was in a sexual relationship with Mesens and his wife Sybil at this time.

Gatherings continued at the Barcelona throughout the war and for a while afterward. In December 1946  Mesens organised an exhibition there, though by this time the main meeting place for the surrealist group seems to have shifted to the Three Horseshoes pub on Tottenham Court Road.

There's a remarkable 1978 BBC documentary on surrealism, made to coincide with that year's 'Dada and Surrealism Reviewed' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. In 'The Journey', George Melly revisits some of the London surrealist haunts of the 1940s including the Barcelona which was then still open. In the upstairs room he brings back together some of the luminaries of British surrealism including Penrose, Maddox and Agar.  

Surrealists reunited in the Barcelona, 1978 including Melly at the top of table and Eileen Agar front left.

The Barcelona Restuarant was undoubtedly significant but Melly was to suggest that 'The non-existence of cafes' was one of the reasons for the relative failure of British surrealism  - exemplified for Melly by Penrose and Read accepting Knighthoods. In a 1987 article 'British Surrealism' published in The Raven: Anarchist Quarterly Melly argued  'This may seem frivolous, but it is not. Pubs are hopeless settings for the exchange of ideas; restaurants too formal. The British Surrealists tried both and found them wanting. The cafe was surrealism’s natural theatre'.

'A meeting of the Surrealist Group with dinner to follow will be held at the Barcelona Restaurant, Beak Street, W1 on Tuesday May 10th at 6:30 pm' - 1940 postcard from Roland Penrose to Jacques Brunius (French surrealist, then living in London).

Barcelona Spanish Restaurant 1968

Barcelona Restaurant 1978

Nights full of sex and dancing: the New York hot summer of 1967

'There was a hit song in the 1960s by the Lovin’ Spoonful called Summer in the City all about how the days were hot and gritty, everyone looking half-dead, but the nights passionate and fun, full of sex and dancing. That was certainly my experience of the summer of 1967, an especially hot one when New York became a tropical city full of cruising and drinking, of people sleeping without air conditioners on the cindered roofs of their buildings, sharing wine coolers out of Mason jars, and attending late-night horror movies...

When a gay bar would open, everyone would rush there until the police closed it; it wasn’t until 1969, two years later, and the beginning of gay liberation following the Stonewall uprising that gays could freely congregate. At bars like the Blue Bunny, when a plainclothes cop would enter, the overhead Christmas lights would start to twinkle and all the dancing couples would break apart' 

Summer in the city: Edmund White on sex and dancing in 60s New York (Guardian 14 August 2021)

Extinction Rebellion Animal Murals

I love snowy owls, so obviously love this Extinction Rebellion mural in Brighton.

In nearby Lewes a mural highlights the extinction of Spix's Macaws (think there may be a few left in captivity, but more or less gone in the wild)

Also in Brighton a bear looks out from a cage in this International Animal Rescue mural:

 

2000 AD - 1990 sub culture style

2000 AD magazine celebrates becoming a teenager on its 13th anniversary, February 1990, with a look straight out of Whirl Y Gig or any number of any clubs of that period.

From the same issue, Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell give a visual and textual reference to Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in their Zenith story. Another sub cultural look from that time, TOPY shaved hair with long bits at the back (skinhead mullet) with chaosphere t-shirt.

 

The Luton Riots of 1981 - Brixton comes to Bedfordshire

In 1981 a wave of riots swept across England, starting off in Brixton in South London and spreading to many other towns and cities. The Brixton uprisings are recognised as of historic importance, prompting the landmark Scarman report into policing and race relations. The riot in Toxteth, Liverpool, is also sometimes recalled for its impact on urban regeneration policy - in the immediate aftermath Michael Heseltine, then Environment Secretary, spent 3 weeks in Liverpool producing a report for cabinet entitled ‘It took a riot’. Most of the others are rarely mentioned today, or are just dismissed as lesser 'copycat' riots.

The riot in Luton, Bedfordshire, in July 1981 was immediately dismissed in these terms at the time. Vivian Dunnington, the Conservative leader of Luton Council, claimed: 'It was a copycat riot - the kids had seen the riots on TV and thought it a lot of fun. The town was neurotic with rumour. It went crazy' (Luton News, 23/7/1981).

In his reflections on 'Race, riots and and policing' in this period, Michael Keith warns against explaining different riots by a single cause: 'Generalizations, by definition, exclude the significance of the historically and geographically specific; by suppressing memory, they become the vehicles through which time is lost and place is forgotten'  (Race, riots and and policing - lore and disorder in a multi-racist society, 1993).

The following account is an attempt to recover what was specific to events in Luton in 1981, as well as what they shared with experiences elsewhere.  The Luton riot – like each of the others - did not come out of nowhere. While undoubtedly inspired by events elsewhere, those taking part had their own reasons for doing so, with the riot as a key event in a longer period of racism and resistance in the town. 

I have covered some of the history leading up to July 1981 in previous posts here. The far right National Front had been active in the town since the mid-1970s, and there had been ongoing opposition to them, including to their meetings in Luton Library (see: A School Kid Against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80). An attack on the mosque by racist Chelsea fans in December 1980 had led to further community organising against racist attacks. In early 1981 the Luton Youth Movement, inspired by Asian Youth Movements around the country, had been set up to oppose racism and organise self-defence. An LYM march through Luton in May 1981 had been attacked by racist skinheads (see: Blinded by the Light - memories of 1980s Luton racism). Which brings us to July...

July Days

‘In the summer of ’81, Britain seemed to be two entirely different countries, slapped on top of each other, like two films being shown on the same screen at the same time’ (Mark Steel, Reasons to be cheerful: from punk to new Labour through the eyes of a dedicated troublemaker, 2001).

Temporary Hoarding, Rock Against Racism zine, August 1981 - 
the cover depicts the Royal Wedding coach against backdrop of a burning city

The big news story in July 1981 was supposed to be the preparations for the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.  But in the weeks immediately before this ill-fated union, the youth of England seized the front pages in the most dramatic way possible. The 1981 riots actually started in  April in Brixton, South London, sparked by the oppressive policing of 'Operation Swamp 81'. In July though it became clear that this was not an isolated incident, but the harbinger of a nationwide movement of uprisings.

The first of the summer riots occurred in an area with similarities to Luton - Southall in West London, with its large South Asian population and a history of racism and resistance. On 3 July several hundred skinheads arrived in the area for a concert in a local pub. After a number of racist incidents in the High Street, hundreds of Asian youths took to the streets and attacked the pub where the gig was due to take place. The pub was set on fire, and petrol bombs thrown at police who were seen as protecting the skinheads.

On the same evening, four nights of rioting erupted in Toxteth, Liverpool where black and white youths fought the police. Over the next few days, similar scenes were repeated across the country - notably in Manchester's Moss Side and in Wood Green, north London.

By the end of the week, many people were just waiting for the wave to hit Luton. The talk was of little else at a Luton Youth Movement meeting on July 9th. In the previous week there had been  two major incidents in Luton. On Saturday 4th July a group of 30 racist skinheads charged a group of Asian youths in St George's Square, where a crowd was watching a Punch and Judy Show organised by Luton Children's Library. Then in the early hours of the following Monday morning two petrol bombs were thrown at the Sikh temple in Portland Road, Luton. Volunteers from amongst Luton 1000-strong Sikh community mounted a round the clock vigil to prevent further attacks (Luton News, 9/7/1981). Notorious local racist Robert Relf told a local paper that it had 'probably' been the work of a right wing group (Herald, 9/7/1981).  

On Friday 10th July many town centre shops had taken the precaution of boarding up their windows as rumours spread of impending violence; by Saturday morning others must have wished that they'd done the same. By 8.30 pm on Friday night  'two hundred mainly Asian and West Indian youth had organised to defend their community and had gathered outside the Luton mosque. The local Asian taxi service was used to link groups of black youth in Bury Park and the Town Centre' (Socialist Worker, 18 July 1981).

In effect there were two riots in Luton on the Friday. The first involved a gang of 50 or so skinheads who rampaged down George Street (the main shopping street) shouting racist slogans and smashing some windows, including Don Miller's bread shop.  Their presence brought out a crowd of black and white youths to confront them, who rioted in turn.

The Plume of Feathers pub in Bridge Street, a haunt of the skinheads, was smashed up and fighting broke out with the police. By the end of the evening the fighting had moved to Bury Park. Shop windows were smashed and bricks, bottles and two petrol bombs were thrown at the police.  The police reported that 150 people were involved.

The following day 12 of the 21 people who had been arrested on Friday night were brought before a special court, a mixture of racists and their opponents.

Saturday

'Day the Town Went Crazy' (Herald, 16 July 1981)
'The scene could have been Belfast, or even Brixton or Liverpool'

On Saturday afternoon the town was buzzing with rumours. There was a mixture of anger, determination, curiosity and excitement. Everyone was waiting for something to happen, with lots of people hanging around in the town centre. Here's my memories written down not long after:

'The signal was the police and security guards locking the doors of the Arndale shopping centre, apparently panicked by the crowd forming inside. The group of people I was with at the St George's Square end ran down to the side entrance of C&As and through the store. When we got to the front, the grill had been lowered so we couldn't get into the main bit of the shopping centre, but faced with having a section of the crowd loose in the store the management opened the doors briefly to let us join the rest. There was now a surreal situation with the shopping centre malls deserted except for a couple of hundred African-Caribbean, Asian and white youths, while thousands of shoppers watched on from behind the locked doors of the shops. There was a real feeling of power as the crowd moved through the Arndale. A line of police moved on ahead making no attempt to stop us as we moved without incident out into the high street and back along in the direction of the Town Hall. The rumour going around was that a community festival in High Town might be attacked by fascists and that was the direction we headed. The police were nowhere to be seen by this point. A couple of skinheads were spotted in a cafe in High Town on the way, and the windows were broken as they cowered in the back. There was no sign of any trouble at the festival and everybody sat down in the sun on the grass in People's Park overlooking it. Then people moved off again over Cromwell Road towards Bury Park. There was a brief stand-off with the police in Dunstable Road and a couple of bottles were thrown before people dispersed. The Conservative Club had its windows smashed'.

On Saturday night, some racists were still on the streets of Luton: 'A heavily built white man in his late 20s goose stepped along George Street yelling 'Sieg Heil!' and saluting Nazi style'. Youths were guarding the mosque, but many others, black and white, had now converged on the town centre: 'A gang of youths, most of them black, armed with snooker cues and broom  staves, lingered around the streets near the ABC Cinema' (Herald, 16.7.1981).

The situation was moving rapidly from self-defence towards a full-scale riot, and a number of fires were started. At 8.20 pm, there was an arson attack on Jack's curtain shop in West Side Centre. At 10.05 pm, a fire bomb was thrown into Maurice Davis hat makers in Guildford Street. Later tyres were set alight at National Tyres in Crawley Road (Herald, 16.7.1981).

The police's priority seemed to be move the focus of the riot away from the town centre, and the main shopping area, towards the predominantly Asian area of Bury Park: 'Police had shepherded hundreds of white and black youths along Dunstable Road out of the town centre when pubs closed' (Herald, 16.7.1981). 

The most serious fighting occurred as the crowd reached Westbourne Road, near the mosque: 'Trouble flared again as the police brought out riot shields and made indiscriminate arrests in an attempt to break up the groups of youths. Petrol bombs, bricks and bottles were thrown at police lines as more black and white youths came out from local pubs and joined in, swelling the numbers to about 400… a few police were injured but many black youngsters carry the marks of police brutality' (SW, 18.7.81). 

A line of police advanced banging their riot shields - 'Soon the banging came from hundreds of bricks pounding into the shields' (Herald, 16/7/1981). People ‘broke pieces from garden walls and used them against the police’ A police van had its windscreen smashed. The fighting spread into Leagrave Road and Althorpe Road before the crowd were driven towards Biscot Road. Shop windows were smashed, including at Sainsbury's in the West Side Centre, and at Peters motorcycle shop in Dunstable Road where two motorbikes were dragged onto the pavement and wrecked. 

At 2.30 am, groups of young people were still defiantly on the streets but 'youths refusing to shift paid the penalty and we saw and heard the truncheons crack' (Herald, 16/7/81).

A total of 107 people were arrested; '64 of them white, 30 of West Indian extraction, and 13 of Asian extraction' (the white category included both racists and those fighting alongside black youth against racists and the police). Special court sessions were held on the Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, with 67 people appearing before the magistrates, 51 of whom were bailed with strict conditions including being restricted to their homes between 8 pm and 7 am . Almost all of those arrested were under 25 years old, with over half of them teenagers ((LN, 16.7.81).

Herald, 16 July 1981

A police authority meeting in September was told that 200 police officers had been deployed on the Saturday night, including some from the Metropolitan police.  17 police vehicles had been damaged and 83 claims made in Luton under the Riot (Damages) Act 1886. The cost of all claims in Bedfordshire was estimated to reach £60,000. The same meeting heard that Bedfordshire police had held stocks of CS gas for the past 15 years, although these were not used (Luton News 24.9.81).

Reactions to the riot

On the weekend of the Luton riot, similar scenes were witnessed across the country. On the Friday night there were renewed clashes in Brixton and Southall, as well as in Hull, Liverpool, Preston and many other areas. The following evening, Leicester, Derby, Bradford, Leeds and the Handsworth area of Birmingham were among those that erupted.

As the riots started to spread across England, Luton Conservative MP John Carlisle predictably called for arming the police with CS gas, rubber bullets and water cannon and flogging rioters with the birch (LN 9/7/81). A week later, with Luton having exploded, he called for ‘a new Riot Act for Britain which would give the police powers to break up groups of people’. Carlisle's hardline approach was in accord with his reputation as one of the most right wing and racist MPs of the time. Linked to the far right Monday Club, he frequently made anti-immigration speeches. For instance in the same week as the anti-racist march in Luton in May 1981, Carlisle was quoted as saying that black people should be given a grant to encourage them to leave Britain (LN 22/5/1981). He was to become known as the 'Member for Johannesberg' for his links to the South African apartheid regime including in 1985 speaking at a meeting at Luton Town Hall with the South African ambassador. 

Other local Tories took a slightly more sophisticated approach than the local MP: 'A top Luton Tory has told the Government to spend more on jobs, council housing and sport - to help prevent further street riots… Cllr Vivian Dunnington, leader of Luton's Conservative-controlled council, told Home Office Minister Timothy Raison that Government cuts were too harsh in some areas' (Luton News 13/8/81). 

Adult employment had more than doubled in Luton between June 1980 and June 1981, with 7,840 people officially registered as unemployed (10.5% of the labour force). The Trades Council estimated that that the real figure was closer to 12,000 (Luton News, 2.7.81).  Most of the major employers were making redundancies. The week before the riot, 330 workers at the Electrolux fridge and cleaner factories in Luton received redundancy notices (Luton News 9.7.81).  In March 1981, Whitbread brewery made 300 workers redundant, followed by 200 at Kent engineering in June 1981 (Luton News, 23.7.1981). Just days after the riot the town's main employer, Vauxhall Motors, announced 2000 redundancies in addition to hundreds of jobs that had already been cut that year.

For young people leaving school there were very few opportunities. Two weeks before the riot Jim Thakoordin, secretary of Luton Trades Union Council and a Labour councillor, claimed that there were 'over 2,000 young people in Luton and Dunstable chasing after eight vacancies. Many more young people leaving school will head straight for the dole queues'. 700 young people were temporarily employed on short term Manpower Services Commission schemes like the 'Youth Opportunities Programme' (Luton News, 2.7.81).

John Solomos  (2003) has written of the ‘racialisation of the 1980-81 events' as demonstrated in press reports of ‘mobs of black youths’ in the Daily Mail and elsewhere (Race and racism in Britain, 2003). One Luton paper did lead its riot reports with the headline ‘Race Hate Erupts’ (Herald, 16/7/81); however equally notable was an anxiety amongst local police, press and councilors to downplay any racist aspects of the riots. A Luton News editorial stated firmly that  ‘this was no racial riot’, it was rather the work ‘of young hooligans who like nothing more than an opportunity to attack and loot’ (LN 16/781). The paper also reported that ‘Tory and Labour councillors are united in their belief that Luton’s recent riots were not racial but the copycat acts of a panic stricken town’(‘Copycat riots not racial’, Luton News, 23/7/81). The riots were presented as an explosion of irrational criminality with no real basis in conditions in the town.

Labour Councillor Jim Thakoordin put forward a different view, claiming that ‘police action to clear black youngsters off the streets caused some of the worst violence’ (LN 16/7/81).

As we have seen, Luton did not experience a race riot in the sense of a battle between white and black communities. There were far right white racists on the streets, but also white people amongst those opposing them. But the experience of racism and organizing against it was a crucial ingredient in the events of 1981. Many of those who had been fighting against racism in the town in the previous months were at the forefront of the events of July, and in the subsequent defence of those arrested. The events in Luton may have been inspired by what was going on elsewhere but they were rooted in local experience and existing networks. 

Trials

In the days immediately following the riots, summary justice was dealt out by the local courts. Two people were jailed, for four months and four weeks respectively, for ‘threatening behaviour’. They had been part of a group of ‘youths of all nationalities’  (the police description) which ‘threw bricks and bottles at police’. Another 17 year old was fined for the same offence, saying in a statement ‘We were just there to fight the skinheads’.

Members of the skinhead gang also appeared in court, two of whom were jailed at a later trial. Two skinheads, aged 18 and 19, were jailed for 3 years for 'throwing a destructive or explosive substance with intent to cause grievous bodily harm'. One of them claimed that the police had frightened him into making an untrue statement that he had lit a petrol bomb for his friend to throw (Luton News, 10.12.81). A 17-year-old claimed by the prosecution to be a leading member of the skinhead gang was jailed for 18 months.

In a remarkable case at St Albans Crown Court, a 21-year-old 'West Indian youth' was acquitted by a jury of 'throwing a destructive or explosive substance with intent to burn two police officers' during the Luton riots. He admitted throwing a petrol bomb but said that someone handed it to him and he had thrown it as 'a spur of the moment thing. I didn't mean to harm anyone' (LN 26/11/81). He also denied he had told police that petrol bombs were being made at the mosque. 

This was one of a number of sympathetic verdicts reached by juries in this period. In Bristol, the trial of 12 people on the serious charge of ‘riot’ collapsed in April 1981 when the jury failed to agree convictions. The charges related to events in the St Pauls area of Bristol in April 1980 following a police raid on the Black and White Café which foreshadowed the uprisings of the following year.

A jury also acquitted the ‘Bradford 12’, members of the United Black Youth League, even though they admitted that they had made petrol bombs on 11 July 1981 – the same day as the main Luton riot. The jury accepted that it had been legitimate for them to do so to defend their community against the threat of racist attacks.

 The Luton Community Defence Committee

Across Britain around 3000 people were arrested in the 1981 riots, and in many areas defence campaigns were established to support those facing trial. These included the Brixton Defence Campaign, Liverpool 8 Defence Committee, Hackney Legal Defence Committee, and the Moss Side Defence Committee in Manchester. In Luton, a Community Defence Committee was established on the day after the riots and quickly secured legal support for defendants. 

At a hearing at Luton Magistrates Court on the Monday after the riot, CDC members complained from the public gallery that the police had not allowed parents to see their children in custody and that those arrested had only been allowed to see duty solicitors.  Sibghat Ali, a solicitor ‘involved with the legal aspects of the Brixton and Bristol riots’ was in court and was described as ‘A legal representative of the newly-formed Luton Community Defence Committee’ (‘Police Kept Children From Us’ Claim, Luton News, 16 July 1981).

The first public meeting of the Community Defence Committee was held at Warwick Road church hall on 19 July. I remember it being a packed and stormy affair, with around 350 people in attendance and various arguments raging. Rudi Narayan, a Brixton-based solicitor for some of the Luton defendants, sparked off a row by calling for Luton Labour Party to put forward a black candidate for Parliament, and specifically for former Luton Labour MP Ivor Clemitson (Chair of the Community Relations Council) to support Jim Thakoordin, a black Labour councillor and Chair of  the CDC. This led to Clemitson and others storming out of the meeting. The meeting Chair seemed to want to sideline more militant Luton Youth Movement activists,  asking  ‘Are you going to let this meeting be run by a white girl and a half-caste?’, referring to the secretary of LYM and another member (LN 23/7/81)

Despite this there was general support for continuing with the CDC with the objectives including ‘To defend all victims of racism’ and ‘to provide advice, information and assistance in terms of legal advice, financial and moral support to all victims of racism’. The following week a steering committee meeting was held with '40 representatives of most the major ethnic minority groups and youth and political organisations’(LN 20/8/81). While some other defence committees were primarily focused on those arrested in the riots, the Luton committee had a broader remit in promoting community defence against racism in all forms.

The formation of the CDC incensed John Carlisle MP who called for the group to be prosecuted under the Race Relations Act for being ‘racially biased’ and planning to compile a dossier of racist attacks in the town (LN 27/8/81). Luton’s other Tory MP, Graham Bright joined in the condemnation: ‘They should be disbanded. The police, as the body responsible for maintaining law and order, should be left to do their job’ (LN, 16/7/81). Labour councillor Eric Haldane also criticized the group for turning down a request from the police to attend its public meeting (LN 23/7/81).

On 30 July 1981, the Luton Youth Movement held its own post-riot public meeting at the International Centre.in Old Bedford Road. There were a couple of speakers from the Brixton Defence Committee, including Monica Morris who called the Brixton riot 'a legitimate uprising against police harrassment' (LN 6.8.81). Another speaker talked about the case of Richard Campbell, a black youth from Brixton who had died in custody in the previous year.  John Gardner of Luton Labour Party also spoke. The meeting agreed to picket Luton magistrates court in September when three LYM members were due in court on charges relating to the riot.

The question of whether a black-only defence committee (as set up in Brixton) should be established in Luton was the cause of some discussion and was promoted by the BDC speaker.  As with the Luton Youth Movement, the Luton defence committee had a predominately South Asian/Black membership but not exclusively so.  The Committee was made up of 23 local minority ethnic community organisations (Dunstable Gazette, 1/10/81) but ‘it was not of the defence committee’s choosing that it became all black. There were whites on the committee when it was formed during the recent street disturbances in Luton but for reasons best known to themselves they chose to leave. However at present there are six whites on the committee again’ (Cecil Harrison, treasurer, Luton CDC, letters, LN 27.8.81).

Luton Community Defence Committee leaflet for October meeting - 'Despite repeated promises and assurances by the police to defend the black community, racialism in Luton and Dunstable has continued to increase. In many cases the police have been unable to question or prosecute the racist aggressors'.

On 3rd October 1981 Luton CDC held a meeting at Holy Ghost Church. The week before  'The Dunstable Gazette' had reported that 'Extreme right wing activists are waging a campaign of hate against immigrant families in Houghton Regis' and quoted  Jim Thakoordin, Chair of CDC, as saying 'we have heard of leaflets being distributed from organisations like Column 88, a military type group… Then there is the November 9 group which is a similar Nazi style operation' (DG, 1.10/81). The latter was an explicitly neo-nazi organisation based in Milton Keynes.

The meeting heard reports of continuing racist attacks in the area. Mr Bhim Dookie, originally from Trinidad and living in Houghton Regis, told of being abused and spat at in the streets by skinheads and of having stones thrown at his windows. There were calls for black people to defend themselves and widespread criticism of the police. Mr Dookie said that a policeman who had come to see him had said 'If things are so bad here, why don't you go home?'  Jim Thakoordin, said that black families were to be given a list of telephone numbers to ring for help and advice if they were attacked (LN 8/10/81).

Report of October meeting from 'Fight Racism Fight Imperialism'

Members of Luton Youth Movement participated in the CDC and its steering committee, and in some ways its formation can be seen as a reaction to the earlier activities of the LYM and to the summer riots – events that galvanized the older activists of established community organizations to take a more militant stance. At the same time, the formation of the CDC threatened to drag militant anti-racism back into the internecine feuds of the local Labour Party and Community Relations Council which the LYM was partly a reaction to in the first place. The difference of approach was shown in the aims of the organizations – as well as offering defence and support to ‘victims of racism’, the CDC sought to ‘To liase between various ethnic groups and institutions, such as the police, young people, local authorities, the community relations council and Government agencies’ (LN 20/8/81). Some of its leadership saw it as having a role in mediating with the authorities rather than confronting them.

The LYM on the other hand had a generally more militant approach. As Fahim Qureshi of Luton Youth Movement has recalled,  ‘young people had enough of seeing their parents cowed down and they said enough was enough…  We used to go and sit with families.... We had self defence vigils in family homes’ and would go outside and confront racists who were harrassing people in their homes. The LYM was part of a network of similar movements across the country and  'We worked closely together especially after the riots’ (Fahim Qureshi interview with Taj Ali, youtube, 2020 - see below). Coaches bringing Asian youth movement activists from Southall and East London would stop off in Luton and pick up people on their way to picket courts in support of the Bradford 12, and Luton activists travelled down to Brick Lane to support their East London counterparts opposing racists there - the area was notorious for its National Front paper sales and associated violence.

The Luton Youth Movement are listed in this list of supporters of the Bradford 12 - a who's who of radical movements from that period

The Luton Youth Movement continued into 1982, when it was involved in protests after a pig’s head was left at the local mosque, but it seems to have faded away soon afterwards. Youth Movements tend to be short lived by their very nature, as members grow up, move away or move on to other things. LYM never reached the size or maturity of some of the other youth movements of this period, some of which for instance published their own magazines, but it was a significant chapter in an important national movement (see Black Star: Britain's Asian Youth Movements by Anandi Ramamurthy, 2013, for more on this).

The British Movement

In the weeks after the riot, the far right British Movement stepped up its activities in  Luton and the wider Bedfordshire area, or at least its threat of activities - most of which never materialised. At the beginning of August, the British Movement announced plans for a march in Bedford, in response to which the Home Secretary banned all demonstrations in Bedford, Luton and Dunstable from 1 August to  9 August. (LN 30.7.81). Demonstrations in London had been banned in the previous month (Times, 11/7/81).

I remember going to Bedford on 1 August to oppose a rumoured BM plan to put a wreath on the war memorial as an alternative to their banned demonstration. Our van was stopped at a police road block outside Bedford and we were questioned about why we were going there. We convinced them that we were just going for a drink. This was partly true as we had a pint at the Barley Mow (a gay pub) and then went and staked out the war memorial watched by the police, but with no BM showing up.

Two weeks later, the British Movement announced a plan to march in Luton on the 15^th August, leading to another ban on all demonstrations in the town (Luton News 15.8.1981).  In September, the BM claimed that they were setting up their own vigilante group to defend their supporters in the town because their Luton organiser 'had to have hospital treatment after a glass was thrust into his face, and that he had now left his home because of further threats and attacks' (LN 10/9/91).

Many of the BM claims were undoubtedly hot air, but their supporters were still a real threat. On 1 August, youths with British Movement sympathies threw a petrol bomb into an Asian family home in Hayhurst Road, Luton. Three 16-year olds were later charged with the attack and with writing racist slogans and Nazi symbols (Luton News, 3.9.1981).

It is doubtful whether the British Movement actually had the capacity to organise significant demonstrations in Luton or elsewhere, but their continual announcement of planned marches provided the authorities with a pretext to ban all demonstrations in affected areas. In Luton the biggest casualty of this was a planned Sinn Fein march in support of the Irish hunger strikers which was banned after the threat of a BM counter-demonstration - though a static Sinn Fein rally did go ahead in September (see previous post on the hunger strike and Luton). 

'Under heavy manners': Crisis culture

While it is possible to reconstruct events from memories and newspaper clippings, it can be more difficult to recapture how people were thinking.  One feature of the ‘structure of feeling’ of this period was a generalized sense of crisis. Aspects of this crisis culture were evident in everything from political discourse to popular music. The economic crisis was real enough, as shown by the rise in unemployment discussed above, and this was reflected in a range of responses across the political spectrum.

On the right, politicians had invoked the spectre of crisis throughout the 1970s, to articulate a sense of the British way of life being threatened by an enemy within of strikers, Irish republicans, migrants, radical students and other malcontents . This sense of unraveling of the social fabric informed some responses to the riots themselves – Luton Tory Council leader Vivian Dunnington blamed the violence on the ‘general deterioration of society’ (Luton News, 16 July 1981).

On the left, there was a sense that new forms of authoritarian policing and racism were paving the way for some kind of quasi-fascist ‘crisis state’.  For instance, Stuart Hall and the other authors of ‘The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain’ (1982) argued that  ‘the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of popular racism’ in the context of ‘the organic crisis of British capitalism and race’. The sense that the racism of the far right National Front was now being taken up by the Conservative Party had been heightened by Margaret Thatcher's remarks in 1979 about Britain being 'swamped by people with a different culture.' 

Another ingredient of this culture of dread was the overarching threat of nuclear destruction, prompted by a heightening of Cold War tensions and giving rise to the rebirth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Luton branch of this was very active and coachloads from the town went to London in October 1980 for the huge ‘Protest and Survive’ demonstration.

Imagery of social contradiction and collapse was at the heart of punk (Luton’s main punk band were called UK Decay), with an apocalyptic language borrowed from reggae and rastafarianism. In 1979 The Clash covered Willie Williams ‘Armagideon Time’, and The Ruts sang of ‘Babylon’s burning’. The phrase that summed up this sense of crisis more than any other was ‘under heavy manners’, coined in Jamaica during the violent political conflicts of the 1970s and popularized in Britain by The Clash and subsequently Rock Against Racism. The peak period of RAR was passing by 1981, but some people from Luton attended the big RAR carnival in Leeds on 4 July, just a week before the riot, where the Au Pairs, The Specials and Misty in Roots played. I saw the latter play at Luton Recreation Centre on a snowy night in January 1981 -  the UK reggae band had been involved in the anti-National Front demonstration in Southall in 1979 where anti-fascist Blair Peach had been killed. Music was a key means by which anti-racist struggles circulated and a sense of a national and indeed international movement was created and sustained.

Famously, the Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ was the number one record in July 1981, providing a suitable soundtrack for the riots with its depiction of urban dereliction and its cry of ‘people getting angry’. For Paul Gilroy, writing immediately after the riots,  the Two Tone movement of which the Specials were part prefigured the movement of July with its ‘self-conscious anti-racist politics’ and its impact of  African Caribbean culture on white youth; it also encapsulated ‘youth’s own perceptions of economic crisis and the consequent crisis of social relations’  ('you can't fool the youths ... race and class formation in the 1980s', Race & Class, Autumn 1981).

In the aftermath of the riots, Socialist Worker reproduced a photo of a banner from 1908 stating flatly ‘work or riot, one or the other’ with the caption ’73 years on – the same fight’ (SW 18.7.1981). Earlier in May 1981, the TUC organized People's March for Jobs from Liverpool to London passed through Luton, met by 2000 local people in the pouring rain, an attempt to resurrect the spirt of the 1920s/30s hunger marches.

The movement of riots can certainly be seen as a kind of reaction to mass unemployment, not in the narrow sense of demanding jobs, but as an angry response by young people to their situation as a 'no future' generation condemned to the dole queues or low-paid work.  In his reflections on the riots, A. Sivanadan argued that: ‘Nowhere have the youth, black and white, identified their problems with unemployment alone… There is a different hunger – a hunger to retain the freedom, the life-style, the dignity which they have carved out from the stone of their lives’ (A different hunger: writings on black resistance, 1982).  Another response was summed up in the title of an anarchist pamphlet published after the Brixton riot: ‘we want to riot not to work’.

Whatever the underlying causes, the spark for the Luton riots was undoubtedly the presence of far right skinheads and mobilising to oppose this, in a similar pattern to the Southall riots. This differed from the situation in some areas such as Brixton where the rioting was more of a direct response to policing. In both scenarios it was racism that was key, whether coming from the National Front, the British Movement, or the police.

Luton features on this riot map on cover of ‘Like a Summer with a Thousand Julys’, a situationist-influenced account of the 1981 events that declared that ‘the UK is tripping down the primrose path to social revolution’.

Report of the Luton riot - Socialist Worker, 18 July 1981

I had thought that the 40th anniversary of July 1981 might be marked with some interesting events but I guess Covid put a stop to that. I would be interested in other people's memories of this time in Luton (or indeed elsewhere), my own teenage involvement was quite peripheral. Leave a comment or drop me an email.

 

Other Luton writings:

How it all began (for me): a School Kid against the Nazis in Luton 1979/80

Blinded by the Light - memories of racism and job cuts in 1980s Luton (including the Luton Youth Movement)

Luton Nuclear Disarmament Campaign go to Greenham Common 1980

The Luton Riots of 1981 - 'Brixton comes to Bedfordshire'

The Hunger Strike, the Irish War and an English Town

Karma Sutra, Luton anarcho-punk and hunt sabbing

Clubbing in Luton 1984

Dole Days in Luton: unemployed protests, 1985

Luton punk squat party 1985

We are Luton - opposing the English Defence League in 2012

'Angry White People' book review (at Datacide magazine)

Neil Transpontine (2021), The Luton riots of 1981: Brixton comes to Bedfordshire <https://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-luton-riots-of-1981-brixton-comes.html>. Published under Creative Commons License BY-NC 4.0. You may share and adapt for non-commercial use provided that you credit the author and source, and notify the author.