Tuesday, July 06, 2021

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, LeicesterDerby, 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 CafĂ© 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 meetingThe 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 BedfordLuton 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 15th 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 RoadLuton. 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.
 


Tuesday, May 04, 2021

The Hunger Strike, the Irish War and an English Town: Luton 1980-81

The 1981 Irish Hunger Strike started in the H Blocks of the Maze prison (also known as Long Kesh) in March and finished seven months later following the deaths of 10 Irish Republican prisoners.  The mass support for the hunger strikers was to prove a turning point in Irish politics, but it resonated across the world. 

I grew up 300 miles away in Luton, an English town albeit one with a large Irish community. The events had a profound impact on me as a teenager just getting involved in radical politics, it was heartbreaking following the news day by day of prisoners getting sick and dying in the face of the chilling, cold-hearted indifference of Margaret Thatcher and her Government. All the more so in that the five demands of the prisoners were quietly conceded shortly afterwards:

- The right not to wear a prison uniform;

- the right not to do prison work;

- the right of free association with other prisoners;

- the right to organize their own educational and recreational facilities;

- the right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week.

Luton had a significant role in the Irish republican movement in the 1970s and early 1980s, and was the scene of one of the last Hunger Strike demonstrations.

Frank Stagg and The Luton Three

An earlier hunger strike had been mounted by Irish prisoners in English jails in 1976, demanding a transfer to prison in Ireland.  In the course of this protest Frank Stagg died in Wakefield Prison and Michael Gaughan died in Parkhurst.  Frank Stagg had first joined Sinn Fein in Luton in 1972. 

Frank Stagg

In November 1973, three members of Luton Sinn Fein - Sean Campbell, Phil Sheridan and Gerry Mealey -  known as the Luton Three, were convicted of ‘conspiring to rob persons unknown'.  No robbery had taken place and it was claimed  that 'They were the victims of a trap laid by police agent Kenneth Lennon at the instigation of Special Branch. At the trial Lennon’s name and his role in the affair was concealed by the prosecution denying the defence any opportunity of contesting the basis of the police case. All three were sentenced to ten years' (Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 12, September 1981). In another twist Lennon (who lived in Francis Street, Luton) then encouraged an 18 year old Luton man, Patrick O'Brien, to take part in a plot to help the Luton prisoners escape from Winson Green prison in Birmingham. This seems to have been another Special Branch sting. Lennon later confessed his role as an agent provocateur to the National Council for Civil Liberties, shortly before he was found shot dead in the Surrey countryside.

The Luton Three all had a tough time in prison. Mealey spent seven weeks on hunger strike in 1976 as part of the same protest in which Frank Stagg died. While in Albany jail on the Isle of Wight, Campbell was badly beaten up by prison officers during a prisoners protest in 1976, sustaining a broken leg, jaw and ribs.  Shortly after his release in 1982 he was admitted to hospital after suffering a severe stroke, but he went on to become a Sinn Fein councillor in Cookstown, County Tyrone until his death in 2002

'They were taken to Luton Police Station where they were again assaulted and beaten and interrogated'. Republican News, 25 August 1973. The Patrick McAdorey Sinn Fein Cumann in Luton was named after an IRA volunteer killed in a gun battle out with the British Army in Belfast in 1971

In another incident in 1976 John Higgins, an electrician and the National Organiser of Sinn Fein in England, was arrested in Luton and later jailed for four years after being convicted of soliciting arms as well as walkie-talkie radios (Belfast Telegraph 7/4/77).  He was convicted on the dubious evidence of John Banks, an ex-paratrooper and mercenary recruiter with links to the British  intelligence. Higgins had earlier been the focus for an entrapment attempt from  Kenneth Lennon

'MI5's own mercenary - ex-Para set up Irish Republicans'

There was also the odd case in 1977 when Luton Sinn Fein member Michael Holden was approached by Luton Labour Councillor Finbar McDonnell and asked if he knew about an IRA plan to bomb the Vauxhall car factory in the town -  a false story apparently originating with police/security services. As Holden commented at the time: 'I don’t think that the IRA would bomb the Luton factory. They have never bombed factories. And, anyway we have 16 or 17 members of Sinn Fein working at Vauxhalls’. I asked who would benefit if such a thing happened — only our enemies would benefit. I said if a bombing was carried out there it would completely destroy all Sinn Fein activity not only in Luton but in the whole area' (statement in Hands off Ireland, November 1977).

The Luton 2: Jim Reilly and  Gerry MacLochlainn 

The case of the 'Luton 3' was followed in 1980 by that of the 'Luton 2', which I remember personally. Jim Reilly was a familiar figure on the Luton Left, and had been a union shop steward at Vauxhall as well as the Home Counties organiser for Sinn Fein.  He lived in Highfield Road in Luton's Bury Park area. As reported in Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! (no.4, May/June 1980):

'On Sunday and Monday 30 and 31 March two leading members of Provisional Sinn FĂ©in (Britain) – Gerry MacLochlainn South Wales Organiser and Jim Reilly Home Counties Organiser – were arrested under the racist anti-Irish Prevention of Terrorism Act.

Sinn Fein and Hands off Ireland staged pickets of Luton police station, on one of which - on Easter Sunday - police piled in. 10-15 police rushed from the station and kicked and punched the demonstrators back from the entrance. This was followed by the arrest of five Hands Off Ireland supporters – four of whom were subsequently charged with ‘breach of the peace’.

That morning Jim and Gerry appeared in court and were charged with conspiracy to cause explosions. The conditions under which Jim and Gerry are being held also violate their rights as remand prisoners. Both men are forced to wear prison uniform and are being held on 23 hour lock-up in solitary confinement and denied association or recreation. Since being moved to Leicester prison, they have been held in the punishment block'.

Another Luton Vauxhall car worker, Willie Higgins, was also arrested under the PTA in April 1980, but was released without charge.


On 28 June 1980 there was a demonstration from People's Park in Luton calling for the dropping off charges against 'The Luton 2', as well as those arrested in the police station protest. Around 150 people took part in the demonstration which was addressed by Jim Reilly (by then out on bail) when it paused by Luton police station. The march had been arranged by Hands Off Ireland, the Revolutionary Communist Group's Irish campaign.

(The RCG did not have a branch in Luton, but there were a few members in nearby Hemel Hempstead including one of my teachers from Luton Sixth Form I believe. I recall them turning up at a Luton CND meeting around this time at the Communist Party HQ at 8 Crawley Green Road and trying unsuccessfully to get them to adopt a Troops Out of Ireland position.  They spent a great deal of time denouncing other left factions for not having the 'correct' line on Ireland, but to give them their dues they did priortise solidarity when for much of the Left the fact that British troops were on the streets just across the sea was treated as background noise, just another issue on the menu of causes) 


Report of the Luton demo in June 1980, from FRFI, July/August 1980

I remember going to a public meeting at the International Centre in Old Bedford Road called by the Defence Committee Against the Prevention of Terrorism Act at which both Jim and Gerry spoke- the latter also having just been released on bail. I believe this was the meeting on June 19th 1980 mentioned in the following article, it also included a showing of a film 'Prisoner of War' about the prisoners' struggle.

'The racist anti-Irish Prevention of Terrorism Act... allows the police to arrest and hold people for eight days without any evidnce or charge, without any legal advice or contact with the outside world, and in atmosphere of intimidation and anti-Irish prejudice'

The death of Jim Reilly

Sadly, Jim Reilly was to die shortly afterwards at the age of 54. A long time asthma sufferer, he was admitted to hospital with a chest complaint and died at St Mary's Hospital in Luton. 

Born in the New Lodge area of Belfast in 1927, Jim Reilly was first interned in Crumlin Road prison as a young republican in 1942. After emigrating to England, he founded the Luton branch of Provisional Sinn Fein in 1971 and was arrested at least four times in the 1970s. For instance in 1975  Reilly and three other people from Luton including John Higgins were arrested in Liverpool as they left the Belfast boat on their way back from a Sinn Fein conference (Belfast Telegraph 31/10/75).  

Reilly's treatment in prison was widely held to have contributed to his ill health, not to mention his earlier experiences of being on hunger strike as a teenage prisoner in the 1940s: 'Jim Reilly, Luton Sinn Fein and Home Counties Organiser, died in hospital on Friday 26 September 1980. Jim Reilly was a lifelong revolutionary Republican fighter working right up to the moment of his death. His death was a direct result of the frame-up organised against him and his close comrade Gerry MacLochlainn (now serving a six year sentence). Having hounded Jim Reilly throughout his life, British imperialism succeeded in hounding him to death in September 1980. Jim Reilly’s death was a great loss both to the Republican movement and the British working class. He will always be remembered as a courageous dedicated Republican and convinced socialist' (Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! No 12, September 1981).

As a final indignity, British Airways refused to fly his body back to Belfast, resulting in his funeral at St Peter's on the Falls Road being delayed. He was buried in Milltown Cemetery.




Jim Reilly Obituary, from Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism, Nov/Dec 1980



Class struggle (Revolutionary Communist League), 2 October 1980

Gerard MacLochlainn was jailed for 6 years, like me he ended up in Kent a couple of years later: he was in Maidstone Prison and I was at University of Kent at Canterbury! Gerry applied for a course at the University and was refused admission, I was involved in a short lived campaign in his support which involved painting 'Defend Gerry MacLaughlin' and 'Troops Out of Ireland' across the campus among other things (his name variously given in English and Irish spellings in different reports). I also came across him later on when he was the Wolfe Tone Society/Sinn Fein organiser in London in 1990s, I was in Troops Out Movement at the time. Later he moved to Derry and became a Sinn Fein councillor.

Troops Out, December 1982

The Next Step, November 1982


1981 Hunger Strike

Shortly after Reilly's death, in October 1980, prisoners in the H Blocks began a hunger strike in support of their five demands. This was called off after 53 days with the prisoners believing an agreement had been made. When it became clear that this was not the case, a second hunger strike began. Bobby Sands was the first to die on 5 May 1981, less than a month  after being elected as MP for Fermanagh and Tyrone. Immediately afterwards the Government passed a law to stop prisoners standing in elections to ensure there would be no repeat of this.

Between then and the end of August, nine other prisoners died: Francis Hughes, Raymond McCreesh, Patsy O'Hara, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine. All were volunteers with the Irish Republican Army or the Irish National Liberation Army.  Kevin Lynch, who died on 1st August aged 25, had spent time in Luton including training with St. Dympna’s Gaelic Athletics Association club.

As the prisoners died they were replaced by others on the hunger strike and in September 1981 Sinn Fein announced that it planned a demonstration in Luton in support of the prisoners.  In the event the demonstration was banned, along with all other demos in the town, after the neo-nazi British Movement announced its intention to stage a counter-demonstration. Not long before, on 11 July 1981, more than 100 people had been arrested in a full scale riot in Luton sparked by clashes between skinhead British Movement sympathisers and predominately Asian youth in the town centre.  The threatened BM demo was the latest in a summer of threats from the group in the Luton area, and it provided a pretext for the Home Secretary to ban the hunger strike demo - not to mention the  fact that Luton Town FC were at home to rivals Watford on the same day (for the historical record I will simply state that the mighty Hatters won 4-1).

However, a static Sinn Fein rally did go ahead in Luton's Manor Road recreation ground on Saturday 26 September 1981,  which I attended along with about 250 people in the pouring rain. The speakers included prisoners' relatives including Nora McElwee (sister of Thomas McElwee), Malachy McCreesh (brother of Raymond) and Marius McMullen, brother of Jackie McMullen who was still on hunger strike (1). Other speakers included Michael Holden (Luton Sinn Fein), Eddie Caughey (Sinn Fein prisoners support) (2)  and ex-soldier Meurig Parri. Guest of honor was Owen Carron, who had been Bobby Sands' election agent and then after his death won the subsequent byelection on an 'Anti H-Block' ticket (3).

The British Movement had claimed that on the same day 200 - 300 people would protest outside Luton police station to protest against their march being banned (4)), but nothing materialised.

Just over a week later, on 3 October 1981, the hunger strike ended - but will never be forgotten.

 

Troops Out, October 1981

At the time of the Luton riot in July 1981, the local Herald newspaper said: 'The scene could have been Belfast, or even Brixton or Liverpool' (16 July 1981). I think it's important to remember that the Hunger Strike was going at the same time as the 1981 uprisings in English town and cities. I have no doubt that the young people rioting in Brixton and Toxteth on the one hand, and Belfast and Derry on the other took inspiration from each other - the TV news was dominated throughout the year by such scenes. Many black and Irish activists definitely saw each other as both being in the front line against British imperialism - to take but one example, radical black magazine Race Today published a text by Bobby Sands. And of course the British state was also not slow in making such connections -  in July 1981, the army demonstrated its water cannon to police chiefs and senior police officers from England visited their counterparts in the Royal Ulster Constabulary to learn about their methods of riot control.

(1) Belfast Telegraph, 24 September 1981

(2) 'Troops Out demand by Sinn Fein’, Luton News 1 October 1981

(3) Special Category: The IRA in English Prisons, Vol. 2: 1978-1985 by Ruán O’Donnel

(4) Luton News, 24 September 1981.

Leaflets from my own colllection, The Splits and Fusions RCG archive was a useful resource

A couple more leaflets on the Jim Reilly/Gerry Gerard MacLochlainn campaign. This from the Defence Committee Against the Prevention of the Prevention of Terrorism Act:


Back of leaflet advertising events in Luton


'Luton Magistrate Obstructs Bail' - Hands Off Ireland press release:



[post updated March 2024 with information about John Higgins trial and Michael Holden statement]



More posts on Ireland



Thursday, April 15, 2021

Love is the Message Podcast

I was pretty excited to hear that Tim Lawrence  and Jeremy Gilbert have started a new podcast, Love is the Message. Tim is the great cultural historian of disco with his books on The Loft, Arthur Russell and early 1980s New York, while Jeremy co-hosts one of my favourite podcasts, ACFM on Novara Media which looks at the weird/pyschedelic left.

They describe the new podcast as follows:

'Love is the Message: Music, Dance & Counterculture is a new show from Tim Lawrence and Jeremy Gilbert, both of them authors, academics, DJs and dance party organisers. Tune in, Turn on and Get Down to in-depth discussion of the sonic, social and political legacies of radical movements from the 1960s to today. Starting with David Mancuso's NYC Loft parties, we’ll explore the countercultural sounds, scenes and ideas of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. ”There’s one big party going on all the time. Sometimes we get to tune into it.” The rest of the time there’s Love Is The Message'


In the introductory episode they talk a lot about David Mancuso and his famous Loft parties which they see as a bridge between the counter-culture of the late 60s/early 70s and the emergence of disco not just as a music but as a  new way of being on the dancefloor. As Lawrence describes it in the show, when Mancuso moved to New York he was 'heavily committed to the ideas that were fermenting around civil rights, around gay liberation, around the feminist movement of course the anti war movement and he also got interested in experimenting with LSD... it was very much the idea that the party could become a manifestation of these energies. It had become dangerous to go out on the street, anti-war protestors were getting killed by the state for protesting against the Vietnam war. There was this idea that the dancefloor space, that intimate private space could also function as a safe space, as a refuge where these energies could be cultivated, could be nurtured, could be given freedom to explore themselves'.

Of course there had been 'discotheques' through the 1960s but these were primarily heterosexual courting spaces with short songs and regular breaks for slow dances and trips to the bar.  The focus was not on losing yourself in the music and the crowd. Lawrence describes The Loft as a an experiment where Mancuso used longer, percussive tracks as part of 'setting up the parameters,  exploring the outer limits of what happens when you take the dancefloor,  you turn it into a space of openness, of possibility, of exploration, of transformation, where there are no clear cut limits being set... using the neutral space of the floor as a space where the rules were taken away and people were  allowed to enter it and redefine the set of the rules. The grand experiment was what happens when you start to bring a different form of music into this setting and you let the music take you somewhere, you let it drive the space'.

Lawrence and Gilbert are not just theoreticians of this sort of stuff but actually put on parties with Mancuso before his death in 2016, so expect to hear a lot more about this in future episodes.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

'The Night will not be Silenced' - Myanmar punks oppose the coup


Mass resistance to February's military coup is continuing in Myanmar, with more than 500 people killed as soldiers and police open fire on protestors. Among those taking part are members of the country's punk community. According to Myanmarmix:

'Myanmar bands The Rebel Riot, Kultureshock, The Outcast and The Slingshot, as well as several international bands, have formed a collective called Cacerolazo – the Spanish word for “casserole” and a form of protest popularized in 1971 when women banged empty pots on the streets to demonstrate against food shortages in Chile... the practice of clattering pots and pans is associated with exorcising evil in Myanmar and it has been deployed nightly to show disgust at the junta, which seized power from an elected government on February 1. Cacerolazo’s “The Night Will Not Be Silenced” pays homage to the noisy protest along with the people who have been killed by security forces since the coup 

“The voracity with which people crash their wooden spoons against their dented and deformed pots and pans is a daily reminder of the solidarity of the people against this regime," said a member of the band who asked for anonymity. “We wanted to share in this unity by bringing people together from across the Yangon punk community to write and record our own raucous din.”

Listen out at the end of the song for “Kabar Ma Kyay Bu” or “We Won’t Forget Until the End of the World” – a revolutionary song adapted from Kansas’ 1977 classic “Dust in the Wind” that became emblematic of the 1988 uprising and has also been widely sung since the coup'.

'Thousands of millions of people/An explosion of opposition/Very determined minds/ Oppose the perpetrators of the coup/Widespread everywhere/The sound of pots and pans/A song for freedom/Drive out the fascists... pull your head out of the sand/can you hear the pots and pans... the night will never silence this song'. You can download/donate here: https://cacerolazo.bandcamp.com/

Yangon band The Rebel Riot have released a track with the universal slogan on A.C.A.B. They say: 'We, Rebel Riot are furious with the current injustice and brutality of police towards peaceful protestors. We are protesting in anyway we can on ground and with our creation through music with our music video ACAB. This video is not merely a song. We are portraying their violence through this video. We hope our music video will help this revolution as a part' (see video on youtube).  The lyrics include: 'Behind the slogan of "May I help you", Lies the violence faced by detained civilians under the coup. We have no faith in the justice system.  Disgusting police. F**K the Police! A.C.A.B'.


The punk community's Food Not Bombs projects have continued to be active since the coup, distributing food to those who need it most. According to their facebook group (18 March), one of their activists was recently hospitalised in the represssion:

'Our friend Japan Gyi (Nickname) is 24 yrs old and he is from our community. He is a musician and has been an active volunteer of Food Not Bombs. He is the vocalist of band Outcast.

Since Feb 1 coup, all of our people from the community have been feeling angried towards the coup. We have been protesting from the start with the crowd and it was a peaceful protest at the start. After a while, they have been cracking down the protest violently by arresting people, beating people and killing people. Deaths of protestors has been increased day by day. Despite the violence caused by junta, people have not   been stopping the protest and still protesting in any way they can .

Hlaing Thar Yar is a township full of factories and many working class people across the country resides. The junta has been oppressing Hlaing Thar Yar more than any other townships to protect China factories. On March 14,Japan Gyi participated on the protest in Hlaing Thar Yar. In the afternoon,many soldiers and police arrived to crackdown the protest. In the evening, they started the crackdown by using tear gas, rubber bullets and live rounds. More than 50 people died and many injured. Japan Gyi got wounded with a bullet (possible rubber bullet) on his right arm and he got a fractured bone. He was sent to the nearest hospital and put in a  cast. His arm condition is still not in a good shape. Our community is worried for his current condition. He is not just a vocalist but also have a hobby for instruments and can play bass, drum and guitar. He is an important youth for our community and has been participating delivering food with Food not bombs. We are all praying for his hand to be back to normal. We need support for his family. We hope he will be back with us soon'.

One small way you can support this community is by paying to watch the Myanmar punk film 'My Buddha is Punk' on Vimeo, all proceeds of which are currently going to Food not Bombs and the Rebel Community

[thanks to Stefan Szczelkun or the heads up on this]


Saturday, March 27, 2021

'Weird youths in tight trousers' and 'demoralising scenes' at 1950s dance in Huddersfield

An everyday tale of police, the licensing laws, spooning and weird youths from Leeds in 1950s Yorkshire:

Huddersfield club wants inquiry into dance "slur"

'A public inquiry into police allegations about a dance in Huddersfield is to be requested by the organisers. Longwood Harriers Athletic Club at its annual meeting last night decided to ask Huddersfield Town Council for an inquiry. The club was recently refused a licence for a dance after police witnesses had spoken of "disgusting and demoralising scenes"..

Huddersfield teenagers' dance hall behaviour was defended last night at a meeting of Huddersfield Youth Committee. The troublemakers whose actions were criticised might have been some of those weird youths in tight trousers and extraordinary dress who come into the town from Leeds and the Spen Valley, said Mr W A Hinchcliffe'.

(Bradford Observer, 21 September 1955)

Longwood Harriers protest at police criticism of dances 

'A police officer stated in court that when he visited a dance which Longwood Harriers held at the Town Hall on August 19, the bar was crowded out, the floor was littered with empty bottles, and some of the couples were spooning. The officer suggested that 90 per cent of the people in the bar were under 20 years of age, and he described conditions as disgusting.

(Bradford Observer, 9 September 1955)

Harriers are granted dance drinks licence after police objection

Longwood Harriers Athletic Club who were recently refused a drinks licence for a dance at Huddersfield Town Hall after police complaints about a previous dance, successfully supported an applicatoin at the Borough Court yesterday for an occasional liquor licence for a ball which they will run at Cambridge Road Baths, Huddersfield

(Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 1 October 1955)

I stumbled across this story at the great British Newspaper Archive while looking for something else, as you do. Longwood Harriers is still going as an athletics club, as a committee member for an athletic club myself I can only dream that we could put on an event today that could attract such notoriety.


Wednesday, March 10, 2021

'And I Dance with Somebody' - Diamonds are Forever & the Yokohama AIDS Conference 1994

In 'And I Dance with Somebody: Queer History in a Japanese Nightclub' (History Workshop Journal, Autumn 2020), Mark Pendleton  reflects on queer spaces, drag and HIV activism (among other things) through the prism of  'a drag-based club night called Diamonds are Forever' which was launched in Kyoto in 1989 and is still going. Pendleton frequented the club while living there in 1998-9 and returned to it recently.

The club was started by the 'artist and activist Furuhashi Teiji, also known by his drag persona Glorias' who while living in 1980s New York  became part of 'the East Village’s burgeoning drag and gay scene centred on the Pyramid Club'. Back in Japan he started the club in Kyoto as well as being involved in 'the radical performance art collective Dumb Type, which challenged social norms around gender, sexuality and identity'.

Pendleton honours the club founders but also warns against 'a narrow focus on creation.. A scene is created, sure, and that act of creation is fundamentally important, but what is created is also experienced by participants, who may or may not be known to the creators themselves and who make those spaces their own through their acts of resistance, or their dance moves'.

In Japan and elsewhere, Pendleton argues, queer spaces can be 'A retreat from the heteronormative world outside. A place to grow into cultures and histories marginalized from that world. That flash of bliss that gives a sense of a future beyond those dull places that fettered us. And a damn fun night of dancing, as a political act in and of itself'.

The 1994 International AIDS Conference in Yokohama

Pendleton highlights the significance of the Tenth International AIDS Conference held in Yokohama in August 1994, a decade into the AIDS crisis and the first event of its kind held outside of Europe or North America. The conference was attended by 10,000 people from 140 countries, with researchers, clinicians, policy makers, community workers, activists and others gathered under the slogan ‘The 
global challenge of AIDS: together for the future’.

Pendleton is critical of a framing of this conference as a culture clash between 'the conservative Japanese society and the western activists' (International AIDS Society), noting that it 'also featured Japanese artists and activists joining with those from elsewhere to remind scientists and policymakers that HIV positive people continued to live their lives through the crisis'. Specifically, Furuhashi and others involved with Dumb Type and Diamonds are Forever  intervened at the conference 'hanging red banners and hosting a party to reflect this insistence and the mechanism through which they understood that life could continue to be realized – collective acts of dancing and love. The AIDS acronym was stripped of its association with illness, stigma and death to become 'And I Dance with Somebody, accompanied by the slogans LOVE POSITIVE in English'.

Yokohama 1994 - image from Mori Art Museum

I attended the Yokohama conference and the party mentioned here so it was great to see this documented, and I thought I would contribute my fading memories of this event and my small collection of documents related to it (I wish I'd taken more photos now of course - I did take some of Yokohama street art which I've featured here before)

'Love Positive' with its slogan 'And I Dance with Somebody' was a series of cultural events, including a Symposium involving the US art critic and ACT UP activist Douglas Crimp. The Love Ball was an evening event taking place in the Plaza in front of the Pacifico Yokohama International Convention Center, the main conference venue. The Ball was described as 'A party to conference participants and the general public' with 'appearances by Diamonds are Forever's drag queens from the Kyoto club scene'. 

'And I Dance with Somebody' - postcard from AIDS Poster Project, Japan

More details are included on this fyler which lists DJ Lala and performers including Ms Glorias (Furuhashi), Simone Fukayuki, Maria Le Reina, OK Girls, Blue Day Girls and others:



As I recall there were a few hundred people there. It wasn't the wildest party, starting as it did in daylight in the humid outdoors, but it was a striking departure from the conference format of endless presentations. The drag acts would certainly have disabused anybody with misconceptions about Japan being a homogenously conservative nation! Of course I was familiar with drag, but I guess the mainstream UK conception of it at the time was of men dressing up as versions of women. If I had to describe it now I would say in Yokohama it was people (who may have defined themselves as men, women or neither) dressing up in outrageous costumes that were beyond anything usually worn by anybody and in a sense beyond gender.

There was a kind of utopian energy, captured in the slogan on this postcard featuring OK Girls, one of the acts participating in the Love Ball: 'O Developed Nations of Desire! O Superpowers of Fantasy' . As described by Pendleton, Japanese slogans on the banners 'imagined a dissolution of binary divisions, whether HIV+/-, man/woman or citizen/foreigner: "I have a dream that my status disappears. I have a dream that my sex disappears. I have a dream that my nationality disappears"'.


 After the performances everyone was invited up on the stage where we danced to disco.

The Plaza venue for the Love Ball (though this photo is of another event at the conference)

My encounter with the Kyoto crew was fleeting but it cheered me up, the conference itself was (understandably) a sober affair. At that point the World Health Organisation was estimating that 6000 people were being infected with HIV every day and that at least 17 million people had acquired HIV world-wide. Medical treatments had not progressed much beyond AZT, which had first been licensed in 1987. There was some positive news at the conference, such as a study that showed AZT could prevent babies being born with HIV to HIV+ mothers. But even the limited treatments available were out of reach of many in Sub Saharan Africa where the  majority of people living with HIV resided.  In her speech at the closing ceremony, 'Noerine Kaleeba from Uganda said that many young women there were asking why, if AZT was effective in reducing mother-to-child transmission, did they not have access to it' (quoted in Orr, Children, Families and HIV: The Global Picture, 1994).

It sometimes felt that such issues were as at risk of being sidelined in the increasingly professionalised AIDS industry of doctors, drugs companies and NGOs. Of course many of these people were doing good work and I was in the latter category myself. But there was a need for a strong activist challenge to put the lived experience of people with HIV at the forefront, and to maintain a sense of urgency.

There were some people in Yokohama from direct action group ACT UP, and they staged a protest at the closing ceremony focused on immigration restrictions on people living with HIV. New York activists reported that  'ten ACT UP members from New York, eight from Paris, and more than 100 members of Tokyo's OCCUR spearheaded several events during the week, including an unprecedented AIDS/coming out march in Yokohama on the opening day of the conference' (The Advocate, 15 November 1994)

ACT UP New York Press Release for Yokohama
(full publication here)


OCCUR (Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement, based in Tokyo) had established  'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities' in May 1994 and had spent the months leading up to the conference lobbying against immigration restrictions on people with AIDS, sex workers and drug users that would have prevented many people from attending the conference. While some flexibility seems to have applied for the conference, the Committee continued to argue against discriminatory immigration laws and that 'The fight against AIDS has no border and so efforts must be made to assure all PWA/H's [People with AIDS/HIV] freedom of international mobility and to encourage solidarity through global networking, cooperation and actions of community-based organisations'. 

Newsletter published by 'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities'/OCCUR for Yokohama conference (full text of document here)


As well as discrimination against people with HIV, another big issue in Japan at the time was the blood products scandal. At least 1,000 haemophiliacs had been infected with HIV through blood products and those affected were taking legal action against the Government and drug companies for failing to take action when the risk was known. Japan did not switch to heat-treated blood products until more than two years after the US had taken this action.

With language barriers and time constraints I didn't engage with Japanese activists other than picking up their literature and attending the Love Ball. But with the visible presence of OCCUR, Love Positive and the large numbers of young people who acted as volunteers to help conference attendees, there was no sense that Japan was in need of enlightenment from outside. The issue of discrimination, including in relation to immigration, was one faced in most parts of the world.

I didn't do that much networking and socialising on my all too brief visit, I diligently spent my time in conference sessions as I was writing a report on it. I did meet some interesting people though, including hanging out with some folks involved in a HIV prevention project with young women sex workers on the German/Czech border (we went on a trip to see the Amida Buddha statue in Kamakura). With so many people present there must have been many connections made, some with lasting significance. For instance, a meeting in Yokohama led to the foundation of the Asian Pacific Network of Sex Workers.

[Mark Pendleton, a historian of Japan, is conducting research on the Yokohama conference, so I am sure would be interested in any memories or reflections - you can find him on twitter]

Commemorative stamp from Yokohama conference 1994


Tuesday, March 09, 2021

'We sing to keep ourselves from falling' - On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

I loved Ocean Vuong's poetic tale of growing up a young queer Vietnamese migrant in the US, 'On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous' (2019).  On the music front I liked this reflection centred around 50 Cent's 'Many Men (Wish Death)', which gets a few references in the novel:

'Trevor, beside me, was singing the 50 Cent song... I joined him. 

"Many men, many, many, many, many men"

We sang, nearly shouting the lyrics, the wind clipping at our voices. They say a song can be a bridge, Ma. But I say it's also the ground we stand on. And maybe we sing to keep ourselves from falling. Maybe we sing to keep ourselves.

"Wish death 'pon me. Lord I don't cry no more, don't look to the sky no more. Have mercy on me!"

In the blue living rooms we passed, the football game was dying down.

"Blood in my eye dawg and I can't see"

In the blue living rooms, some people won and some people lost. 

In this way, autumn passed.