15
The Deptford Fire, the Bradford Twelve, the Mangrove and Spike Milligan . . .
Anyone who drives north out of central London heading for the M1 or the A1 (the Great North Road) is likely to go along the Archway Road corridor that runs between Dick Whittington’s Highgate Hill on the one side and Hornsey on the other. En route you pass, largely unnoticed, a solid red-brick monolith of a building, unwieldy and unprepossessing. It had been a Methodist church, but with dwindling congregations during the post-war period it had stood empty, bordering on the derelict, for a number of years by the time I moved nearby with my young family.
I have always shunned mainstream party politics because it inevitably becomes bogged down in territorial power games and personality squabbles. Instead I have found it far more satisfying and productive to concentrate my energy on single-issue campaigns, which tend to transcend the usual political boundaries, and for me this begins with the place and community where I live. It is often all too easy to pontificate about how others should organise their lives in foreign lands and ignore what is going on in your own back yard or outside your own front door.
Sharing a local common goal brings people together in a way that little else does, and often helps to strip away embedded prejudices that we all carry around. Although the church, the pub and the post office can provide a focal point of contact, none of them can be as effective as a community centre with no strings attached. Whereas the village hall performs this role in rural areas, for the urban dweller there is nothing similar. Of course local authorities sometimes fund and establish purpose-built community centres on inner-city estates, but they are usually soulless caverns, which become an excuse for graffiti and general desecration by idle hands.
Given the chance, though, people often have extremely constructive ideas about their own environment; and the problem is getting your voice heard and then translating the voice into action. Standing together with a collective and unified message can generate remarkable changes, and in the early 1970s a number of volunteers came together to transform the empty shell of this church into a local amenity. It took a great deal of commitment and stamina to persuade various funding bodies and Haringey local authority to permit this development, but the obvious benefits spoke for themselves, and in the end a highly successful centre known as Jacksons Lane was established. Both Melian and I helped as much as we could – as did Nicky Gavron, Labour Deputy Mayor of London until 2008 – and gradually a concrete wilderness gave way to a comfortable place for the older generation to pass the time of day; for young people to meet to exercise or party; for all sorts of groups to hold their meetings; and for others merely to have a drink and a bite to eat. Nothing extraordinary, indeed quite the opposite, but then that was the whole point.
Jacksons Lane began to get a reputation beyond the locality when a theatre space was created. This was initially intended to encourage local aspiring talent, but it also attracted professional theatre companies who wished to have a testing ground for sometimes very experimental work. One such company was Shared Experience, run by Mike Alfreds. I was particularly taken by its performances, which reminded me strongly of another experiment that had occurred in the Potteries while I was at university: theatre in the round at the Victoria Theatre in Stoke, inspired by Stephen Joseph. Never having visited the theatre in my youth other than to see the Crazy Gang or – unbelievably now – The Black and White Minstrel Show with my father, this experience opened my eyes and my mind to a completely different and intimate world, from Arnold Bennett to Shakespeare. More recently, Northern Broadsides, under the dynamic direction of Barrie Rutter, has continued to keep me hooked with lively, intelligible and novel interpretations of ‘The Bard’, the latest featuring Lenny Henry as a powerful and emotional Othello.
One of the earliest productions by Shared Experience at Jacksons Lane was Bleak House by Charles Dickens. The idea that this 900-page novel could be turned into a manageable stage play seemed a bridge too far, but it was performed over three consecutive nights by a small company whose members took on several different parts, extemporised their own sound effects, had no special costumes and no props or stage scenery. Everything was communicated through words and actions alone, and it was completely compelling from start to finish: I didn’t miss a minute of it. Mind you, the content contained a cutting analysis of the wheels of justice grinding amazingly slow. What I didn’t appreciate then was that, ten years after watching this, I was to break away from mainstream chambers to set up my own at number 14, in a small cobbled street with Georgian lamp standards called Tooks Court off Cursitor Street. The next-door house had a small sign outside it indicating that Dickens had lived there. I’m not entirely sure whether that is correct, but given the steady flow of camera-wielding tourists, it was clear that many others believed that he had. What is certain is that when writing Bleak House, Dickens did draw upon this tiny street for locating Mr and Mrs Snagsby:
On the eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more particularly in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, Mr Snagsby, a law stationer, pursues his lawful calling. In the shade of Cook’s Court, at most times a shady place, Mr Snagsby has dealt in all sorts of blank forms of legal process; in the skins and rolls of parchment; in paper-foolscap, brief, draft, brown, white, whitey brown, and blotting; in stamps; in office quills, pens . . .1
A little later Dickens describes a scene that could be contemplated now:
The day is closing in, the gas is lighted, but it is not yet fully effective, for it is not quite dark. Mr Snagsby standing at his shop door looking up at the clouds, sees a crow, who is out late, skim westward over the slice of sky belonging to Cook’s Court. The crow flies straight across Chancery Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Garden into Lincoln’s Inn Fields . . . to the house of Mr Tulkinghorn.2
All very evocative.
Meanwhile, back on the Archway Road, efforts continued to raise money. One memorable occasion involved Spike Milligan and his wife Patricia Ridgeway, an accomplished classical pianist, entertaining a packed house. I had been a long-standing Goons fan, listening avidly on a large, fake-mahogany wireless with three black plastic knobs (for long, medium and short wave) to nearly every single episode of their zany humour – a sort of humour that no one has matched since, except possibly John Cleese in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. (I love the fact that when Spike first proposed the idea to the BBC, they thought it was going to be called The Go-on Show.) In Jacksons Lane, Spike was in a particularly anarchic and disruptive mood, appearing at completely unscheduled moments and from utterly unpredictable places while Patricia was playing, preceded by a silent, rapidly moving trombone slide! Many years later, when I happened to be addressing an environmental campaign meeting in Trafalgar Square, I had the unenviable task of following Spike. There was a ladder by the side of Nelson’s Column enabling speakers to mount the plinth to deliver their speech, and I held the ladder to let Spike come down before I went up. As I did so, I introduced myself by saying, ‘I don’t suppose you’ll remember me . . .’ – but before I could get any further, quick as a flash Spike replied, ‘As long as you do, you’ll be fine!’
No sooner had Jacksons Lane got itself on the map than the Department of Transport wanted to take it off, with a widening scheme that would have transformed the Archway Road into a motorway. All the usual claptrap was wheeled out about bottlenecks, traffic flow and freight costs, just as it is today, not only in relation to roads, but also to airports – as short-sighted a view then as it is now. The never-ending rush to get more people more quickly to more destinations is a self-defeating objective, never mind the disastrous toll inflicted upon the environment and the guzzling demand for oil.
I chaired a campaign named ARC 73 to oppose the road development, and ultimately to take the fight to a planning inquiry, and we endeavoured to present an integrated transport policy that paid much greater regard to rail, canal and river modes of transport. If there had to be road expansion of this kind, then stick it underground, which coincidentally was what had been done with the Northern Line on the Tube. In the end, thankfully, the main proposals of the scheme were not carried out and Jacksons Lane survives to this day, a tribute to the tenacity of local people rather than the drive for profit.
Throughout this period – as well as my days at school and university, my early upbringing in Finchley, my married life in Belsize Park and Highgate, and my first years at the Bar – I was barely conscious of the trials and tribulations faced by the post-war black immigrant population symbolised by the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury docks in London thirty years earlier. None of my friends, neighbours or colleagues were black. It was only after the 1961 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which, paradoxically, led to a rush to get in under the wire and an increase in the number of immigrants, that classrooms across the UK began to reflect the new complexion and composition of our society. Those children’s parents had been subjected to a very British form of apartheid whereby, although it was not government policy, large swathes of Middle England were bitterly opposed to the influx, and – notoriously – landlords put up signs saying: ‘No Irish, No Dogs, No Blacks’. Tension spilled over into clashes and riots in Nottingham and in Notting Hill during the 1950s, and I should have been far more aware of these developments than I was. I glimpsed some of this when Bernie Simons asked me to represent Darcus Howe, one of the so-called Mangrove Nine who were charged following a showdown between police and protesters at the Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill in 1971. At that stage I only met Darcus briefly, but both he and the Mangrove were to become critical factors in awakening me to what had been going on.
One after the other, I became involved in the cases of people who were no longer going to put up with, or ignore, wholesale discrimination and who were immersed in the politics of resistance.
Fifteen thousand people marched through London with demands for recognition and civil rights in the wake of a dramatic fire in Deptford, south London, in 1981. A house full of black teenagers had gone up in flames, resulting in the deaths of thirteen of them, while twenty others were injured in the blaze that engulfed the house. The fire started on the ground floor and quickly spread, the young people being trapped upstairs by the smoke and flames. Police launched a murder inquiry after survivors described how they had seen a car being driven away from the incident as the fire broke out; the police also said they had found evidence of a liquid substance that may have assisted the spread and intensity of the fire. It later transpired there was a potential device found under a dustbin lid below the front window. Officers had been called to the house earlier in the evening after receiving complaints about noise levels; they suggested someone may have started the fire because they were angry about the loud music, or because they had been excluded from the party.
There were different theories about the cause – one of which was that it was a racist attack – and I represented a number of the families at the inquest.
Darcus Howe had helped to organise the demonstration together with John Le Rose, who ran the New Beacon book shop in Stroud Green, and one Sunday shortly before the inquest began they unexpectedly came round to my house in Crouch End. They were two very different characters – Darcus was larger than life, ebullient and assertive, while John was more retiring, gentle and calm – but together they formed a holy alliance, a partnership to be revered. They had realised, quite rightly, that if I were to understand the predicament and feelings of the families I was representing, it was essential that I should have a strong working knowledge of the background of the black community. Three hours later I certainly did.
There have been two inquests into the Deptford fire tragedy, both of which concluded with an open verdict.
Following close on the heels of the Deptford fire were the trials of the Bradford Twelve and the Newham Seven, which gave rise to the slogan ‘Self-defence is no offence’. In both cases, at different ends of the country, Asian youths assembled petrol bombs in order to defend themselves against impending attacks by members of the National Front.
First-generation black and Asian immigrants were concerned about political equality; they recognised common causes and struggles with whites – for jobs, housing and education – and were less worried about preserving cultural differences. Police brutality and racist attacks, culminating in the inner-city riots of the late 1970s and early 1980s, produced the Scarman Report.3
In April 1976, twenty-four people were arrested in pitched battles in the Manningham area of Bradford, as Asian youths confronted a National Front march and fought the police protecting it. These were young radicals taking on the traditionalists within their communities, who were seeking to deny women equal rights and keep different religious and ethnic sects apart.
The next few years brought further conflict between Asian youths and the police, culminating in the trial of the Bradford Twelve in 1982. Twelve young Asians faced conspiracy charges for making petrol bombs to use against racists, and before their trial I was briefed by Ruth Bundey, one of a rare breed of no-nonsence, intelligent and committed solicitors.
I represented a young man called Tarlochan Gata Aura, who was mild-mannered and deeply political. He and the other eleven had got wind of the imminent arrival of coachloads of members of the National Front from London via the M1, and when they realised the venomous nature of what was in store, it was decided to prepare defensive materials in the form of milk bottles adapted to become Molotov cocktails. Each bottle was one-third filled with petrol and had a rag stuck in the neck that could then be lit and thrown, and the bottles were stored in crates. However, the police arrived before the National Front, and the defendants were arrested for possessing explosive substances. The question at the trial was whether a petrol bomb was truly an explosive substance or merely a pyrotechnic.
This led to two moments of light relief. One came when codefending counsel the late Edmund Alexander (a member of Tooks) attempted to demonstrate – in court! – how easy it was to assemble a petrol bomb, and how its effect did not constitute an explosion. At the point at which Edmund lit the rag, the judge ducked and made a rapid exit. The other was when all defending counsel went to a nearby courtyard with an expert, Dr Keith Borer, who was again to demonstrate the relatively innocuous nature of petrol bombs. He produced a crate of milk bottles, half-filled them with petrol, lit the rags and suggested we throw them at a wall to see what happened. This was undertaken enthusiastically by all, and the meagre result was just a blackened wall. Well, not quite the only result. A window was suddenly flung open and an extremely irate man leaned out, shouting abuse at us: our target had turned out to be the rear wall of the Conservative Party offices in Leeds. The police were summoned and leading counsel had some testing questions to answer . . .
As Ruth Bundey so clearly remembers:
The thing that the police and the prosecution believed until the very beginning of the case was that the defence was going to be based on denial of any involvement in any activity to do with the making of petrol bombs . . . the actual defence being, ‘Yes, we did this; yes, we were proud to do it; we believe we had to do it. It was a defence of necessity, and when the National Front never came to Bradford, fine, we never had to use these preparations that we had got together’ . . . that element of surprise I think was tremendously important because the defendants then just took the courtroom by storm really, and the jury listened very, very, very carefully.4
So we argued that the Bradford Twelve were acting in self-defence, and we won. They were all acquitted of every charge – a remarkable victory.
It was a long trial and it was one of the many times in my career when I had to ‘camp’ with a solicitor or live in digs during the week – rushing home to see the kids and try and pick up family life again for a day and a half at the weekend. It was hard for Melian with five children and a career of her own to pursue, and these periodic separations began to take their toll on our relationship. I have made sacrifices for my work and beliefs, which have given me a fulfilling and stimulating career, but that commitment wreaks havoc with domestic bliss and I really don’t know how you achieve a ‘work– life balance’, as they now call it. I failed in that respect and am sorry for the effect on my family, but I cannot deny the satisfaction I have derived from seeing so many defendants walk free after enduring the stress of being tried for an injustice.
As a result of the continuing frustrations felt by the Asian community, Bradford council drew up a new anti-racist strategy, based on a model pioneered by Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council. It declared that every section of the ‘multiracial, multicultural city’ had ‘an equal right to maintain its own identity, culture, language, religion and customs’, championing both equal rights and the right to be different. Bradford established race-relations units, drew up equal-opportunities policies, and gave millions of pounds in grants to black and Asian community organisations, the aim being to encourage groups to express their distinctiveness, discern their own pasts and pursue their own values and lifestyles. Multiculturalism was born, but was not to mature without the people of many communities being driven into pockets of segregation.
Much the same issues arose in the two cases of the Newham Eight and the Newham Seven in London, when young Asians were faced with threats from white racists and the National Front. Sadly, the events of these two cases were repeated thirty years later when another generation of Asian youths were once again defending their community in Manningham against an incursion, but this time by the BNP. Unfortunately a number of these young individuals pleaded guilty when they had a perfectly legitimate defence. Some first-time offenders were given seven years for stone-throwing, and I was brought in on appeal to try and reduce these heavy sentences, which had been passed by the Crown Court. Some were reduced, others weren’t.
Running alongside all of the events in Deptford, Bradford and Newham was the systematic targeting of the Mangrove restaurant on the All Saints Road in Notting Hill, run by Frank Critchlow. Frank was a charming, laid-back, but quietly authoritative man from Trinidad, and all he really wanted to do in life was cook, entertain people in a cheerful environment and at the same time provide a refuge for the unemployed. So he started with a small café called El Rio in Brixton and then graduated to the Mangrove in 1969. It was a low-key success from the start, as there were few Caribbean-run establishments serving good West Indian food.
Times were hard for Frank’s community. Rising unemployment fuelled competition for jobs and heightened the tension between black and white communities; racial discrimination was the norm; stringent immigration controls were being introduced; and the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech by Tory MP Enoch Powell in 1968 had painted scenes of Britain being torn apart by racial violence and further stoked the engines.
It wasn’t long before Notting Hill became a cauldron for black culture, and oddly the Mangrove restaurant became its focus – I’m told the food was very good – and attracted intellectuals like C. L. R. James, Richard Neville and the Oz pack, musicians, radical lawyers and even John Profumo. Everyone, it seems, but me . . .
The early 1970s was a period of enormous racial tension, and Notting Hill was not immune to the gathering political storms: it was right on the front line, and the Mangrove came to symbolise resistance by a generation ready to reject racist oppression. Frank didn’t invite it, but he attracted the attention of a local senior police officer named Pearman. There were heavy-handed and repeated police raids on the restaurant. The police just did not like Frank Critchlow, and no one ever really understood why. He had moved upmarket from the Rio to a proper, well-run restaurant, and maybe they couldn’t bear to see an ordinary black guy making a go of something. Or maybe they resented the fact that the Mangrove became an unofficial centre for young black people in Notting Hill, providing a more constructive haven than street corners. Or perhaps it was because Frank lived with a white woman, Lucy, and was enjoying a happy family life. The Mangrove wasn’t a drugs den – far from it: Frank was determined to keep drugs out and was always personally ‘clean’, but the police seemed intent on closing it down, and time and again they raided it for drugs.
This in turn provoked discontent and unrest within the black community. Constant hostile policing and harassment meant the Mangrove inadvertently became a meeting place for community activists, and things started getting heavy after a demonstration was organised by the Action Committee for the Defence of the Mangrove, which began as a peaceful protest of about 150 people sporting rather graphic anti-police placards (such as ‘Kill the Pigs’), then escalated into a violent clash between local police and protesters. Of the nineteen people arrested, nine, including Frank Critchlow, were later charged and tried at the Old Bailey as the Mangrove Nine, described as ‘black-power conspirators’.
The trial lasted for fifty-five days and highlighted the oppressive treatment and policing of black people in Britain – and in December 1971, Frank, Darcus Howe and seven others walked out of the Old Bailey, freed by a jury following multiple charges of conspiracy to riot, affray and assaults on police.
Frank was immensely supportive of his community, but suddenly found himself thrust into the forefront of the ‘struggle’. Unexpectedly his local restaurant had become the focus for community mobilisation and resistance and – more up his street – the meeting place for the organisers, performers and musicians of the Notting Hill Carnival. The police of course didn’t let up, and it never really ended for Frank, who was constantly harassed and accused of providing a front for drug dealing. In a further trial in the late 1970s, this time of the Mangrove Six, Frank was again acquitted.
In 1989 I represented Frank when he was falsely accused of dealing in heroin following another raid on the Mangrove, and the trial took place at the Knightsbridge Crown Court behind Harrods (which is now owned and used as offices by Mohamed Al Fayed). It was at the time of the Critchlow case that I began to cycle to court, partly for health and environmental reasons, but also because with continuing death threats I felt that it would be more difficult to conceal a bomb on a bike.
Thirty-six police officers testified against Frank in a drawn-out court case but the jury chose to believe him and Frank was cleared of all charges. He eventually won a case in 1992 against the Home Office for false imprisonment, battery and malicious prosecution. Frank won £50,000 in damages, but it was small comfort as the Mangrove had been closed down while he was awaiting trial, and his personal life was decimated.
The Notting Hill police commander, one Paul Condon, was rewarded for his assiduity over the Mangrove operation and went on to higher things as the top man at New Scotland Yard. We were to clash later in a significant exchange at a rather high-profile inquest: into the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.
In a sense, all Frank had wanted to do was exactly what I had got myself involved in at Jacksons Lane, and I have maintained my belief in the community with other projects intended to provide across-the-board help and advice. One was the establishment of the first neighbourhood law centre to give free advice in Tottenham, and the other was the Acre Lane neighbourhood set of barristers’ chambers, an idea that turned out to have been ahead of its time by trying to directly serve the community in Brixton, instead of being remotely situated in the Inns of Court.
The draconian measures which are being taken within public funding, particularly with criminal legal aid, mean that in the future barristers will have to consider completely different ways of working, one of which will be within the community.
Ironically, the economic wind of change may force barristers to relinquish lavish and expensive premises in city centres in favour of much smaller administrative and collectively resourced offices. This will permit the growth of satellite branches at a local level within the community. Back to the grass roots.