In 1981, fury, fear, and frustration reverberated across the capital's streets. In many retellings of these events, the 'racial tensions' of those early years of Thatcher's Britain 'erupted' into 'riots'. But 'racial tensions' seems a peculiar way of framing what was in fact many individual communities who all felt terrorised not only by white supremacist groups like the National Front, but also by racist police officers and the entire institution of rotten law enforcement. The Macpherson report, published in 1999 in response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence, condemned the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, a reality that was not news to the ethnic minority population of the capital. Indeed, the lived experienced of over-policing was viscerally felt by multiple generations. But that over-policing was only one side of the coin; prejudicial policing not only criminalises marginalised groups, it also fails to protect them.
Saturday night. 17th January, 1981. 439 New Cross Road, Lewisham, South East London. Yvonne Ruddock and Angela Jackson, two Black teenagers, were hosting a joint birthday party. With two hundred guests and the party continuing into the early hours of the morning, it seems to be undisputed there were some noise complaints from neighbours, but a next-door neighbour, Mr Franzen, would later tell journalists that he didn't think there was any trouble. Some older people were in the kitchen at the back of the house, while teenagers danced and listened to music on the first and second floors; there was nobody in the room at the front of the house.
At about 5.30am, a fire broke out. A forty-five year old guest, Mr Forbes, who was in the kitchen of the house at the time, later told newspapers that he heard a bang and then 'the fire didn't take long to spread, it was really going, you never saw anything like it. People were shouting "get out, get out" and kids were jumping out of windows'. Robert McKenzie, a friend of Yvonne Ruddock's older brother, Paul,attended the party and survived the blaze. Recalling the events of that night twenty years later, McKenzie said 'we were all friends, enjoying the music, the atmosphere. It was a happy occasion - like being part of one big family'. When the fire broke out, McKenzie remembered 'lots of smoke, people pushing to get out of windows'.
Ten teenagers died in the early hours of the 18th January, trapped upstairs with limited means of escape and a fire that raged its way up the stairs and flooded the rooms with smoke that choked them. Three more died over the next few weeks, including both Paul and Yvonne Ruddock. Two and a half years later, one of the survivors of the fire, Anthony Berbeck, took his own life just shy of his twenty-first birthday.
An investigation was launched into the cause of the blaze. A white man in a pale-coloured Austin Princess was seen driving away from the scene just moments before the fire ignited and police initially seemed to agree with the community that at attack by far-right terrorists was a real possibility. This theory was bolstered by the fact that the National Front were known to be extremely active in the area; racist violence and aggression was relatively commonplace. It has been claimed by various sources that they were known to have committed acts of arson prior to the fire in New Cross, but it is difficult to properly confirm this, in part because investigations were not always conducted as thoroughly and they could - and ought - to have been. That said, The Huffington Post notes that three years earlier, a Black community centre in Lewisham was firebombed, not long after burning it down had been discussed in a National Front meeting. A similar arson attack occurred the following year.
Daily Mirror, 19th April 1980 (9 months before the fire)
Initially, many family members believed that the attack was racially-motivated and that the fire had been started deliberately from outside the house. Over time, as the results of forensic testing became known, some of these opinions changed. The father of one victim, seventeen-year-old Gerry Francis, has pointed out that a petrol bomb thrown through a window should cause shattered glass to be present in the room and none was found. In Mr Francis' mind, there is just not evidence that these were murders carried out by the National Front. Other survivors agree, and I recommend watching this video from Huffington Post. No definitive answers have ever been given about the cause of the fire, nor about the response of the police and wider establishment. Less than a month after the fire in New Cross, forty-eight mostly young people were killed in a fire at a nightclub in Dublin, Rep. Ireland. Accusations against the Prime Minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, focused on her immediate expression of sorrow and regret at the fates of the young Irish, while entirely ignoring what had just taken place in the capital of her own nation. At this point, tensions were running high in New Cross and among Black communities in other parts of the city.
By March, the police appeared to have changed tack entirely and were now focusing their efforts on the theory that the fire had been started as a consequence of a fight inside the house. Interviews were conducted with survivors, many of them very young, without either a parent or a lawyer present, and some claimed that statements were being forced out of them. The reliably racist rag The Daily Mail reported at the beginning of that month, falsely, that some survivors had actually bee arrested. On 2nd March, around 20,000 protesters marched a full eight miles from South London to Hyde Park. Known as the Black People's Day of Action, it remains one of the most significant demonstrations in British history. With slogans such as '13 dead and nothing said,' the marchers brought the city to a standstill. Following on from this, stop and search operations were stepped up in Brixton, a predominantly Black neighbourhood, which many in the community viewed as law enforcement seeking revenge for the demonstrations.
The New Cross fire brought into stark relief the lack of concern which the British media and authorities held for Black lives. Now, forty years later, almost identical conversations are being had, for example regarding the very different media coverage of the murders of sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, compared with that of Sarah Everard. The survivors, the victims' families, and the wider community continue to commemorate the victims of the fire and it has been the inspiration behind various works of poetry and music in the intervening decades, including Benjamin Zephaniah's 13 Dead and Linton Kwesi Johnson's New Crass Massakah.
Many people remember the London Riots that broke out in 2011 after twenty-nine-year-old Mark Duggan died at the hands of the police. They may also remember the disturbances in Brixton in 1981, 1985, and 1995, as well as the Broadwater Farm Riots. Perhaps they know about the Battle of Cable Street in 1936. The Notting Hill Race Riots of 1958 are less well known, and equally obscure are the events of June 1919. Britain has a rich Black history that began long before the Empire Windrush docked in Tilbury. Tiger Bay, an area of Cardiff that encompassed Bluetown as well as the docks, was extremely diverse even during the 19th century and into the 20th. In the early summer of 1919, clashes unfolded between white demobbed soldiers and the local Black population; these clashes spread and by the time the smoke cleared, three men in Cardiff were dead. That's next week.
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