The 2024 Radical History Faction programme will be unleashed in the near future. Until then, here are some other Hackney happenings you may be interested in:
Hackney Art Activism Festival 27 April – 6 May
“A 10 day sound + visual art festival exploring community resistance to policing in Hackney from 1980s to today.
Venues + Locations: Gillett Square, The Vortex, C.L.R. James Library, Hackney Archives, The RIO + Online.”
One of the reasons this site started was the lack of information available about community responses to corrupt, racist and violent policing in Hackney in the eighties and nineties, specifically the amazing work done by Hackney Community Defence Association.
It looks like a number of people who were active in HCDA are involved with this event. There are lots of great things in the programme, but everyone should go to the free exhibitions at Hackney Archives and Gillett Square.
Gillett Square has specifically been chosen because of its proximity to Bradbury Street, which was home to the HCDA HQ, the Colin Roach Centre – as well as number of other co-operatives. The square is not immune to local pressures and struggles and an anti-gentrification protest was held there in 2006. Since then it has been a contested space, being a cornerstone of “radical black history” and also, more ominously, the focus of an award winning redevelopment by architects. Clearly the festival is squarely in the tradition of the former…
Including: Susan Doe on Hackney’s Suffragettes, Breda Corish on how the campaign for Home Rule in Ireland played out in Hackney, Stephen May on the weeks Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg spent in Hackney in 1907 and a Black History Walks tour of Dalston.
Last Thursday, Transport for London (TfL) announced new names for six of its Overground lines and everyone got very angry on social media. For me, this all raised some interesting questions for people invested in London’s radical history and in fostering inclusivity. As well as for observers of the culture wars.
Three of the new lines pass through Hackney:
The Mildmay line is named after a hospital in Shoreditch (but frustratingly it’s in Tower Hamlets and not Hackney) which has done excellent work caring for AIDS/HIV+ patients. The line comes fairly close to the Mildmay Social Club in Newington Green though, which started life as the Mildmay Radical Club in 1888.
The Weaver line is named after the waves of immigrant workers in the textile industry in the East End. We have previously covered both women in the rag trade in Hackney and the role of radical Jews in the borough.
The Windrush line is named after HMS Windrush which is emblematic of the thousands of people from the Caribbean who travelled to the UK from the 1950s onwards, many of whom settled in Hackney. There were celebrations thougout the borough last year to mark the 75th anniversary of the ship’s voyage. The Windrush line includes Dalston Junction Station, which was built following the demolition of the site of the Four Aces – a key venue in the evolution of London reggae soundsystem culture and associated genres like hardcore techno and jungle.
The Suffragette line does not pass through Hackney, but we have previously covered Suffragettes in Hackney and Stoke Newington. I was pleased to hear recently that further work is being done in this area by the Women from Hackney’s History team.
Outrage!
First out of the blocks was the Daily Telegraph, with a righteous defence of the role of Irish people in London:
This is wildly at odds with the Telegraph’s long history of anti-Irish prejudice, which begs the question – what has changed?
The process of Irish people becoming respectable (“white”) in America is brilliantly described in Noel Ignatiev’s classic 1995 bookHow The Irish Became White and similar forces are clearly still at work in London in 2024. In the conservative mind, Irish people are now an asset to London – compared to subsequent waves of immigrants from elsewhere.
GBnews decried the “woke makeover” of the Overground and The Sun also helped fill up the culture wars bingo card with “virtue signalling nonsense”.
The Daily Mail unsurprisingly found a few people who baulked at the renaming project costing £6m of public money during a cost of living crisis.
Former Boris Johnson cabinet minister Lord Frost captured a mood when he said:
“The London tradition is that public transport lines are given a name either with a royal connection or one related to the line’s geography.
Giving them political names is, whether one agrees with the politics or not, a break with that tradition.”
This is a perfect example of the problem of how a lot of people think about politics (and history). Conservatives sincerely believe that the Royal Family is not political and so they get outraged when people of Irish heritage (or from other colonised nations) take issue with that.
And so to geography. The Bakerloo and Waterloo & City lines are named after an area of London called Waterloo. This is itself a celebration of the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, which marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Up to 50,000 people died in the battle.
These things are not political, but the woke Suffragettes using violent direct action to secure votes for women is. And so is naming a train line after women’s football team The Lionesses.
The outrage about the Overground echoes the controversy around historians revealing the connections of various institutions and ruling class families to colonialism and the slave trade. For some, that was not a deepening of historical knowledge, but an attack on a fixed body of facts – which were commonly embodied in statues and monuments. History as tradition and stone versus history as an active process of understanding and re-evaluation.
“Celebrate our history, avoid making the same mistakes – and get inspiration to help create a better society for the future.”
Which brings us to critiques from a more progressive angle…
Is this radical history?
It is important that we celebrate this diverse group of predominantly working class migrants and remember their workplace struggles through trade unions and other organisations.
There are obvious reasons why ethnic diversity is celebrated by Transport for London’s blurb about the weavers, but their struggles around pay and conditions are not mentioned. TfL is notoriously and increasingly anti-union and it is an interesting coincidence that a strike by Overground workers over pay was called off on the same day as the announcement about the renamings.
It is important that we remember that the fighr for votes for women was multi-faceted and that the Suffragettes were amongst its most militant exponents. Exactly 111 years ago a Suffragette bomb destroyed Liberal Minister Lloyd George’s home in Walton-on-the-Hill.
On the other hand, several commentators have pointed out that the woman in the image above is Millicent Fawcett who was not a Suffragette – she was instead the leader of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies, who deplored the direct action tactics of the Suffragettes. So that’s quite funny.
We shoud defend the legacy of direct action. And in doing so, remember that whenever it is used it is decried by the media, courts and politicians – until enough time has passed for it to be deemed good and proper. This celebration of the Suffragettes is in stark contrast to the UK government’s ongoing clampdown on the right to protest.
It is important that we recognise the contribution of the Windrush generation in spite of the brutal racism that it has faced.
The TfL site does mention that the Windrush generation was “often met with intolerance and denied access to housing, shops, pubs, clubs and even churches on account of their race”.
It does not mention that the origin of this project of migration was in the British Empire, a violent exercise of racist colonisation which received the blessing of the “non-political” Royal Family of the time.
The TfL acknowledgement of “intolerance” does not really do justice to the normalised violence and institutional racism faced by London’s black communities from the 1950s onwards. HMS Windrush will now be forever associated with the Windrush Scandal, in which the Conservative Party’s “hostile environment” for immigrants was directed towards the Windrush generation and its descendants. This resulted in countless detentions, threats of deportation and actual deportations for members of this “celebrated” community.
TfL is correct to point out that “Caribbean communities enriched and expanded London’s music scene.” But back in Dalston, the founders of the influential Four Aces nightclub bore the brunt of British racism. Newton Dunbar was one of the most arrested individuals in Hackney at one point in the 1980s, despite never being charged with anything significant.
Charlie Collins (aka Sir Collins) lost his son Steve in the 1981 New Cross Fire – a tragedy at a house party which is widely attributed to a racist attack. Charlie planted 13 trees in the garden of the Four Aces in memory of the 13 victims.
The trees were destroyed when the area was demolished in 2006 to make way for Dalston Square. A luxury development of 550 apartments was built on the site. Two of the blocks are named Dunbar Tower and Collins Tower. Newton Dunbar commented:
“They called it Dunbar Tower without consulting me. I do not know if they were taking the mickey, or if they had some other more sinister intention. It’s certainly no compensation for the building which was taken from me.”
According to Newton, “the demolition of The Four Aces laid down the roots for the subsequent gentrification of Dalston.”
The Dalston towers overshadowed a botched immigration raid in May 2022, in which Hackney’s residents successfully fought against police brutality. Two months prior to this, it was revealed that Metropolitan Police officers had strip searched a black schoolgirl, ‘Child Q’ without another adult present and in the knowledge that she was menstruating. This led to several significant protests and an inquiry. Giiven the long history of police racism in Hackney it is reasonable to suggest that these two incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.
The culture wars are being waged after a decade of capitalist restructuring (aka austerity), a process which has only intensified since the pandemic. Everyone except the super-rich has seen a rapid decline in living standards during this period – and women, ethnic minorities and those at the sharp end of the economic scale have borne the brunt of it. Arguments about the names of train lines are a distraction from this. (But sometimes a distraction from the doom and gloom of everyday life can be welcome and might even be an inspiration…?)
Complicating history
Where this leads me is that celebrating past victories is not enough. Radical history needs to be more than a checklist of “cool things that happened in my neighbourhood”.
At the very least, we need to recognise the struggles that these victories arose from and the wider context that those struggles existed in.
But more than that, we should be explicit about the suffering that these now “celebrated communities” endured and continue to endure. And be inspired to fight this injustice – and all injustice – in the here and now.
Update 20th February 2024:
Thanks to the commenter who mentioned this forthcoming event in Hackney to commemorate Sir Collins and the victims of the New Cross Fire:
At the vigil for Brianna Ghey in Soho Square we were encouraged to turn to the people next to us and tell them that they were loved. This was an important demonstration of solidarity at a time when most trans people in the UK will be feeling even more persecuted than usual. But it may not surprise you that my middle-aged cis-hetero English repression prevented me from participating.
That said, I have been thinking about my trans friends and comrades a great deal this last week. Young people talk about their “love language” and I guess, if that is a thing, then I will express my love through writing about the radical history of Hackney.
And radical history brings us nicely to the elders of the British trans community and what we can learn from them.
Roz Kaveney
Roz Kaveney was born in 1949 and transitioned in her late twenties. She is a writer, critic poet and activist. Roz was a member of the Gay Liberation Front, helped found Feminists Against Censorship and is a past deputy Chair of Liberty (The National Council for Civil Liberties). Her life in London in the 1980s features in the superb Rebel Dykes documentary, which I would recommend to anyone without hesitation.
Roz moved to London in 1974 and “lived in various flats in the borough [of Hackney], in the middle and late 1970s.”. As she told Hackney Museum:
“My living in Hackney is very much a function of the housing situation for young queer people in late 1970s and early 1980s. It was possible to get a tenancy in Hackney, if you were young and vulnerable, and I got one.”
Roz’s collection of poems The Great Good Time (2022) reflects on her early time in Hackney, as she explains in the foreword:
“Back in the late 70s, when I transitioned, I acquired as my peer group a bunch of slightly younger trans women who I met around Soho, and for a short while became their landlady, bail person and wailing wall. I had middle class and education privilege and they didn’t – I hope I used it for the greater good… It taught me a lot about solidarity.”
It’s clear from these poems that life was far from easy for trans people in this period (when has it been?), and that the mutual solidarity the group provided took many forms. There is a lot of help with recovery from violence, from police and doctor induced trauma and some often comical examples of simply navigating existence together as complicated and difficult people.
The final poem “Ridley Road 1981” is a beautiful evocation of Roz and her friends styling it out in Dalston, on the way to buy a late night kebab “protected by the nothing left to lose”.
Alongside everyday psychological and material support, a very concrete form of solidarity was providing a home:
“So, in 1979 I lived, first of all on the Hackney end of Amhurst Road and then on Colvestone Crescent in Dalston. This will be one of the things that will interest you most, because that’s the period when, because I had a licensed squat, I filled it up with a number of very slightly younger trans club workers that I knew from the trans community in Soho. There was briefly, first of all on Amhurst Road and then on Colvestone Crescent, The Dalston Trans Commune.
Looking back it only lasted a few months, because I think it lasted a while after I left, because there was a point when I got my flat on the Kingsmead, I tossed people the keys and said “You are on your own kids, I am out of here.” Because I didn’t much relish being everyone’s parent. That whole thing I was, what, 28 or 29 and they were 24 or 25 I mean, one of them was a bit younger, one of them was 19 or 20. Mostly they were people in the 23, 24, 25 area. But I nonetheless had to be the responsible adult.”
Hackney Museum interviewer: What led you to be the grown up in there?
“It wasn’t particularly a plan. […] One of my friends got out of jail, so I let her stay, while she was between engagements in jail. She had been evicted while she was in jail, so she needed somewhere to stay, so I let her stay, and then she went back to jail for a short period, only a couple of months.
While she was in jail along with one of her friends, two slightly younger trans women, who had been living with the friend who went to jail at the same time that she went to jail, got thrown out of the flat where they were living in the middle of the night. Basically [their flatmate’s] boyfriend, decided to make a pass at the pair of them, in the middle of the night, and they walked out, and then realised they had nowhere to go. Literally, I mean, at 1 o’clock in the morning I found two drowned rats on my doorstep. Obviously, I let them stay and there was nowhere else for them to go immediately and I thought, “Oh what the hell.” Then they moved with me from Amhurst Road to Colvestone Crescent, and then Maz, and for a while Bieber, came out of jail, needed somewhere to stay. Yeah I mean it was a big house.
Suddenly, there were all sorts of people wandering in, it became a crash base as well. It was a matter of very much policing people because, well, the border of Amhurst Road and Sandringham Road which is the first one, was in those days a front-line for drug dealing. So, I made an executive decision that this was a drug-free house, otherwise we would be people of interest, which meant being quite firm about dope. But also it meant, one of them, Vivian, had, I won’t say an addiction problem, but certainly a barbiturate habit, I had to tell her, “what you do when you are not here, is your concern, while you are in the house, you are clean”, and that meant that she didn’t get a key.
And it’s these things that everyone who finds themselves in that kind of alternative housing has to learn quite fast. You make people pay some rent, because otherwise they don’t feel a commitment. You make people contribute to a food kitty, because otherwise they take advantage. It’s all token things and you have to be prepared to throw someone out if they do something wrong, which I found myself having to do on one occasion, but I won’t mention the specific thing, because it was something quite hard. Someone else who lived in the flat briefly did something extremely criminal and I evicted them on the spot. Again, you have to be prepared to do this. I mean, I then went to a house and called a house meeting and said, “I have just done this, any objections?”
“So, and then I moved up to the Kingsmead, where I was fine for a while, because on a different floor of the same building was a gay male commune made up of reformed skinheads. Which meant that they dyed pink triangles on to their scalps, and adopted anti-fascist politics, having had fascist politics, but were still quite scary people. On the other hand, they were on my side… there were a couple of times I got into arguments in clubs in the West End, and they appeared sort of out nowhere and said, “She is our mate,” which was nice, but then they moved off to a farm in Wales or something. Farm or what, I don’t know. I don’t ask.
At that point, things on the Kingsmead got a little less pleasant. There was a very speed addled gang on the Kingsmead in those days, and I’ve made the mistake of ringing the police when I saw them doing a burglary. As a result of which, the police came around to my flat to take a statement, rather than ask me into the station to take a statement. What kind of idiot does that? As a result of which, I got threatened with being firebombed, and this is how I ended up living down in Haggerston, but I had to move out fairly quickly and go on paying rent in a flat I couldn’t live in, because the police had fingered me.”
Roz survived all this – and more – and remains a Hackney resident to this day. She mentions the current climate of hysteria about trans people in The Great Good Time:
“I noticed a lot of bleakness creeping into trans social media and thought it my job as a community elder to remind young people that things had been, if not worse, at least as bad in different ways… The important thing about life in an embattled community is to have each others backs.”
I hope that’s useful and perhaps inspiring context and perspective for anyone who has read this far, but especially to younger trans people. You should know that you are loved and wanted and that there is a place in this world for you.
Sources and further reading
The full transcript of the excellent interview for Hackney Museum is here.
Roz was interviewed at length about her life in a recent episode of the recommended What The Trans podcast. (Starts 37:30)
Her collection of poems about trans life in the late 1970s and early 80s, The Great Good Time is published by Team Angelica and can be ordered by your local independent book shop. Or from Amazon if you must.
The header image is a photograph of Colvestone Crescent during the “winter of discontent” of 1979 and is by Alan Denney. I have taken some liberties with it.
This events programme for Hackney Women’s Centre Lesbian Group is typical of some of the social events programmes and flyers which we have throughout the archive. It illustrates the wide range of social activities that these groups promoted amongst the women that used those spaces. Flyers like this are often interesting because they can often underline the intersectional approaches to organising that feminist and lesbian spaces often tried to institute around building access for wheelchair users, childcare facilities and language interpretation.
Glasgow women’s library
I also like that the events are social rather than overtly political – precisely because in the 1980s lesbians socialising together would haven been a political act in itself in many ways.
Hackney Women’s Centre on Dalston Lane, photograph courtesy of Rio Cinema Archive on Instagram
Hackney Women’s Centre appears to have been based at 27 Hackney Grove E8 and then at 20 Dalston Lane E8 around 1984/5.
The Centre’s origins stretch back to at least 1981, with this call to action in Hackney People’s Press:
An early story about the Centre from Hackney Peoples Press #72 September 1981
The group seems to have prioritised a feminist approach to the entire project – the commitment in the article above was matched by ensuring the premises were accessible to disabled women.
Similarly, the renovation of the Dalston Lane property was overseen by Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative – an feminist architecture co-op who were also based in Dalston at the time:
There is an interesting post about their work on Hackney Women’s Centre at Matrix Open Feminist Architecture Archive including a scan of some pages from a brochure about the renovations needed at the 20 Dalston Lane building.
In “Evaluating Matrix: note from inside the collective” Julia Dwyer and Anne Thorne note that not all of the GLC funded women’s centres were as successful as the Hackney one:
Matrix was involved in projects for Hackney, Brixton and Bermondsey. Of these, only one, Hackney Women’s Centre, was built. The borough council had made a rundown shop building on Dalston Lane available, and much of the limited funds for building work went into repairing it before it could be converted for use: here the kitchen, built by women joiners, was at the heart of the social space, and as much of the building as possible was made accessible for disabled people.
Alongside the technical renovations and building work, the Centre commissioned some lovely stained glass by femalie artist Anna Conti and the photos on her site are the only tantalising glimpse of the interior of the Centre I have been able to find:
The flyer below gives a flavor of the sort of activies that the organising group were hoping the Centre would be able to offer. And of course there is the inevitable mail box at Centerprise!
An advert for the Centre, reproduced in The RIo Tape/Slide Archive: Radical Community Photography in the 80s (Isola Press)
Hackney Museum has a nice badge too as part of its collection:
Aside from the Hackney Lesbian Group flyer at the top of this post, I’ve not found a huge amount of material on what actually happened at the Centre after it opened. There are some interesting adverts in the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre Project newsletter from 1988 and 1990:
An event fron 1988.A regular event in 1990.
The longevity of these events suggest that the Centre was able to maintain the commitment to intersectionality noted by Glasgow Women’s Library.
Social event at the Centre – probably from 1989
Inevitably it was not all plain sailing, as is evident from this unpleasant exchange of letters between the Pan African Congress Group and the Centre. They concern an argument over a group obtaining a Malcolm X tape which is mainly about homophobia in the black community:
Letters page, Black Lesbian and Gay Centre Project newsletter June/July 1990.
It appears that Hackney Women’s Centre was in operation until at least 1993. A lot of organisations that had been supported by the GLC struggled to maintain funding beyond this point. (Although it is worth noting that London Irish Women’s Centre was at 59 Stoke Newington Church Street until 2012).
The Centre appears in several novels: “Calendar Girl” by Stella Duffy (1994), “Hello Mr Bones” by Patrick McCabe (2013) and “All Girl Live Action” by Sara Faith Tibbs (2015)
If you have any memories of Hackney Women’s Centre – or access to archival material, stories, people relating to it, please leave a comment below.
Sources and further reading
Petrescu, D. (ed.) (2007) AlteringPractices: Feminist Politics and Poetics ofSpace, New York and London: Routledge – includes “Evaluating Matrix: note from inside the collective” Julia Dwyer and Anne Thorne.
Grace Quah – Beyond the Home: Re-evaluating feminist representations of domestic space through contemporary cinema (Thesis for Bartlett School of Architecture, 2017) – available on academia.edu
Norman and Gerald Jacobs were both members of legendary Jewish anti-fascist organisation The 43 Group. Any more information on the excellent Mrs Rae Sims would be very welcome.
Alt text for the visually impaired and search engines:
PC Pushed Her – So She Hit Him
PASSING through Dalston, London, during a Fascist meeting on her way to visit relatives, Mrs. Rae Sims was pushed by a policeman. She hit him.
“She was a bit annoyed because she could not get through,” said her counsel at North London yesterday. “She is not a politician.’
Mrs. Sims was stated to have said: “Do you think I’m afraid of a — policeman?” and given him a blow that was “more of a scrabble” on the mouth. She was fined £2.
Norman Jacobs, 22, and Gerald Jacobs. 19, charged with insulting behaviour, were said to have flung tomatoes at the “British League of Ex-Servicemen” speaker in Ridley Road on Sunday. Police Sergeant Davis said that a crowd of 50 “surged forward” shouting “Out with the Fascist rats,” and threw tomatoes, apples, potatoes and electric light bulbs. Both Jacobs were fined £15.
A letter to underground magazine International Times, 1972.
Gender balance seems to have been a serious issue for Hackney communes in 1972. I have previously posted a similar notice from the same year by a gay collective in nearby Abersham Road E8. The difference is that Abersham Rd notice explicitly mentioned “we are into smashing our male patriarchy” whereas this would not appear to be a concern for Roger (and/or “the gang”).
For me this speaks to a clash of subcultures – on the one hand the hedonist druggies of 86 Sandringham Road. On the other the hard-edged feminist political milieu that would host figures like the Angry Brigade, Astrid Proll and Dalston Men’s Group. The hedonist faction is less well documented, for obvious reasons… I’d love to speak to Roger and the gang about their time in Hackney if they are still around.
Sid Easton (1911-1991) was a Jewish cabbie, communist and trade unionist. The following is taken from his autobiographical tribute “The Life and Times of Sid Easton” edited by Graham Stevenson. This is available here (text) and here (pdf scan) and also includes a lot of material on the Transport and General Workers Union attempting to clamp down on communists in its Dalston branch.
At this time [1941] l had an unpleasant tangle with the law, it was an event heavily tinged with anti-Semitism. I had a job carting finished dresses in my cab. I waited whilst they loaded up and then I took them where I was directed. I carried string and I used to put it in one side through an open window and take it out through the other side and tie it to the roof.
Then they would pile dresses on hangers from the string inside the cab. So much so that the guy who sat in the back of the cab was completely invisible to anyone who didn’t know he was in there.
On this job one day, I was going down Dalston Lane, a viciously anti-semitic area. Nowadays it is viciously racist against Bangla Deshis. The traffic lights were just turning red as I got to them, so I pulled up. I wasn’t conscious of cutting anyone up. l was in such a good mood, once I’d finished this job I was going home to have an early finish. All of a sudden, I got the feeling that someone was trying to come over to my nearside, but couldn”t do so as the kerb was in the way. I looked to see what was happening, when someone came over.
“I’ve a good mind to punch you in the fucking jaw for cutting me up,” he told me. I looked at him, “Look, mate ,” I replied. “I wasn’t aware that I cut anybody up. If I did, I’m sorry. But be careful how you go, don’t threaten me, because I’ve got a weak heart,” I checked him. “I’ll give you a weak heart,” he said and swung a punch at me. I opened the big half door of the cab and swung it out as he shaped up. He was forced to step back and so didn’t get anywhere near me. I thought I’d let him see how big I was, because I’ve a tendency when I’m driving to slump down a bit! So, I got out of the cab and said,”Now look, you’ve had two goes.Why don’t you get back into your cab..” (he was actually driving a lorry ) “..and when the lights change we’ll go. I’ve told you, I didn’t intend to cut you up. Whatever I did was done quite unconsciously. I’m sorry, but what else do you want? Blood?”
“You fucking Jew bastard,” he growled and slung one at me. He was a mug, because I could see it coming a million miles away. So I just stopped it and hit him myself. He hit the deck – he fell flat on his face. There he laid. It was unfortunate for me, because immediately I hit him, my arms were grabbed by two men. They turned out to be plain clothed policemen. They stood waiting for the lorry driver to get up, but l’d done too good a job on him and he remained unconscious. Leaving him on the floor they took me to the police station, riding the few yards on the side runners of the cab. My passenger was still in the back and all this time was hidden by the hanging dresses. Well, I didn’t say anything about him!
These policemen knew what they were about alright, they didn’t care that I was defending myself… it was Jew versus Gentile. In the charge room they prepared to do me for grievous bodily harm. One of them says, ”It’s a good job this wasn’t at night, because we’d have done you.” Meaning of course that they would have beat me up under cover of darkness. “Look, I’ll tell you something,” I replied. “If this had been at night the pair of you would have been on the floor and out. But I’ll let you away with it. If you feel like it, I’ll prove it to you.”
By this time a superior officer arrived and began questioning me. He sent the two policemen who had arrested me out for the body. The knocked out lorry driver had come round before the police could get back to the scene of the crime, although they did have a note of the number of the lorry. The driver nonetheless had pushed off without knowing what had happened. Whilst the passenger in my cab emerged from his hiding place and arrived at the station to confirm that I had been a victim not an assailant.
So they were unable to make the GBH charge stick and resorted to charging me only with assault.
As I was leaving the station, the two policemen who had arrested me started whistling “Deutschland Uber Alles” – remember this was 1941! I asked the policeman in charge if he knew what they were whistling and told him that they also had reckoned they would have beaten me up in the backyard if it had been night-time. I told him that they could do that as far as I was concemed, and lock the door, for there was only going to be one person knocking on the door, the other two would only be fit for burying. He said, “You’re loosing your temper.”
I replied, “What do you mean, “loosing my temper” -there’s a war on, didn’t you know! They’re whistling the enemy’s song and you’re talking to me about loosing my temper. I thought this was something you could be in prison for.” Eventually I had to leave the station, my customer was still anxious to deliver his dresses!
In court, both me and the lorry driver were bound over to keep the peace and had to pay a two shillings fine. The policeman who took the money off us said that we had both acted stupidly and that we ought to shake hands, but the other guy refused although I told the policeman that I didn’t want to fight in the first place. So the copper said, “If I turned round the other way, do you want to give him another one!” That was funny, but I said it was too easy and in any case it was no use banging somebody you didn’t really have to be afraid of.
“Sisters: There is a collective/Commune/Household, of gay people living in Hackney and we want some sisters to come and live with us. We are into smashing our male chauvenism and giving up our privileges as men over women. You do not have to be gay, just full of good energy and love, and if this society has fucked you up, maybe we will be able to work it out together. At the moment there are five men and we want about four more people….. please contact The People, 4 Abersham Road, Hackney, London, E8.”
A previous post highlighted that this show was in development and it finally airs this weekend with all episodes available on Iplayer.
That post also went into some detail about the real events that inspired the novel that the show is based on, including the role of the militant anti-fascist 62 Group in fighting fascists at Ridley Road in the 1960s.
I enjoyed Jo Bloom’s novel and am looking forward to the TV adaption. From the trailer it appears that the female lead plays more of a role in infiltrating the fascist group than in the novel, where she mainly worries about her square-jawed male lover doing that.
The Radical History of Hackney 