---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 04 Feb 2002 17:31:06 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Look back in anger [Angry Brigade]
Look back in anger
<http://www.observer.co.uk/life/story/0,6903,643923,00.html>
They were the British Baader Meinhof, 70s icons of the radical left. Thirty
years ago, the Angry Brigade launched a string of bombing attacks against
the heart of the British Establishment. No one was killed, but after a
clampdown on the 'counter culture' and amid accusations of a Bomb Squad
'fix', four radicals were sentenced to 10 years in prison. Now, for the very
first time, two of the Angries break their vow of silence
Martin Bright
Sunday February 3, 2002
The Observer
Amhurst Road hasn't changed much in the past 30 years. Rotting chunks of
low-rise council blocks break up the long lines of run-down Victorian
villas. There are trees, but they don't look at home. There are shops, but
no banks, just the odd bureau for cashing cheques. Here and there, towards
the top of Amhurst Road, pockets of gentility peek through the desperation.
At the farthest point north, as Amhurst Road ends and Stoke Newington
begins, there's even a delicatessen. But all-in-all it's pretty low-key and
anonymous. You could easily blend into the surroundings if you were a
criminal. Or a terrorist.
Number 359, the last building on Amhurst Road, has been spruced up a little,
but it hasn't changed much since 20 August 1971, when a police squad raided
the upstairs flat and found a small arsenal of weapons and explosives. They
belonged to Britain's only homegrown urban terrorist group, the Angry
Brigade. In the series of 25 bombings attributed to them no one was killed
(one person was slightly injured), but they were a serious embarrassment to
Edward Heath's government. For a brief period between August 1970 and August
1971, the authorities were unable to stop a group of left-wing adventurers
bombing the homes of Tory politicians, as well as government and corporate
offices.
The Bomb Squad, set up in January 1971 with the specific job of catching
'the Angries', had received a tip-off that the flat had been rented by four
university dropouts wanted in connection with the bombs. When they smashed
through the door at four o'clock that Friday afternoon, the squad couldn't
believe its luck. There, according to the police account of events, they
found more than 60 rounds of ammunition, a Browning revolver, a sten gun,
and a Beretta said to have been used in an attack on the US embassy in 1967.
In a cabinet in the hallway was a polythene bag stuffed with 33 sticks of
gelignite and more ammunition. They also found detonators, a knife, a
hand-operated duplicating machine used for the production of 'communiqus',
and a John Bull children's printing set used to authenticate Angry Brigade
releases to the press. Bags of documents removed from the flat included
lists of names and addresses of prominent Tories: employment secretary
Robert Carr, whose home had been bombed in January 1971, Attorney-General
Sir Peter Rawlinson who had been targeted the previous September and John
Davies, the secretary of state for Trade and Industry, whose heavily guarded
town house in Chelsea had been bombed three weeks before the raid. Also
included was the man who would later become the chief ideologue of
Thatcherism, Keith Joseph, and the future chancellor, Geoffrey Howe, then an
obscure junior minister.
The police hid out in the house and the next day arrested two more suspects:
Chris Bott, who had been an activist at Essex University, and Stuart
Christie, an anarchist, known for his opposition to General Franco. A series
of round-ups and raids in the months that followed led to the arrest of
dozens of Angry Brigade suspects, but only two were linked to the six
arrested in Amhurst Road: art student Kate McLean, and telephonist Angela
Weir, now better known as Angela Mason OBE, director of Stonewall, the gay
equality group. They became known as the Stoke Newington Eight.
The people they arrested that August day on Amhurst Road fitted perfectly
the Establishment's picture of dissolute middle-class revolutionaries
plotting to undermine civilised values. James Greenfield and John Barker had
both been at Cambridge before they ripped up their finals papers in 1968 as
a political protest and joined the growing underground that had sprung up
around opposition to the Vietnam war. Anna Mendleson and Hilary Creek had
started at Essex University in 1967, but after their second year likewise
gravitated to the alternative political scene in London's communes and
squats. Bott had been involved in the student riots in Paris in 1968 before
enrolling as a post-graduate student at Essex, and Christie was already
wanted for a series of attacks on Spanish targets in London.
It didn't take long for a mythology of hippie outlaws and their molls to
develop around the two couples from Amhurst Road. This was helped in no
small degree by the Angry Brigade's own ironic propaganda: one early
communiqu was signed 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid' and another 'The
Wild Bunch'. The prurient drooling began even before the four had been
identified. 'Girl slept with bedside arsenal' claimed one tabloid, while
another screamed, 'Dropouts with brains tried to launch bloody revolution.'
Meanwhile, a Sun reporter produced a bizarre story headlined 'Sex Orgies at
the Cottage of Blood' about a house where the four were once said to have
stayed. Here they were said to have ritually sacrificed a turkey while
indulging in the nightmare revolutionary cocktail of 'bizarre sexual
activities' and 'anarchist-type meetings.' Even the broadsheets couldn't
resist. On the weekend after their trial was over, The Observer used the
by-now iconic pictures of the two 22-year-olds as an eye-catching addition
to its table of contents. What the press didn't know was that every time
they used the images, they were contributing to a defence group fund. In a
move that demonstrated a canny understanding of the media's thirst for
images of pretty girls, Creek and Mendleson had a set of photographs
secretly taken during the trial and gave the copyright to friends to manage.
This year is the 30th anniversary of the Angry Brigade trial, which lasted
from May to December in 1972. Barker, Greenfield, Creek and Mendleson all
received 10-year sentences, reduced from 15 after pleas of clemency from the
jury, for 'conspiring to cause explosions likely to endanger life or cause
serious injury to property'. The other four defendants were acquitted. Jake
Prescott, a burglar and heroin addict from Fife, who got mixed up in the
politics of the Angry Brigade, had already been sentenced to 15 years in
November 1971, although this was later reduced to 10.
Today, the cases have all but faded from the collective memory, but for
those still nostalgic for a time before irony had replaced political
commitment, the 'Angries' retain a cult status. For the most part, however,
if they register at all now it is only as a quaint Pythonesque version of
their more murderous continental counterparts, Germany's Red Army Faction or
the Red Brigades in Italy.
But at the time, the Conservative government took the Angry Brigade very
seriously indeed. By June 1971, when the home of William Batty, a director
of the Ford plant at Dagenham, was damaged by an Angry Brigade bomb, The
Telegraph reported that the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John
Waldron had been instructed to 'smash the Angry Brigade'. The raids on
squats, communes and bookshops that followed, represented an unprecedented
crackdown on the counter-culture culminating in the raid on Amhurst Road.
The police strategy, which coincided with the introduction of internment in
Northern Ireland, had the desired effect: the Angry Brigade was snuffed out
before it had a chance to gather momentum.
The reason the story of the Angry Brigade has never fully been told is that
none of the main protagonists have ever spoken about what really happened
all those years ago. A collective vow of silence was taken by those involved
in the trial. That same agreement was also honoured by the defendants that
were acquitted and the substantial network of friends that made up the Stoke
Newington Eight defence committee. Now, for the first time, one of them has
broken that wall of silence. Hilary Creek, who was 22 at the time of her
arrest, believes the time has come to scotch some of the more lurid myths
that surrounded them.
'I was sick of sitting by and waiting passively for the next slap in the
face from the mass media, who rarely reported anything but the prosecution
case,' she says. 'But I thought I didn't really have the right to grumble if
I didn't try to do something to rectify the situation myself.'
The Angry Brigade was no joke for Creek, the youngest of the defendants, who
like Anna Mendleson and her partner John Barker, came from a solidly
middle-class background. Her father worked in the City and she attended
Watford Grammar School where she discovered a talent for economics. At Essex
University she became involved in the revolutionary politics that dominated
the life of the campus and eventually drew her into open conflict with the
British state. She is central to the story of the Angry Brigade. In the week
before her arrest, she travelled to Paris where she met representatives of
the French underground movement in the Latin Quarter. The police alleged she
also collected the 33 sticks of gelignite found in the flat at Amhurst Road.
I have met Creek on two occasions and what is most remarkable about her is
that her politics have remained largely unchanged over 30 years. She
supports the anti-globalisation protesters, but stays away from
demonstrations, knowing it would do the cause no good if it was associated
with a convicted terrorist. She is almost unrecognisable from the old
photographs and she likes it that way. Her hair is shorter now and a
lifetime's smoking has taken its toll. On top of that, the lights of her
isolation cell in Holloway caused permanent damage to her eyes. She has now
recovered from the anorexia she developed in prison, but still talks
passionately about the damage the experience inflicted.
'Anyone who says that prison rehabilitates people is insane,' she says. 'A
long prison sentence completely stops you being able to lead a normal life.
When I first came out I had to teach myself to do the most ordinary things,
like going to the shops.' She believes she was lucky to survive the prison
experience at all. She was threatened with being sent to a secure hospital
and was only saved by the intervention of a psychologist. 'They said they
could fix it so I would be detained "at Her Majesty's pleasure",' she says.
'That was terrifying. I would still have been inside now.'
While in Holloway, she was often kept in isolation, or in a wing with other
long-term prisoners, including Myra Hindley, who became a good friend. When
she developed anorexia nervosa she was finally released for hospital
treatment. But the press wouldn't leave her alone. The Mail splashed the
scandal of the 'bomb girl' who had been released into the community across
its front page.
MPs demanded an immediate inquiry, but Home Secretary Robert Carr, whose
house had been bombed by the Angry Brigade, refused to bow to pressure and
allowed her to continue treatment. When she was let out on parole in 1977,
her conditions included a ban on leaving the town where she lived for any
reason, having anyone to stay in her house or any political activity of any
kind. When she first came out, she and her family received anonymous death
threats and after completing a degree at Swansea University she began to do
research which took her abroad, where she finally settled.
After months of negotiation, she agreed to speak on the record to The
Observer , but only if we agreed not to reveal her whereabouts, her
professional activities, or publish a contemporary photograph.
Speaking now about the Angry Brigade bombing campaign, she says it was a
distraction from the main political thrust of the movement. But the bombs
are a difficult issue to avoid and it is the only moment during our
discussions that she comes close to losing her temper: 'You use the word
"bomb", but be careful about using it because nowadays that's such a
value-loaded term. You think of Omagh, you are not thinking half a pound of
gelignite that causes small structural damage. It is important to put things
in perspective. What nobody picked up on was that it wasn't the bombs
themselves that they were worried about. It was the fact that it exposed the
vulnerability of the system. How could someone go and do in the back door of
a minister? It wasn't so much the criminal damage, it was the fact that it
made them look stupid.'
Basically, I'm not ashamed of anything I have done.' she says. 'Going from
the student protests at Essex to the organisation for the Vietnam war
demonstrations, squatting and the early women's movement. Some of the things
we did I am proud of and we still see the effects now.' She argues that most
of the work of the movement that was linked to the Angry Brigade went
largely unseen. Creek and her friends were involved in campaigns that were
considered subversive three decades ago, but now sound entirely mainstream:
winter-heating campaigns for the elderly, schemes to set up adventure
playgrounds in inner cities, and shelters for the victims of domestic
violence. 'There was a lot going on and each of us had our own particular
area. But there was no organisation that you could in any way coerce. It was
just people helping and supporting each other. There was discipline, there
had to be, but they didn't know where to attack us. I think that's why their
action against us was so extreme. Because what we were doing was a new form
of politics and anything new is frightening for the state.'
Creek refuses to be drawn on precisely what her involvement was with the
bombing campaign and it is important to remember that none of the defendants
were ever convicted of planting explosives. But she is right when she says
that the Angry Brigade bombs made the Heath government look 'stupid'. By
hitting targets connected with the hated Industrial Relations Bill they also
attracted a limited amount of support from workers against the proposed
dismantling of the power of the trade unions. During the trial, thousands of
badges were sold with 'I'm in the Angry Brigade'.
It is difficult now to imagine the intensity of the times. Edward Heath was
locked into a lengthy dispute with workers who occupied the Clydeside
shipyards in Glasgow, which would eventually end with a humiliating
climbdown for the government. Internment was introduced in Northern Ireland
and the Bloody Sunday massacre of civil-rights marchers in January 1972
happened while the Angry Brigade suspects were awaiting trial. One document
found in the raids across London that weekend brought the three causes
together in a mini-manifesto: 'Put the boot in - Bogside, Clydeside -
Support the Angry side'.
Creek also believes lessons should be drawn from the trial itself, a unique
moment in judicial history. Barker, Mendleson and Creek, all under the age
of 24, chose to conduct their own defences with a young barrister, Ian
McDonald, acting for Greenfield. Much to the irritation of the police, they
also chose to exercise their right to interview every juror about his or her
background and political allegiances, to weed out anyone connected with
groups that had been targeted by the Angry Brigade. In addition, the
youthful defendants also introduced the concept of 'Mackenzies', named after
a case in the divorce courts. These were assistants -in this case friends
from the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Committee - who sat in the well of
the court and were allowed to help and advise the accused. 'The hardest
thing was that we were running a political defence in a country where there
are, officially, no political trials,' Creek explains. 'John, Anna and I
defended ourselves as a political decision. We decided the only way to
counter the conspiracy charge was to make the jury understand what our real
political activity was, who we were and where we were coming from.'
Between them, the defence was highly effective, successfully casting serious
doubt on most police evidence against them, including the arsenal found at
Amhurst Road, which they claimed was planted on them. Government forensics
and fingerprinting experts found their professional credibility brought
seriously into doubt. The four also took advantage of the moments when
detectives over-reached themselves in the desire to produce evidence. For
instance, Creek questioned how the police could have found a pair of gloves
impregnated with explosives in the pockets of a pair of her trousers when
the trousers concerned were proven to have no pockets.
'The only concrete evidence they had, we quickly disposed of,' she says.
'All they were left with was the conspiracy charges.'
'We will never know all the answers,' says Ian McDonald QC, now one of the
country's most respected human rights lawyers. 'But there's no doubt about
it, forensically you could sustain a defence that those weapons and
explosives were planted.'
Commander Ernest Bond, the first head of the Bomb Squad, doesn't see it that
way, although he admits that when he first started investigating the Angry
Brigade in January 1971, the only explosives he knew about were used for
blowing safes. Now in his eighties, Bond still talks like a character from Z
Cars , the popular cop show of the period. 'They were a cunning lot the
Angry Brigade, well wrapped up in that anarchist movement. They were
belligerent and very "anti" and there was no sense that they were sorry for
what they had done. Right from the start, there were allegations that we'd
planted this and planted that. It was the most disgraceful trial I've ever
seen in my experience.'
It is tempting to look upon the Angry Brigade convictions as miscarriages of
justice, because we know what happened shortly afterwards in the Guildford
Four and Birmingham Six cases. What can be said is that the police's
ham-fisted investigation made it look like they were fitting people up.
Thankfully, the matter is clarified in a review by John Barker of a book
about the Angry Brigade: 'In 1971-72, I was convicted in the Angry Brigade
trial and spent seven years in jail. In my case, the police framed a guilty
man.' Barker also articulates the criminal naivete of the Angry Brigade's
actions. 'For one thing we were libertarian communists believing in the mass
movement and for another we were not that serious. Put baldly like this it
sounds especially arrogant. Yeah, man, we never took it seriously anyway:
what I mean is that like many people then and now we smoked a lot of dope
and spent a lot of time having a good time.'
Jake Prescott knows a lot about having a good time, as only someone who has
had some genuinely bad times can. He is sitting in his Hackney home, just a
few minutes, walk from Amhurst Road, every bit the working-class ghost at
the Angry Brigade's bourgeois feast. Put into an orphanage at seven,
convicted of his first crime at 11 (stealing a box of paints), and a drug
addict and burglar by the time he was in his teens, Prescott didn't stand a
chance. But in the mid-60s, when he was sent to Albany Prison for possession
of a firearm, he discovered the revolutionary politics of the black civil
rights movement. 'I took it all to heart. I had no objectivity. So when I
got out of jail I thought, "London here I come." I wanted to live it.'
In prison, he'd met Ian Purdie, a young revolutionary who was serving nine
months for throwing a petrol bomb at an army recruitment office. Through
Purdie he was introduced to a commune in Grosvenor Avenue, Islington, with
close links to the Angry Brigade. But Prescott got in too deep with the
revolutionaries and one day in January 1972 found himself in a house in
Notting Hill agreeing to address three envelopes for Angry Brigade
communiqus. Prescott says he had no idea the contents of the envelopes were
claims of responsibility for an attack on the Barnet home of Robert Carr
that night.
Prescott read about the bombing in the papers the following morning and says
that from that moment he knew the game was up. 'I literally walked into a
wall when I read it,' he says. Later, when he left prison, Prescott wrote to
Carr apologising for his involvement, an apology the minister gracefully
accepted over tea at the House of Lords. Prescott still feels resentment
towards the people who asked him to write out the envelopes. None of them
were ever convicted and Prescott refused to name them under interrogation.
But he now says that the apology to Carr represents a turning-point in his
life. He found a job at a citizens' advice bureau in Sheffield and began to
train in employment law. He is now married with two young children, whom he
cares for while his wife goes out to work.
'As the only working-class member, I was not surprised to be the first in
and last out of prison. When I look back on it, I was the one who was angry
and the people I met were more like the Slightly Cross Brigade.'
The Trotskyist groups of the period always viewed the Angry Brigade with
suspicion and the hostility among veterans is as strong as ever. Tariq Ali
remembers being approached by someone claiming to represent the Angry
Brigade, suggesting it might be an idea to plant a bomb at the American
Embassy in Grosvenor Square. 'I told them it was a terrible idea. They were
a distraction. It was difficult enough building an anti-war movement without
the press linking this kind of action to the wider Left.'
Nigel Fountain, who wrote the definitive history of the alternative media
during the period, Underground , said that many people on the Left were
forced to support the Stoke Newington Eight out of a sense of solidarity.
'We saw them as a bunch of libertarian adventurists. But as soon as they
went on trial you couldn't condemn them and we were dragged through it with
gritted teeth.'
Creek and Prescott have taken different paths since leaving prison, but both
emerged from their Angry Brigade past with their sanity and their principles
intact. In a sense, the Angry Brigade was the making of Prescott. He
believes he would still be a criminal and drug addict if he hadn't come into
contact with the middle-class revolutionaries he met at the time. Meanwhile,
ironically, his old comrades Barker and Greenfield have since both have
served time for major drugs offences. Creek completed a degree and rebuilt
her life. Mendleson, also went back to university and did an English degree
at Cambridge in the mid-80s. She writes poetry under a different name and
friends have asked me not to approach her or reveal her new identity. As for
those who were acquitted, apart from Mason, only Bott has had any public
profile - he was marketing manager of the ill-fated left-wing newspaper,
News on Sunday . He is now thought to live in France.
As the anniversary of the trial approaches, interest in the case has started
to grow. There are already plans for an Angry Brigade documentary and a
radio docu-drama has been written based on the trial transcripts. There are
still many unanswered questions. How much lasting damage did the Angry
Brigade do to the radical Left in Britain, or did they have no real
political significance at all? Did the police really plant the arsenal at
Amhurst Road and did their success in getting a conviction mean they did it
again? And were the young radicals really terrorists or would it be more
accurate to describe them as political saboteurs? Thirty years on, the jury
is still out on the Angry Brigade.
The Stoke Newington Eight
John Barker was involved in 1988 with Jim Greenfield and a group of Israelis
and Lebanese in a massive 5m cannabis smuggling operation. Originally
escaped to Greece, but arrested in 1990 when returning to Britain on a false
passport.
Jim Greenfield (pictured right) was given six years for his part in the
smuggling operation and gave a full confession to the police when he was
arrested, putting himself in considerable danger. Served his sentence in
solitary confinement and has not been heard of since.
Anna Mendleson went back to full-time education in the mid-80s and studied
English at Cambridge under an assumed name. Publishes poetry under her new
name to considerable acclaim.
Chris Bott helped found the ill-fated left-wing Sunday paper News on Sunday
in the mid-1980s, but is since thought to have moved to France.
Angela Weir as Angela Mason worked as a lawyer for Camden Council in London
before becoming director of the gay rights group Stonewall. She was awarded
an OBE for services to homosexual rights.
Kate McLean married her solicitor from the Angry Brigade trial and is
believed to now work herself in the legal field.
Stuart Christie lived for many years in the Orkneys, where he set up an
anarchist publishing house. He is since believed to have moved to England
and is now living in the Home Counties.
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