On 15 June, 1974,clashes between anti-fascists and the police at London’s Red Lion Square, Holborn, culminated in a police charge against anti-fascist demonstrators opposing the far right National Front’s meeting at Conway Hall, resulted in one anti-Front protester, Kevin Gateley, a 20 year old student at Warwick University, being killed. He was not a member of any political organisation, and the march at Red Lion Square was his first. He was the first person to be killed at a political protest in mainland Britain for at least 55 years. (since the British Army shot two looters dead in Liverpool during the riots associated with a police strike in August 1919)
The events leading up to his death began in April 1974, when the Front booked the large hall at Conway Hall, a venue long associated with secular humanism and the anti-war left.The Front had been using Conway Hall for meetings during the previous four years, but anti-fascist pickets began in October 1973. On 15 June 1974, they planned a meeting entitled “Stop immigration – start repatriation”. In early June, the anti-imperialist campaign group Liberation, headed by veteran Labour MP Fenner Brockway, learned of the Front’s booking and attempted to book a room of their own elsewhere in the building. By 9 June, the police were aware that both the Front and its opponents planned to hold demonstrations culminating at Conway Hall.
The owners of Conway Hall, the South Place Ethical Society, through their General Secretary Peter Cadogan, released a press statement defending the decision to allow the Font a room on free speech grounds.
The National Front was founded in 1967 as a far-right, fascist political party. From its inception the organisation had four main issues on which they campaigned: opposition to Britain's membership of the European Economic Community; Ulster; the trade unions and what the journalist Martin Walker calls "the post-immigration attack on black people born in Britain".The National Front had grown rapidly in the early 1970s and by 1974 the membership was about 10,000–12,00 and the Front’s influence was growing; from their origins as a merger of three far right splinter groups in 1967, run by men with long histories in neo-nazi organising, the NF had played populist nationalism to the max.
In an era where full employment and the hopes of the 60s were giving way to recession, unemployment and increased industrial action by workers, the NF whipped up fears that migrants were threatening the ‘British Way of Life’, taking white workers jobs etc. Ably abetted by tory and some Labour politicians and many a media front page… Refugees like the Uganda and Kenyan Asians were hysterically held up as scapegoats; workers fighting for better wages and conditions were also painted as a threat to order.
At this point, in the early 1970s, the Front was concentrating on trying to win middle-class support, among traditional Conservative supporters disillusioned with tory policies from a rightwing perspective: a demographic nostalgic for empire and everyone knowing their place.
Rightwing violence, racist attacks were on the rise. NF candidates were winning larger shares of the vote in elections. But many on the left were determined to oppose the Front.
Freedom of expression was Conway Hall’s mantra – coming from a long history of freethought – but should this be extended to fascists? If most on the left were prepared to demonstrate their opposition to fascism, but not to physically fight it, a growing minority had come round to the position of ‘No Platform’ for fascists; while in practice this was “about denying the NF venues to speak and was not interchangeable with the opposition on the streets”. “Essentially ‘no platform’ was an extension of the successful anti-fascist strategy that had been developed since the late 1940s. As well as physically combating fascist agitation in the streets, one of the major strategies was campaigning for local governments and other institutions to prevent fascists from using public places to speak or meet. Between 1972 and 1976, the ‘no platform’ concept dominated anti-fascist strategy, supported by the Communist Party, the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group (IMG), as well as becoming policy for the National Union of Students (NUS), which was considerably influenced by the IMG and the CPGB.
The ‘no platform’ strategy was not limited to petitioning local councils and institutions to deny the NF access to meeting places, but included physical opposition to the NF organising in public.” (Evan Smith) However, how ‘No Platform’ was interpreted varied among the different organisations… Liberation (formerly the Movement for Colonial Freedom) organised a counter-demonstration that was to end with a meeting outside the hall, which was supported by most of the larger groupings on the left – including the Communist Party of Great Britain, the International Socialists (now the SWP), the International Marxist Group (IMG) and many other groups within the labour movement. Liberation, not intending to try to prevent the NF meeting, booked a smaller room at Conway Hall for a separate meeting, to be preceded by a march along a route agreed in advance with the police, starting at the Thames Embankment to avoid the route of the National Front march. The police agreed that both marches could end at Red Lion Square. An open-air protest meeting was planned on the north side of the square, to the west of the National Front meeting in Conway Hall, with an address by Syd Bidwell, then Labour MP for Southall.
However while Liberation and others were content to march in protest, the International Marxist Group planned to organise a mass picket at the main entrance of the hall, to deny the NF access.
When the Liberation demo of around 1,200 people came from the east, having marched westwards along Theobald’s Road and turned into Old North Street to enter Red Lion Square, a police cordon blocked the way to the left, east of Old North Street, to allow the National Front march to reach Conway Hall. The NF march of around 900 people approached from the west, marching down Bloomsbury Way to the west side of Southampton Row, accompanied by an Orange Order fife and drum band. The march arrived at Southampton Row around at around 5:50 pm, where they were stopped by the police. A group mainly composed of the IMG moved to block the doors of Conway Hall. The police, with what Lord Scarman later described as a ‘concern… with maintenance of public order’, attempted to disperse the IMG contingent. The IMG members refused to be dispersed and according to Lord Scarman’s report, ‘when the IMG assaulted the police cordon there began a riot, which it was the duty of the police to suppress, by force if necessary’.
The cordon was reinforced by members of the Special Patrol Group who eventually forced the demonstrators back with a vicious and wholly disproportionate police response – with mounted police charging into the crowd flailing about with liberal use of their truncheons.
Kevin Gately who was born in England to parents of Irish descent. became a mathematics student at Warwick University, and was in his second year in June 1974, three months before his 21st birthday.He had red hair and was approximately 6′ 9″ tall; contemporary photos show him standing out above the crowd because of his exceptional height and must have presented a tempting target.
During this initial violent clash between police and anti-fascists, lasting for less than fifteen minutes, Kevin Gately, was fatally injured. Gately died from a brain haemorrhage, resulting from a blow to the head.
Photographs from the day show mounted police striking at the heads of demonstrators with sticks. Nick Mullen, a twenty-eight-year-old student from an Irish family was one of those struck on the head. He had been on Old North Street at the same time as Kevin Gateley and a picture shows Mullen’s face thick with blood.
In Mullen’s account, the fatal conflict began when the policemen on foot received an order to attack, causing them to lift their batons. One demonstrator called out, ‘Why don’t you put your truncheons away?’ To which a policeman answered, ‘You must be fucking joking.’ There was a push and one of the demonstrators fell. Mullen claims to have heard a policeman shout, ‘One of the bastards is down. Let’s trample him.’
The last photographs before Gateley suffered the blow that killed him show the student at the junction of Red Lion Square and Old North Street with his way seemingly blocked by police officers. Between Gateley and Conway Hall there are mounted policemen, riding their horses into the crowd. Gateley is three rows back from them, facing mounted officers to his front and police on foot to his side. Subsequent photographs show Gateley after he collapsed. Officers reached for Gateley’s unconscious body and lifted his foot before it fell weightless to the ground.
By quarter past four, the police had succeeded in clearing the north east corner of Red Lion Square, after which they were able to bring in the Front to their meeting. Aside from Gateley, some 48 people were reported to have been injured and by the end of the day some 51 anti-fascists were arrested. Eighty-two charges were brought against the fifty-one people arrested on the day.Twenty-nine of the charges were dismissed, with fifty-three convictions.
A bitter row over the police conduct at the demonstration started with demands for an inquiry and questions being tabled in the House Mr Tony Gilbert, who organised the march for the Central Council of Liberation, said that Mr Gately, had in effect been murdered by the police. “When you get police diving in with truncheons and horses and somebody is killed in circumstances like this I would call it murder.”
NUS President John Randall said, ‘We now know that Kevin Gately died as a direct result of police violence’ Other Left-wing spokesmen accused the police of unwarranted brutality. Miss Jackie Stevens, a fellow student, said that she had been next to Mr Gately linking arms with him. Their line was the first in the march which turned into the police cordon by swinging left when they entered Red Lion square, instead of right. Organisers of the demonstration claimed that they had agreed with Scotland Yard to turn left and only found out at the last moment that they were being made to turn right. This was flatly denied by Scotland Yard.
By the end of the month, Lord Scarman had been placed in charge of a public inquiry, conducting a tribunal with witnesses throughout September 1974, eventually reporting in February 1975. Scarman’s report was seen by many as a travesty which whitewashed the police actions and criticised the demonstrators, primarily putting the blame for the violence – and Kevin Gately’s death – on the IMG, and criticising the naivety of Liberation. The report was ‘unable to make any definition finding as to the specific cause of the fatal injury which Mr Kevin Gately suffered’. and suspicions that his injuries arose from police brutality on the day were never fully answered.
The post-mortem was conducted by Dr Iain West of St Thomas’s Hospital. West indicated that the cause of death was a subdural haemorrhage resulting from a head injury. He found an oval bruise at the back of Gateley’s ear about three quarters of an inch long. The injury had been caused by a hard object. It was impossible to tell from the shape of the bruise what had caused the injury, other than that it was likely to be a blunt object, possibly a police truncheon.Neither a coroner’s inquest nor the Lord Justice Scarman inquiry were able to find evidence to prove or disprove this claim. The jury returned a verdict of death by misadventure on 12 July 1974 by a majority of 10-1.
Gately was buried in Surbiton on Friday 21 June. The same day, 500 students marched through Coventry with black armbands. The following day, Saturday 22 June 1974, thousands joined a silent march retraced the route of the Liberation counter-demonstration from the embankment to Red Lion Square. The march was led by personal friends of Gately, followed by University of Warwick students and then by students from many other universities and colleges as well as contingents from many of the left wing groups that had taken part in the original march. This march also received widespread media coverage. Here's a very short snippet from youtube
The events of 15th June 1974 raised questions of how fascism was to be opposed – questions the Communist Party (CP) addressed by getting all the answers wrong. The CP had supported the counter-demonstration, claiming 5-600 who attended were CP members. In the Morning Star (the Communist Party newspaper) on 15 June, 1974, an article urged people to support the counter-demo, including an appeal by leading trade unionists, stating that the NF’s ‘poisonous ideas are a threat to all that is best in our society’.
In the aftermath, the Morning Star declared that “blame for what occurred… must be placed where it belongs – on the authorities for permitting it, and the police for brutality”. The CP position was that the march by the NF was in violation of the Race Relations Act, and should have been banned. As London District Secretary Gerry Cohen wrote in the Morning Star, “The police, like the National Front, are on the side of the exploiting class. They operated on that side with thoroughness and with fury on Saturday in Red Lion Square.
The CP’s stance – appealing to the repressive apparatus of the State, such as the police, the judiciary and the Home Office, to deal with fascists – showed some extreme naivety. Suggesting the police and the wider State could be persuaded to counter the NF, (despite long experience of the police’s hostility to the left, preparedness to use force against pickets, demonstrations etc, and growing evidence of police rank n file sympathy for NF politics), was a non-starter as anti-fascist strategy. The logical extension of this liberal stance was that the CPGB also slagged off the IMG for aiming at confrontation with the NF. They took the view that the anti-fascist movement needed to appeal to the broader progressive and labour movements, “But what this small section of the march did was to make this more difficult”.
Physical confrontation, they suggested, ‘played into the hands of all those in the key positions of establishment…aimed at destroying our basic democratic rights’. The CP seemed concerned to distance themselves from the physical opposition.
In a press release, the CP stated that, “At no time did our Party contemplate, nor did it take part in any discussions that contemplated of bringing about any physical confrontation with the police or anybody else at this demonstration’; tactics like the IMG’s blocking of the doors they called ‘the adventurist tactics of a minority’.
According to the Party, there was ‘absolutely no reason why the police could not have contained the situation peacefully at all times’ and the police had ‘undoubtedly mishandled the situation”.
This blatantly ignored the reality of organising against fascism, whether in the 1930s, the 1970s, or today. It was physical confrontations that forced the British Union of Fascists onto the defensive at Cable Street and beyond; it was to be mass physical opposition later in the 70s that was to defeat the BF on the streets (if politically they were also undermined by the tories moving to the right under Thatcher). This analysis reflects the reality of later anti-fascist mobilising, in which the CP organisationally played little part. (In fact, the IMG would also not play as significant a role again, being eclipsed by other groups like the International Socialists, before declining and imploding…)
Scarman’s report reflected the ‘nuanced’ establishment response – the police were ‘right not to ban the National Front demonstration’, but the Race Relations Act needed ‘radical amendment to make it an effective sanction’, the anti-fascists were ultimately responsible for the trouble and Kevin’s death, and the anti-fascist movement should ‘co-operate with the police’.
The NF’s electoral fortunes thankfully did not grow exponentially – their profile brought them “notoriety but no tangible gains”. In response the more street-oriented elements of the NF pushed the organisation towards more street marches and confrontation, and attempted to orient their politics more towards a working class audience. This NF campaign chimed with, and contributed to, an increase in violence against Britain’s black population, including racist attacks and murders.
But this led to a broad culture of resistance to the Front and galvanised the anti-fascist movement. helping establish many local anti-fascist groups which, a few years later, became the grass roots of the Anti-Nazi League and inflicted a historic defeat on the NF. By the October 1974 general election the Labour Party prevented any Labour candidate from sharing a platform with the NF. 120 Labour Councils banned the NF from using council halls. The TUC began to take a stand and raise a voice against the NF, calling it a “Nazi Front”.
It would also see the events of 1977 in Wood Green and Lewisham and 1979 in Southall; which led to the tragic death of Blair Peach https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-death-of-blair-peach.html.
After Peach's death, the Labour Party Member of Parliament Syd Bidwell, who had been about to been about to give a speech in Red Lion Square when the violence started, described Peach and Gately as martyrs against fascism and racism/
The National Front became vastly outnumbered on the street. In fact, in the aftermath of Red Lion Square, numbers at anti-fascist demonstrations increased dramatically and continued to rise throughout the mid-to-late 1970s. As Nigel Copsey wrote, ‘despite adverse publicity that the Red Lion Square disorder had generated for the left, more anti-fascists than fascists could be mobilised at street level’.
In the end to the present day. with fascists force again on the rise despite the right to protest being stripped away by the powers that be it doesn’t change the necessity for opposing fascism. physically and no platforming fascists wherever they raise their heads.
Worrying our present government's policies are very close to those of the NF from that era.With the passing of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, we are living in very dark days for civil liberties in the UK. This deeply-authoritarian Bill places profound and significant restrictions on the basic right to peacefully protest and will have a severely detrimental impact on the ability of ordinary people to make their concerns heard. The inexorable rise of fascism in Britain continues.
Protest is a cherished part of British history - from the anti-slavery movement, to the suffragettes and recent anti-war marches and the Policing Bill is in direct conflict with the values of freedom and liberty that this government claims to uphold.
The rise of fascism in Britain is gradual and creeping but sadly more and more evident.The racist Nationality and Borders Bill, is also a clear indication that the British Government is well on the road to becoming a fascist government. If you stand by and do nothing you're an enabler.
Let's not forget Kevin Gately, killed in 1974, in London, whilst opposing the nazi National Front who like Blair Peach and other such fallen anti fascists, their example lives on. British people have a long tradition of fighting fascism. No Pasaran!
The University of Warwick have a collection of documents relating to the aftermath of Gately's death, and in 2019 the university's student union named one of its meeting rooms after Gately. The union have a mural commemorating him in their main building. Lots of information for this post were sourced from here:- https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2013/06/15/red-lion-square-and-the-death-of-kevin-gately/
