'The raiders left behind a black silk mask' - IRA attacks in Catford, Blackheath & Tooting 1921

During the Irish war of independence (1919-1921) there were armed attacks in London linked to the conflict, in the lead up to the truce agreed in July 1921 that paved the way for independence for most of Ireland. Here's a report of a series of attacks in May of that year in South London, from The Times (16 May 1921).

On Saturday May 14th 1921 'Between 10 o'clock and midnight', 'a series of outrages, believed by the police to be the work of Sinn Fein agents in this country, took place in Outer London. They were all the work of armed parties of men, and in the majority of cases there was proof that the incidents had a direct connexion with the troubles in Ireland..

Two masked men tried to force their way in to the residence of Mr Charles F Duffield, a double fronted house, 141 Wellmeadow Road, Catford, standing in the heart of the St Germans estate. As the result of the attack, Mr Duffield, aged 61, is in Lewisham Hospital with a bullet through both thighs, and his wife, Edith Mary Duffield, has a bullet wound through each wrist... The raiders left behind a black silk mask, a bicycle pump and a heavy revolver with four live cartridges in it'.(The Times speculates that this was a case of mistaken identity as the Duffield did not appear to have any connections to Ireland).

141 Wellmeadow Road SE6 - now the London Stage School,
scene of  a non-fatal shooting in 1921

Four armed men attempted to force their way in to a house in 'Halstow Road, Westcombe Park, Blackheath, at the house of an officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary, who is at present serving in Ireland'

'At Tooting an attack was made by a number of armed men on a house in Coverton Road, occupied by Mr William Dawner, whose son is in the RIC. The knocked at the door, and when it was opened, drew revolvers and forced their way inside. When they were inside, they produced bottles of petrol, which they poured over the floors of various rooms. They then set fire to the place'

See also: 'Sinn Feiners at New Cross' for a report of further attacks in June 1921

Maoists in 1970s South London

Today's revelations about the so-called 'Lambeth Slavery' case have linked those arrested to the remnants of a small Maoist group that operated in Brixton in the 1970s. The central allegation seems to be that  supporters of the group formed a collective that degenerated over time into an abusive scenario where several women felt themselves to be controlled and unable to leave the house of their own free will for many, many years. Two people were arrested in a Lambeth Council flat at Peckford Place, Angell Town in Brixton - with press reports identifying them as Aravindan Balakrishnan and Chanda Balakrishnan, formerly leading members of a group called the Workers' Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

Unless and until this case comes to court and all the evidence is out there, it's probably best not to speculate too much about the details. It is pretty clear though that this would be a unique situation arising from very particular circumstances - and certainly no basis on which to generalise about slavery in modern Britain. Clearly there are disparate cases of extreme exploitation, abuse and servitude but maybe Frank Furedi has a point about the inadequacy of the term 'slavery' to describe them.

Tempting too to draw general political conclusions about Marxist-Leninism as Bob from Brockley does. I have some sympathy with this approach, but again we probably can't deduce too much from this pathological case study. Once a political organisation is small enough to fit in one household we are really talking about small group interpersonal dynamics rather than political ideology, even if ideology can justify all kinds of behaviour that most people would find appalling.

But the case has thrown a spotlight on a largely forgotten dead end in twentieth century radical leftist politics - British Maoism. In some parts of Europe, such as Germany, Italy and France, groups inspired by the Chinese revolution and its aftermath formed a large part of the extra-parliamentary left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Britain, it was never more than a tiny minority current made up of a number of competing sects. 'Maoist' is a term they rarely used to describe themselves, preferring the term 'Marxist-Leninist', but their key distinguishing feature was to believe that Mao's China offered a way forward for world revolution as an alternative to the mainstream pro-Soviet Communist Parties. Whether their beliefs bore any relation to what was actually happening in China, and later Albania, is another matter.

Many of these groups had a presence in South London. A hostile account from the 1970s claimed that Maoist 'influence has been felt in London and in particular in the less prosperous parts in an arc from Camden in the north going eastwards around to Brixton in the south... The decaying Victorian surroundings, the depressed environment, the mixture of peoples and the hostility to the authority encourage a spirit of radicalism and provides the revolutionary with a relatively favourable social milieu and a base for development' (Peter Shipley, Revolutionaries in Modern Britain, 1976).

The Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought  opened its  Mao Zedong Memorial Centre at 140 Acre Lane, Brixton,in October 1976, running evening lectures, study groups and film showings. The Centre also operated as a residential commune: 'The role of the Communist Collective in the Mao Zedong Memorial Centre plays a backbone role in the work of our Institute. Of the thirteen comrades living in the Centre seven of us work in factories, shops and a hospital very near the Centre while six of us are doing full-time revolutionary work'. They published a 'South London Workers Bulletin' and boasted in 1977 that they had 'undertaken the unprecedented task of BUILDING A REVOLUTIONARY STABLE BASE AREA in and around Brixton, a poor and oppressed working-class area in South London'.  In March 1978, the centre was raided twice by the police  - apparently on the basis of drugs allegations - with 14 arrests. Six women were remanded in Holloway Prison for six months awaiting trial as they refused to recognise the courts. Bala (Aravindan Balakrishnan) and Chanda were sentenced to six and three months respectively (though nobody was convicted in relation to drugs). If they already had a fairly paranoid world view which saw fascism at every turn, this experience no doubt accentuated it.

This group had split away from another group, the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist), which relaunched itself as the Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) in 1976. Its 'unique selling point' was to side with Albania when it denounced the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s.  Its best known member was the avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. They too had a South London base, with a bookshop at 569 Old Kent Road in the early 1970s called Progressive Books. Later, in around 1975,  the bookshop and HQ was moved to 170/172 Wandsworth Road, SW8, where it continues to this day I believe. In the 1970s they stood candidates in a number of elections, including as the South London People's Front in the 1978 Lambeth Central Byelection (they got 38 votes - as Ian Bone observes, that election was also contested by Trotskyist groups the Workers Revolutionary Party, the Socialist Workers Party/Flame and Socialist Unity).

Another grouping was the Marxist Leninist Organisation of Britain. In 1974 their mailing address was 17b Brindley Street, New Cross SE14. Their members led the League of Socialist Artists which ran the Communard Gallery at 18 Camberwell Church Street in the early 1970s.  A Tooting GP and Spanish Civil War veteran, Alex Tudor-Hart, was one of the founders of yet another group: the Working People's Party of England. No doubt there were many more local connections to such groups.

The history of this current ranges from the comic (the absurd pretensions of tiny groups to be the vanguard of 'the people') to the tragic (the support for murderous dictatorships such as North Korea and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia - we could mention here too the case of Malcolm Caldwell, a sometime member of Bexley Labour Party and Khmer Rouge apologist who was killed in unexplained circumstances in Cambodia in 1978).

No doubt many good people sincerely committed to fighting racism, colonialism and inequality passed through these groups, but their practice was generally the opposite of emancipatory, with their personality cults, authoritarianism and closed intellectual worlds where everybody who disagreed with them was a fascist or imperialist lackey.  As Keith Flett says they were mostly harmless - even though you wouldn't have wanted to end up working in a rice field with them in charge. The recent Lambeth news reads like a sad footnote to this late, and not particularly lamented, episode in London political life.

Music Monday: Mercury Prize 2012

Last year's Mercury music prize included several South East London connections, with Peckham's Katy B and James Blake both out of Goldsmiths in New Cross, Plumstead's finest Tinie Tempah, sometime New Cross pub denizen Anna Calvi, not to mention ex-West Norwood resident Adele.

The 2012 shortlist has a few local links, though less South East than South West London. Folk singer Sam Lee is a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths:



Jessie Ware is from Brixton (born in Clapham):



Lianne La Havas grew up in Tooting and Streatham - she went to Norbury Manor sixth form:



Guess we could claim the Maccabees too even though they are from way out South West. They formed at the famous Elliott School, Putney where The XX, Hot Chip, Four Tet and Burial all went. Guitarist Felix White went to posh Dulwich private school Alleyn's, as did Jessie Ware incidentally.

Freedom for Tooting

Some friends of mine have recently moved from New Cross to Tooting, so as a parting gift Transpontine will take a rare roam into the western lands of South London to offer up some nuggets of cultural history from Tooting and Balham.

Tooting Popular Front


In the late 1970s comedy TV series Citizen Smith, the Tooting Popular Front was a fictitious South London revolutionary group with slogans including 'Freedom for Tooting' and 'Power to the People'.

In real life, Balham was arguably the birthplace of British Trotksyism. In the early 1930s, a group of South West London socialists were expelled from the Communist Party for their opposition to Stalin's policies. Their ranks included Hugo Dewar from Tooting CP, Reg Groves and Harry Wicks and they constituted themselves as the Balham Group of the International Left Opposition operating from 79 Bedford Rd, SW4; Groves later wrote a biography of the 'red priest' Conrad Noel, and indeed some of the Balham Group had been close to Noel's Anglo-Catholic socialist 'Catholic Crusade'.

Punk and stuff

Charlie Harper of punk band UK Subs was a hairdresser on Tooting Broadway when the band started out in 1977. Guitarist Nicky Garratt recalls: 'We based ourselves out of Charlie’s hairdressing salon... where we stored our battered Marshall P.A. system in the back room along with drums, amps, baskets of towels and a huge supply of hair care products. The Salon, became both meeting place and hang out over the next year mostly because it was one of the few places where Charlie could be found with any degree of certainty'. In Julien Temple's film Punk Can Take It (1979), based around the band's music, there a scene with Charlie Harper in the hairdressers.

Other musical connections include:

- Marc Bolan (T-Rex) went to Hillcroft School in Beechcroft Road, Tooting (now known as Ernest Bevin College) - as a teenager he lived in Sun Cottages, Summerstown;
- Captain Sensible of The Damned was born in Balham;
- Kirsty McColl started out in a band called The Tooting Frooties;
- Kitchens of Distinction did a song 'On Tooting Broadway Station':

Angela Carter

Writer Angela Carter grew up in Balham - her favourite building was the Granada Cinema in Tooting, where she went as a child with her father, as recalled in a 1992 BBC documentary: 'This cinema, with its mix of the real and false - real marble hugger-mugger with plaster, so you have to tap everything to see if it sounds hollow or solid - this apotheosis of the fake. There was a functioning cyclorama, in my day, clouds, stars, a sun, a moon, drifting across a painted sky. I held my breath in the gallery of mirrors - anything might materialise in those velvety depths, monsters, beauties, my own grown self. I would have been seven or eight. This was the first great public building that ever impinged on me - and even though it was then jam-packed with queues, the marble steps polished by uniformed ushers, all the same, from outside it was just a concrete bunker. So there was always the element of surprise. It was, like the unconscious itself - like cinema itself - public and private at the same time... I fell in love with cinema although I scarcely remember the movies I watched with my father, only the space in which we sat to watch them, where we sat with all those wonderful people waiting in the dark'.

World War Two

In October 1940 at least 66 people died while sheltering at Balham tube station during a German air raid. The tunnel was flooded after a bomb fractured water mains. The incident features in Ian McEwan's novel Atonement, and in the film version of the book.