Deptford May Day Festival and Jack in the Green 2026

Deptford is bringing in the May this year with Full Bloom, a weekend music and beer festival: 'Led by Villages Brewery and a network of local venues, Deptford in Full Bloom brings together live music, folk sessions, DJs, zine fairs, art exhibitions, and pop-ups across the neighbourhood. Expect everything from open mic nights and jazz sessions to street celebrations and the iconic May Day parade. You can see the full programme here. 

The main event as usual will be the Fowlers Troop Deptford Jack in the Green festival, a revival of a 19th century tradition that has itself been going since 1984. On May Day the procession will begin and end at the Dog and Bell, making its way through the day between various local pubs (route below).

The 19th century Jack in the Green procession was very much associated with chimney sweeps in particular, with May Day known as 'the sweeps' holiday'. As an 1862 court case from Woolwich shows, it wasn't always a respectable affair. In this instance, participants in the local Jack in the Green were accused of fighting and smashing up the Wellesley Arms pub after being refused beer (the now demolished pub stood in Hillreach SE18)

Kentish Independent, 3 May 1862

I have previously written a history of May Day in South London, you can buy a copy of the pamphlet  from Past Tense (please don't order from Amazon, I don't use that account and am locked out of it!). You can also read it at archive.org

See previous posts on May Day in South London

Miners strike benefits 1984: Deptford, Woolwich, Old Kent Road with Test Dept, The Mekons and more

There were many fundraising gigs in support of the miners during their 1984/85 strike, including across SE London. One of the most musically significant took place at the Albany in Deptford in September 1984 where Test Dept played with the South Wales Striking Miners Choir - starting a strong relationship between the two that led to the album 'Shoulder to Shoulder'. I've written about that here before, but there's some additional detail in an interview with Test Dept's Graham Cunnington at Electronic Sound. According to Gra:

“Pat Brown, who was in the Deptford Labour Party at the time, was putting on this benefit at the Albany arts centre, but all the bands he’d earmarked to play had pulled out. Jack Balchin, who was our sound guy and who worked in Deptford and Lewisham teaching music to young kids, said we should do it. He went up to Pat and said, ‘I’ve got the band for you’. Pat had never heard of us, but he said OK, and because we were used to putting on our own shows, we said we’d organise the whole thing. We also said we should have some direct involvement with the mining community, not just do a benefit and send the money out'.  I didn't realise that the Choir was originally pulled together for this gig, rehearsing their songs on the bus on the way to London.

Poster for the Albany gig by Brett Turnbull
(sourced from Test Dept facebook group where there are some pics from the gig)

The Ambulance Station squat on the Old Kent Road also hosted gigs. This 'Solidarity with the Miners' punk benefit in August 1984 featured Your Heterosexual Violence, The Unknown Colours, Violet Circuit and State Hate (I saw the latter play there on another occasion). The Ambulance Station building (which seems to have actually been a former fire station) still stands opposite the Tesco supermarket on Old Kent Road.

In November 1984 The Mekons played a miners benefit at Thames Poly cellar bar in Woolwich with 5 Go Down to the Sea, the Eels,  A Popular History of Signs and the Violet Circuit (again)

See previous posts:

Test Dept and the Miners Strike

Lewisham Miners Support Group/Women Against Pit Closures

Supporting the Miners at Goldsmiths

A mix of music from the miners strike I did a while ago:

 

William Wyld

Poet and artist William Wyld is hosting the next Yer Bard poetry night at Dash the Henge in Camberwell on June 18th 2025.

William works out of a studio at Thames-Side studios in Woolwich and I went along to their open studio this weekend. There were poetry readings from William and other poets including Erica Hesketh (also at Yer Bard this month), Jasmine Cooray,  Michaela Coplen and Mark Rodenhurst. William's diverse body of work was on display including portraits, natural landscapes from the Hebrides (including my ancestral homeland of Islay) and shamanic bird and crab masks. William's poetry has been published in 'Queer Life, Queer Love II' and elsewhere and they have been involved in the Southbank Centre New Poets Collective.

MV Royal Iris - derelict Mersey ferry at Woolwich

The MV Royal Iris, which has been laid up on the Thames at Woolwich since 2002,  is looking in an evermore sorry state after a fire in April 2025.

The ship, built on the Clyde, was one of the ferries across the Mersey from 1951 until 1991. In its hey day it included a dancehall where the Beatles, Gerry & the Pacemakers and other Merseybeat bands played. After it retired there were various plans to convert it into a floating nightclub that never materialised and it has been left getting increasingly derelict by the Thames-side Studios (Warspite Road SE18), opposite the Silvertown Tate & Lyle works.

 

Black Echoes - South London nights out 1987

A window into London soul, funk and reggae nightlife from Black Echoes, 14 March 1987:

A 7 day 'Black Arts Festival' at the Cultural Centre in Woolwich with dance, drama and music with Smiley Culture, Ranking Miss P, Sista Culcha, Taxi Pata Pata and more...

At the North Peckham Civic Centre on the Old Kent Road, Southwark Leisure present 'Art and Soul - a multi-cultural season on events; including Linton Kwesi Johnson and Jean 'Binta' Breeze

Jah Shaka sessionsa the Self Help Centre, 10a Melon Road in Peckham

Soul nights with Bob Jones at the Royal Oak on Tooley Street SE1 (where the Hilton hotel now stands):

Round up of club nights including Chris Nat's under 18 soul parties at the Peter Piper Nitespot (10a Melon Road - same venue as Shaka above) and an under 16s event at the Oneway club in Catford (10 Brownhill Road). There was also an 'under 18 jam' at Steppers, 414 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton (I went there myself when it was Club 414).

And from August 29 1987, Jamaican legend Delroy Wilson appearing at the Golden Anchor pub in Nunhead and La Plaza nightclub in Peckham High Street.

Tales from a Disappearing City - Uncle G on Woolwich B-Boys and Acid House

'Tales from a Disappearing City' is a great podcast with Controlled Weirdness interviewing people about their untold subcultural stories from his SE16 batcave. The latest one is a SE London cracker featuring Uncle G, also known as Urban Intelligence. Godfrey arrived in London with his family as political refugees from Chile in the 1970s and grew up on the Morris Walk Estate in Woolwich. He has lots of great stories of body popping and breakdancing crews in that area in the 1980s at places like Woolwich YMCA and taking part in 'freestyle boogie' dancing competition to hip hop at the Albany in Deptford (apparently there was guy called Chris Sykes  who arranged these events across Lewisham and SE London).

Moving on to the acid house period, Godfrey recalls the legendary Clink Street parties and an ecstasy epiphany with the luvdup crowd that led to a  'rude boys see you later, we want this shit' turning point. He went to Asylum acid house parties at Thames Poly and lots of other raves and parties including 'Rave in the Cave' at Elephant and Castle, a Biology event in a Charlton warehouse, the Tasco warehouse in Plumstead, the Comedy Club in Greenwich and the Tunnel Club (at the Mitre pub by the Blackwall Tunnel) where he remembers a police raid  with 'a big pile of money and pills' in the middle of the dancefloor as dealers frantically disposed of evidence.  He also recalls, as I do, nights at the Venue in New Cross where people would be dancing to house music in one room while indie/alternative bands were playing downstairs: 'we used to see all the goths going to Woolwich train station, loads of punks and all that, and they'd disappear on to the train and go the Venue'. 

He was soon putting on his own parties, including setting up decks in the fields in Middle Park estate in Eltham, and getting involved in pirate radio - leading to 20 years of radio DJing on Woolwich based stations Shockin FM then Wax FM. Today he livestreams every Friday from Planet Wax record shop/bar in New Cross.

Along the way Neil CW mentions seeing Sonic Youth at Thames Poly in 1985 (one of their first UK gigs) and Afrika Bambaataa at Deptford Albany. 

If you remember any of these nights, or similar scenes, let us know in comments.

So many (free) films, so little time

The free film festival scene continues to grow, easy to take them for granted but seeing lots of great movies for free at interesting venues on your doorstep - how cool is that?

Peckham and Nunhead  is on right now until 11 September - full programme here. It will soon be followed locally by Forest Hill from 9 September (as well as Charlton and Woolwich starting on same day), then Catford free film festival from 16 September - opening event is The Great Gatsby at Broadway Theatre, with live music beforehand from Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir.

'Mutiny at Woolwich Dockyard' (1802) - attempted escape by hulk prisoners

During the 18th and 19th centuries, many ships no longer fit to sail the seas were converted into floating prisons. In the London area these 'prison hulks' were located in the Thames by Woolwich and Deptford.

This account of an  'Mutiny at Woolwich Dock Yard' (Morning Post, 2 August 1802) describes an attempted escape by prisoners who had been brought ashore from a prison hulk to work: 'for several months... above five hundred men have been employed in erecting a new wall at the back of the Governor's house. For some time, it since appears, they had planned an escape'.

On a Friday morning, 'about a dozen of these desperadoes went up to the keeper, armed with clasp knives, and demanded the key of the inner gate. The keeper refusing to deliver it up, he was knocked down, and the key taken by force from his pocket'. About 'fifteen or sixteen got into the outer yard' but still faced a 26 foot high wall, which only four managed to climb. By this time the keepers were armed, and two of convicts were shot, one killed. 

The army was mobilised from the nearby garrison, and 'the whole military force, about 2000 men, was placed at every avenue leading out of the town. The horse were stationed in Hanging Wood and its environs, and the foot marched instantly to the Dock-yard... After a very strict search of several hours in the Hanging Wood and the town, the whole were found concealed in different places about the Dock-yard. The four supposed to have have escaped into the wood were found by the military concealed under a quantity of timber in the front yard, near the principal entrance from the high road, and one of them refused to leave the place of his concealment until a shoulder ran his bayonet four inches into his shoulder. The offenders were carried to the dungeon and chained down until they receive their punishment'.

(The Hanging Woods covered an area that included what are now Maryon and Maryon Wilson Parks)

Morning Post, 7 August 1802

Conditions aboard the hulks were notorious. Writing in the last days of their use, Henry Mayhew and John Binny ('The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life', 1862) devoted a detailed chapter to 'The Hulks at Woolwich':

'The idea of converting old ships into prisons arose when, on the breaking out of the American War of Independence, the transportation of our convicts to our transatlantic possessions became an impossibility. For the moment a good was effected, for the crowded prisons were relieved; but from the time when the pressure upon the prisons ceased, down to the present, when the hulks may be said to be doomed, all writers on penology have agreed in condemning the use of old ships for the purposes of penal discipline...

Some idea of the sanitary condition of these establishments, even so recently as 1841, may be gathered from the report of Mr. Peter Bossy, surgeon of the "WARRIOR" hulk, off Woolwich, which shows that in that year, among 638 convicts on board, there were no less than 400 cases of admission to the hospital, and 38 deaths!There are still officers in the Woolwich hulks who remember a time when the "Justitia"... contained no less than 700 convicts; and when, at night, these men were fastened in their dens - a single warder being left on board ship, in charge of them! 

Even so late as 1849, we find the "Unité", hospital ship at Woolwich, described in the following terms- "In the hospital ship, the 'Unité,' the great majority of the patients were infested with vermin; and their persons, in many instances, particularly their feet, begrimed with dirt. No regular supply of body-linen had been issued; so much so, that many men had been five weeks without a change; and all record had been lost of the time when the blankets had been washed"'.

'A view near Woolwich in Kent showing the employment of the convicts from the Hulks'
(the hulks are the ships without sails in the background, not sure of date of picture)

Woolwich Rent Protest 1939

From the Daily Herald Archive at the National Media Museum:

'A photograph showing residents creating a road blockade as part of a rent protest in Woolwich, south London, taken in July 1939 by John Topham for the Daily Herald'.  Great photo, unfortunately I don't know any more about the context. The placard reads 'we the tenants of these flats do not intend to pay  any rent till something is done'. But about what?

The World Cup in South London

As the World Cup comes to an end, here's some pictures from around South London over the last month.

The Artmongers mural on Deptford High Street redecorated in Argentinian and German colours for today's final,
by artist Patricio Forrester, who is Argentinian 

Watching the world cup at Tomi's restaurant in Deptford High Street, on night Nigeria played Iran
(photo posted by DJ Tim Westwood on Instagram)

Brazilian and Colombian flags at Restaurante Santafereno in Brixton

Brazil fans at the Coronet at Elephant and Castle
(photo by James Doleman on twitter)

Colombian fans celebrate at the Elephant and Castle after their team beat Uruguay
(photo by Instailka)

England flag at 2 Sisters Tandoori in Nunhead

French flag in Kitto Road SE14

German flag on New Cross Road

England and Italian flags in Brockley Grove

Ghana fans at the Castle Tavern in Woolwich
(see 853's report on this)

Joan Littlewood (and Brendan Behan) in Blackheath

This year is the centenary of the birth of Joan Littlewood (1914-2002), one of the most influential figures in 20th century British theatre. Among many other things she founded the radical Theatre Workshop and directed iconic plays including Shelagh Delaney's A Taste of Honey and Oh What a Lovely War (1963).

Joan Littlewood - not sure when this photo was taken, possibly when she visited a Durham coal mine for BBC in 1938.

Littlewood was born at the Clapham Maternity Hospital, 41 Jeffreys Road, Stockwell and lived as a child at 8 Stockwell Road. In the 1950s and 1960s she lived in Blackheath with her partner Gerry Raffles. The 1958 electoral register has her listed as 'Joan Raffles', though I don't believe they actually married (she had earlier married Ewan MacColl, and was Kirsty MacColl's godmother).

1938 electoral register

They lived in the Mill House, an 1832 mansion on the Heath that was converted to flats at the time:

The Mill House Blackheath
(photo by APVG at Flickr)

 To protect their privacy in the late 1960s they had a plastic wall designed by Guy Hodgkinson at the bottom of their garden, as featured in a 1969 magazine:

From 'Design' (March 1969)

Littlewood played a critical role in the career of Irish playwright Brendan Behan. In September 1958, Behan stayed  in Blackheath. According to 'Brendan Behan: A Life' by Michael O'Sullivan, 'Littlewood had offered Brendan the use of her home to finish The Hostage', which she was directing at Theatre Royal Stratford.  Behan 'spent most of his time in The Dragon pub in Blackheath. He had an uncannny knack for finding like-minded boozers wherever he was in the world'. Not sure whether the Dragon is the George & Dragon on Blackheath Hill - not the nearest pub, but maybe that was the point as his drinking didn't go down well with Littlewood and Raffles who were worried whether he would finish the play on time.

Brendan Behan in Blackheath
(by Oswald Jones) - possibly in the Crown

Fun Palaces

In the early 1960s Littlewood, along with the architect Cedric Price, conceived of the idea of the 'Fun Palace', a never realised building that would be a ‘laboratory of fun’/‘university of the streets’ based on mass participation in art and science. Littlewood’s motto was “Everyone an artist, everyone a scientist.”and the original fun palace design said:  'Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky'.

Writer Stella Duffy* proposed reviving the idea of Fun Palaces to mark Littlewood's centenary, and on 4-5 October this year there will be at least 80 free 'pop up fun palaces', with the Albany in Deptford not only hosting one of them but also helping to organise the national programme (check map for your nearest event). Duffy's co-director is Sarah-Jane Rawlings, who helped to launched Meet Me at the Albany, the Albany’s artist led day club for the over 60s. 

(*Woolwich-born Duffy is of course the author of the great South London novel 'The Room of Lost Things' (2009) set around Loughborough Junction where she lives)

[thanks to Rosalind Hardie - https://twitter.com/adinnieken - for finding Littlewood's address and pictures following my request on twitter]

Music (and poetry) Monday: Joseph O'Connor

As part of the Irish President's recent state visit to London, there was a night of Irish music broadcast on BBC-4 as 'Ultimate Irish Music at the Royal Albert Hall: A Presidential Celebration'.

Truth be told it was a bit patchy, but one of the strongest parts was a reading from the writer Joseph O'Connor, best known for his novels 'Star of the Sea' and 'Redemption Falls' (and incidentally Sinead O'Connor's older brother). His poem drew on the experience of London Irish migrant workers, with some nice South London references:

'the dancehall in Brixton, the chapel in Bow,
oh the freeze of a South East London morning,
digging trench tunnels in the Lewisham snow,

... remember me sister, in Stepney and Bayswater, is all I ask,
without sorrow or hate in Harwich and Deptford and Romford and Woolwich,
in Canning Town, in New Cross Gate,
through the city of songs where the sweet Thames flows for a London calling with lustre and light,
from the Waterloo Sunset to the rainy nights of Soho,
and down in the tube station at midnight where I drove their trains, where I hefted a pick,
as my daughters taught their children or nursed their sick...'

Joseph O'Connor

O'Connor lived in Lewisham in the late 1980s, not sure exactly where. As mentioned here before 'Star of the Sea', a novel of 19th century Irish emigration, features a criminal parody of the Lord's prayer with the words 'Our old guv'nor,which dosses in Lewisham, swelled by thy moniker, Thy racket be come, thy crack-job be done'.

O'Connor's Albert Hall poem reminded me of Dominic Behan's song McAlpine's Fusiliers, a ballad of road digging and building sites most famously performed by The Dubliners (less famously we used to play/sing it in a session at the now demolished St George's Tavern in Lambeth Road SE1 in the early 1990s):

'I've worked till the sweat near has me beat
With Russian, Czech and Pole
On shuttering jams up in the hydro dams
Or underneath the Thames in a hole;
I grafted hard and I got me cards
And many a ganger's fist across me ears;
If you pride your life, don't join, by Christ,
With McAlpine's Fusiliers'.

The ghost of the Behans was certainly hovering over the Albert Hall the other night, it ended up with Elvis Costello, Lisa Hannigan, Paul Brady, Imelda May, Andy Irvine and others singing Brendan Behan's The Auld Triangle.

If I ever get the time I could surely write a good few posts about the Behans in South London.... Brendan finishing off his play The Hostage at Joan Littlewood's house in Blackheath, Brian being jailed for his role in the South Bank builders strike in the late 1950s... more to come (maybe).

The Brits in Greenwich - time to rename the 02?

This week's BRIT music awards took place on the Greenwich peninsula, with Beyonce, Prince, Lorde, Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, Nile Rodgers,the Arctic Monkeys and many others appearing on stage as performers and/or givers and receivers of awards. But you would never have got a sense that, like Leonard Cohen, Jay Z, Kanye West and Bruce Springsteen before them, these world-renowned singers and musicians were actually in a corner of South East London, a place once of marshland and riverside industries. Instead we were just told we were in 'the O2 Arena' or plain 'O2'

Corporate sponsorship of music venues is now not uncommon. Brixton Academy for instance has been successively branded as the Carling Brixton Academy and now the O2 Brixton Academy. But it has still very much maintained its identity, and is generally referred to by most people as just the Brixton Academy. With the Greenwich arena, O2 have gone a stage further so that the name of the venue is identical to the name of the sponsor. All traces of locality and place have been erased entirely. This seems to be a very deliberate strategy - in Dublin docklands the venue now on the site of the redeveloped Point Theatre is now named 'the O2', while in Berlin Friedrichshain there is the 'O2 World' arena.

The French anthropologist Marc Augé coined the term 'non-places of supermodernity' to describe spaces such as airports, motorways, supermarkets and leisure arenas. They are are 'non-places' in the sense that they appear to exist without reference to history or identity - functional spaces dedicated to the circulation of bodies for a single, prescribed purpose, they are anonymous to the extent that one airport, motorway or indeed O2 arena feels much the same as any other anywhere in the world.

None of these venues is owned or even run by O2. Greenwich and Berlin are both run by Anschutz Entertainment Group, the US-based sports and entertainment giant, while Dublin is run by its main global competitor, Live Nation. What O2 has done is to purchase the 'naming rights' to these venues.

The name 'O2' is itself a brand - the telecommunications company originally established by BT was bought out by the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica in 2005. Paradoxically, its association with music venues has been so successful that it has arguably erased its own identity. I think a lot of people, when they hear the name 'O2', now think of music venues rather than phones (I do certainly).

I suspect that people will be making and performing music at the Greenwich peninsula site long after it has ceased to be called the 'O2' and probably long after 'O2' ceases to exist. So whatever the official name, lets start calling it a name that has some reference to its place in the world, at least the 'Greenwich O2' or maybe 'the Greenwich Dome' as some people do still refer to it. A small step to reclaiming it as a place rather than a 'non-place'.

Pharrell in Woolwich

The TV screening of the BRITS  featured short clips of fans being surprized in their daily life by their idols, including Pharrell Williams popping into a children's dance session. As reported in the Newsshopper, this took place  earlier this month at a Theatrebugs class at the Clockhouse Community Centre in Woolwich, where Pharrell fan Queen Allen was running a session.

Burns Night + Scottish Martyrs at Woolwich

It's Burns Night on Saturday, something I always try and celebrate with some Islay whisky (I got a bottle of Laphroaig for Christmas), a vegetarian haggis and my dad's old bagpipe chanter from when he played in a band on Islay in the early 1950s. Plus my dad's collected poems of Robert Burns that I read from at his funeral. So yes, for me it's personal.

There's a couple of Burns Suppers that I am aware of locally. At Broca Food Market on Mantle Road SE4 they are having an event a night early on Friday 24th. £10 gets you a two course meal (including vegetarian option) and a classic Scottish film. I will overlook the crime of putting an 'e' in whisky on their poster!

On Saturday 25th, there's a Burns Night Banquet at the Hill Station, Kitto Road, SE14 - though I gather this has already sold out.

Robert Burns did actually once write a poem that mentioned part of South London. His 'Epistle From Esopus To Maria' (1794) includes the lines:

'The shrinking Bard adown the alley skulks,
And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks:
Though there, his heresies in Church and State
Might well award him Muir and Palmer's fate':

The reference here is to Thomas Fyshe Palmer and Thomas Muir, two of the members of the Scottish 'Friends of the People' who were transported to Australia for sedition in that period. They spent several months in irons doing forced labour on prison ships (hulks) in the Thames at Woolwich before being shipped to Botany Bayl - Palmer on the Stanislaus and Muir on the Prudentia. Burns was sympathetic to these Scottish radicals, as were many others. William Godwin, philosophical pioneer of anarchism and father of Mary Shelley, was among those who visited Palmer and Muir at Woolwich.

The Scottish Martyrs Memorial in Nunhead Cemetery was raised in honour of Palmer, Muir and others in the 1851.

South London Misty Mornings

Beautiful sunrise this morning, here's a few shots I found on twitter:

Peckham Rye in the mist from top of 78 bus (my photo)

Shooters Hill by James Morrow (@jimbo341)

Woolwich Arsenal by Major Draper

The Shard by @alexbrowna

Finally from yesterday an actual misty morning Albert Bridge

by HappyTaylor3050

'I dreamt we were standing

By the banks of the thames

Where the cold grey waters ripple

In the misty morning light

Held a match to your cigarette

Watched the smoke curl in the mist

Your eyes, blue as the ocean between us

Smiling at me...

Count the days

Slowly passing by

Step on a plane

And fly away

I'll see you then

As the dawnbirds sing

On a cold and misty morning

By the albert bridge'

Misty Morning Albert Bridge - The Pogues

(lyrics by Jem Finer)

Nicky Crane, Jobs for a Change 1984 and other nazi attacks

The crowd at County Hall on June 10 1984 (photo from Tony Hollingsworth on flickr -
I believed he was one of the organisers of the event)

On June 10 1984 the Greater London Council, on the verge of being abolished by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, put on the 'Jobs for a Change' festival by County Hall on the South Bank. I was one of the estimated 150,000 who went along, with the line up including Billy Bragg, Misty in Roots, Mari Wilson, Hank Wangford, Gil Scott-Heron and Ivor Cutler. The biggest draw was The Smiths - it was the fourth and last time I went to see them, and in less than a year they had gone from being third on the bill at the Lyceum (where I saw them supporting the Gang of Four) to becoming the focus of something like mass hysteria.

Morrissey, GLC Leader Ken Livingstone and Mari Wilson at Jobs for a Change
(photo from the excellent UK Rock Festivals site)

Socialist band The Redskins played too, and while they were on stage a largish group of neo-nazi skinheads stormed the stage and attacked people in the crowd. Although the fascists were massively outnumbered by the festival goers, many of the latter fled in panic. Indie kids were never known for their streetfighting skills! I wasn't very handy either but I did end up with a group of punks, anarchists and Red Action members chasing the nazi boneheads round the South Bank, and who knows in the scuffles that day I may have had an encounter with the late Nicola Vincenzo Crane.

Jobs for a Change 1984 poster

An interesting article by Jon Kelly at the BBC News Magazine recalls that among the fascist skins that day was Nicky Crane (1958-1993): 'As The Redskins, a socialist skinhead band, played, Crane led an attack on the crowd. Around 100 fascists began setting about the audience closest to the main stage... The neo-Nazis were beaten back by a group of striking Yorkshire miners, invited to steward the event by Livingstone as a solidarity gesture, and members of the militant far-left group Red Action. Crane was not cowed, however, and after regrouping his forces, he charged a second stage at the other end of the park where the Hank Wangford Band were playing. This time, however, the anti-fascists were better prepared. Militants grabbed empty cider bottles to use as improvised weapons. As the anti-fascists fought back, Crane broke away from the main battle. "He was busy attacking the rest of the crowd, on his own, stripped to the waist," says Gary [an anti-fascist present]. As Crane tried to make it over a barrier on to the stage, he was knocked over by a Red Action member. He escaped the furious crowd by using a female left-wing activist as a human shield, according to witnesses. As the violence subsided, anti-fascists confronted another skinhead in the crowd. His Harrington jacket was unzipped to reveal a slogan on his T-shirt. It read "Nicky Crane", in tribute to the young man's hero. Given the carnage Crane had just instigated, the left-wingers had little sympathy for his admirer. The skinhead was set upon and beaten'.

By this time Crane had become notorious for his role in a string of racist and other violent attacks. Born in Bexley and growing up in Crayford, by the late 1970s he was living in Plumstead and working on the bins - and had become Kent organiser for the Hitler-worshiping British Movement. Kelly describes some of the events he was involved in, including two major attacks in Woolwich:

'The skinhead gang marched in military formation down the High Street clutching iron bars, knives, staves, pickaxe handles and clubs.There were at least 100 of them. They had spent two days planning their attack. The date was 28 March 1980. Soon they reached their target - a queue of mostly black filmgoers outside the Odeon cinema in Woolwich, south-east London... The Woolwich Odeon attack of 1980 was described by a prosecutor at the Old Bailey as a "serious, organised and premeditated riot". After their intended victims fled inside, the skinheads drilled by Crane began smashing the cinema's doors and windows, the court was told. A Pakistani man was knocked unconscious in the melee and the windows of a nearby pub were shattered with a pickaxe handle. In 1981 Crane was jailed for his part in an ambush on black youths at Woolwich Arsenal station. As the judge handed down a four-year sentence, an acolyte standing alongside Crane stiffened his arm into a Nazi salute and shouted "sieg heil" from the dock'.

As Kelly mentions Crane was gay and by the mid-1980s was being spotted out at London gay clubs such as Heaven. To start with he continued his involvement with the far right but in 1992 he not only came out as gay on a TV programme but renounced his previous nazi beliefs. The following year he died from AIDS.

Kelly's implies that it was Crane's increasing identification with the gay scene that led him away from the homophobic far right. That may be true, though Crane certainly wasn't the only gay man in the British neo-nazi scene in the 1970s and 80s. Another key turning point was doubtless in 1990, when Crane got a taste of his own medicine when he was knocked unconscious by Anti Fascist Action activists in the vicinity of an Irish demonstration in Kilburn. A mostly wasted life, but at least he doesn't seem to have died a nazi.

More:

Nicky Crane: The secret double life of a gay neo-Nazi by Jon Kelly, BBC News Magazine, 6 December 2013

Gerry Gable's comments on this article at Searchlight

John Eden's article on Crane from 2004 (in case anyone thought that the BBC article contained anything really new)

Malatesta's blog

(I note from Wikipedia that Crane also used to sometimes frequent The Bell, a gay pub in Kings Cross I sometimes went to in late 1980s, so maybe our paths crossed there too)