On this Day

If you can not remember the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ don’t worry as you are probably in good company with the rest of this country’s population.

If you can remember the events of Saturday 13th August 1977 then you are probably either politically active on the left or right, a local historian specialising in south London, or just someone with a very long memory when it come to current affairs.

To set the scene for this day thirty years ago we can see what the BBC has to say via it’s On This Day web pages:

more than 200 protesters have been arrested after demonstrations in Lewisham against a National Front (NF) march … 110 people, including 55 police officers, were injured … an estimated 400 Socialist Workers Party members had gathered … in frustration at having failed to prevent the NF march the crowd … vented their anger on the police … [who] … were attacked with bottles and bricks and also had ammonia sprayed in their faces … the severity of the onslaught led to officers using riot shields - the first time such equipment has been used in the [mainland] UK [1 BBC]

At the end of the BBC piece we can read something which is highly pertinent in regards to today’s London, and many other city areas of the country:

[NF] Spokesman Richard Edmonds said by demonstrating in Lewisham - an area with a high proportion of West Indian immigrants - they were “standing up for white people” and highlighting the disproportionate amount of street crime committed in the area by black youths. [1]

The marches and riots of the day have a blog dedicated to them, Lewisham ‘77 Remembering and reflecting on the ‘Battle of Lewisham’ in August 1977 [2]. The blog has a fairly accurate and detailed chronology of events before, during, and after the day.

RIGHT: Above we see immigrants burning UK flag with communists.

Lefty Myths

Not long after this incident I took part in something that, reading through the lefts romanticised writing about the so called ‘Battle of Lewisham’, is commonly referred to as a flying wedge [4 Guardian]. This involved the, now isolated after a period of wandering lost in the streets of Lewisham, entire might of the SWP group form Haringey trying to push past half a dozen burly London policemen who barred their way. Doing the pushing was an odd ball trotskyist collective of assorted middle class pot-addled, pot-bellied real beer drinkers, dangerously underweight vegans and vegetarians, school teachers, in all probability at least one paedophile, and numerous homos of varying perversity trying to push past six policemen who were built to play rugby.

At the time, heaving with all my schoolboy might, I thought the situation was rather silly and ridiculous in that if this was the vanguard of the revolutionary left in North London then the SWP were going no where (which is exactly where the did go). Eventually, probably through either luck, or boredom on the part of the policemen, we burst through their lines to shouts and screams of victory. Running as fast as we could we charged on down a street, and another, and another until, through the relative fitnesses of the members, the running petered out and the group became dispersed over an area of unknown residential roads. We were lost. Again.

RIGHT: Mugger berates police for ‘disrespecting’ him on his ‘turf’

The local mugger community, for reasons known only to themselves, suddenly decided to start to throw heavy lumps of masonry at the stationary police. The patience of the British Bobby, famed through out the world, was once again displayed as they stood their ground dodging whatever was thrown at them with nothing to protect their selves with apart from their equally world famous helmets.

Nothing lasts forever. Eventually, as the barrage increased in intensity injuring more and more of the defenceless policemen, they reacted by making small forays into the crowd and bringing out, for the first time ever on mainland Britain, riot shields.

http://tottenhamlad.blogspot.com/