June 15^th marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Kevin Gately. Mike Phipps reports.

Kevin Gately was a maths student from Warwick University, who had never before been on a political demonstration. He died from a head injury he received in Red Lion Square, London, at a protest against the fascist National Front party. He was the first person to die in a public demonstration in Britain for at least 55 years.

The National Front planned to march to Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, where it had booked the main room for a meeting entitled “Stop immigration—start repatriation”. A counter-demonstration called by the anti-colonial pressure group Liberation was blocked by a police cordon at Conway Hall.

The cordon included mounted police and over a hundred officers from the Special Patrol Group, the notorious unit of the Metropolitan Police that was later alleged to have been responsible for the blow on the head that killed anti-Nazi demonstrator Blair Peach in Southall in 1979. A later secret report intro Peach’s killing concluded he was almost certainly killed by a member of the SPG, whose lockers were found to contain a slew of unauthorised weapons, including illegal truncheons, knives and  crowbars. Southall Labour MP Syd Bidwell later described both Peach and Gately as martyrs in the struggle against fascism and racism.

Attempts by marchers to break the police cordon were met by a counter-attack by the SPG who made little distinction between peaceful protesters and those trying to break through. The police counter-attack left several marchers on the ground, one of whom was Kevin Gately, unconscious. He was taken to hospital where he died four hours later.

Police violence intensified later that afternoon when a mounted contingent, without any prior warning, tried to force marchers to retreat down a road where their path was in fact blocked by other officers. Police were seen to use their truncheons freely. They arrested 51 people that day, all from the left. Dozens of people were injured.

The mainstream media blamed the left for initiating the violence. The National Union of Students, however, published a pamphlet The Myth of Red Lion Square, which said that Gately “died as a direct result of a police attack using batons and horses.”

Tony Gilbert, who organised the march for the Central Council of Liberation, agreed that 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.”

Eye-witnesses at the time confirmed this. Jackie Stevens, who had linked arms with Gately, claimed that the police had charged the marchers. “We tried to get through to Conway Hall. The police charged us and drew their batons. They charged into us with their horses. I fell. I was trodden on by a police horse and had my head kicked by a policeman.”

“I find it very hard to believe that Kevin could not have been touched,” she added. “There was blood all over the place, people screaming, and teeth all over the ground. It was horrific.”

An inquest later concluded that Gately’s death was caused by a brain haemorrhage resulting from a blow to the head from a blunt instrument.

Photographs from the day show mounted police striking at the heads of demonstrators with sticks. Nick Mullen, a 28-year-old student was one of those struck on the head – a picture shows his 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. 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 rise of fascism was a real threat in the unstable 1970s. The protest against them in Red Lion Square was a wake-up call to the seriousness of the problem. Despite the brutality meted out to the anti-fascists, subsequent demonstrations against the National Front would massively outnumber them.

A public inquiry into the Red Lion Square events was chaired by Lord Scarman. He was the go-to senior judge to defuse public disquiet about heavy-handed policing, holding inquiries into unrest in the North of Ireland, 1969-72, the Grunwick dispute in 1977 and the Brixton riots in 1981. His 1975 Report on Red Lion Square did not find evidence that Gately had been killed by the police, but did criticise officers for the force they had later used.    

The NUS took a different view. It criticised the Scarman Report for providing “a political platform for the police prosecutor” and said it “permitted in a legal sense a continuation of the police action in Red Lion Square.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: Map of Red Lion Square disorders. Source: OpenStreetMap. Author: Own work and OpenStreetMap. Information about the events on 15 June 1974 are from: Ward, Tony (1986). Death and disorder: Three Case Studies of Public Order and Policing in London. London: INQUEST. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-946858-02-6. Clutterbuck, Richard (1978). Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence. London: Faber and Faber. p. 155. ISBN 978-0-5711-1188-6. Huggett, Tony; Ace, David (23 June 1974). “Map”. The Observer. p. 2; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.