John Clayden

“A people without knowledge of its past is like a tree without roots”. Marcus Garvey 

This was on a banner in Catford Market with Bob Marley playing in the background, where I was canvassing for the Lewisham mayoral candidate John Hamilton recently. The same sentiment naturally applies to the working class: the working class must have knowledge of its past. 

There is a video on the internet of Bob Marley walking with a crowd of kids down the Harrow Road past where I had been squatting in the early seventies.  The squatting movement and other forms of working class activity which developed in this area is a neglected part of working class history .

The fruitful mixture of white British and (mostly) Trinidadian working class in the area known as the Grove grew first out of resistance to Mosley who tried to stir up division and then later the Notting Hill riots against the police.
Squatting had first occurred after the war when the Communist Party occupied deserted army camps for the use of homeless people.
Squatting rights were enshrined in Saxon law.  Squatting grew in parts of London and elsewhere in the seventies where there were appalling living conditions; my work as a maintenance plumber for the Notting hill Housing Trust in that area confirmed these conditions.

North Kensington was a poor neglected part of the richest borough in Britain, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
To give you an idea of the vibe in North Kensington – the ruling Kensington and Chelsea council decided under local pressure to send some councillors to talk to the residents about their housing concerns. The pressure was a result of a housing campaign in the area embarked upon by one of the best organisers of the Aldermaston marches. The meeting took place in All Saints church hall.  As the meeting proceeded a homeless family was produced and it was demanded they be housed   and the councillor responsible refused to say he would house them. All this was being recorded by a community video team. With the refusal, all the doors to the hall were barricaded and guards were placed on them and the councillors were informed they would be kept in until they changed their minds . They were not allowed near the phones and they could not contact the special patrol group who were soon to be seen circling outside. After a while the word got around and the place turned into one big party with a sound system and dancing while the councillors on the platform tried to maintain their dignity, a local transvestite posed on the table in front of them stroking his  gold lamé tights. Towards day break they gave in and offered the family a home and we had a triumphant march around  the area. They vowed never to come back. 

Another time with the charismatic black leader Darcus Howe we threw paper darts at the council from the public gallery in the Town Hall as part of a campaign to force the council to issue Compulsory Purchase Orders for negligent landlords properties.

The area had a number of squares all of which were privately owned and inaccessible to the public. Powis square had its fence broken down and was occupied and was subsequently bought by the council as a public space. The police arrested the people who did it, hammocking them in a blanket and kicking them when they were taken to in the police station on Ladbroke Grove.

Trinidad was the part of the Caribbean where most of the west Indians in the Grove came from, it is more industrial than people think with oil and bauxite and Trinidad lake asphalt. There was a trade union movement and the Trinidad Labour Party there was set up by the British Labour party before the war. The local Community Relations Officer Chris Lamette, I apologise if the spelling is wrong, had been a member and was a great source of information. 

He told me that Anglicans coming to England with a letter of introduction from their Minister found they got a lukewarm welcome in the local churches because the sudden influx of black people upset the few old ladies who comprised the congregations. He knew of a family who had had to insist on the burial of a relative by refusing to take the coffin away from the front door of the vicarage. This undermined the respectable West Indians who had been brought up to consider themselves British subjects and had even been taught British history and folk songs.

Aspects of Trinidadian culture which took root here were Carnival and the Steel Pan band movement and to a lesser extent Calypso. I remember dancing behind a lorry containing Ginger Johnson and his drummers in the early days.
I am a lukewarm football supporter but I avidly support Mangrove Steel Orchestra each year at the steel band Panorama competition. I developed a love and respect for the great calypsonian The Mighty Sparrow whose output encompassed everything from sex to politics always with a sparkle of humour. His song “London Bridge is Falling Down ” about England’s decline was covered by Kirsty McColl.

Squatters liberated a large area by the canal which was christened Meanwhile Gardens. They built a cycle track for the kids and a small arena where we put on entertainment including busker’s concerts. The council now run it. We pioneered the Adventure Playground movement and set up a wholefood coop.

While working for the Trust as it was known, I was stabbed in the back attempting to form a branch of UCATT, the builders union. Our manager lost his job after a photograph of him hitting a gay squatter with an iron bar was featured in the press. I persuaded my fellow maintenance workers to reject instructions to wreck interiors of flats to stop the squatting. The new management team did not allow us anymore to use our mini vans for our personal use at weekends and I left and joined a workers co-op which was building the play hut in the recently liberated Powis Square. The hut was designed by a local architectural student and consisted of a number of shipping containers bolted together mounted on concrete blocks with much of the interior walls cut away to create a larger area inside. A floor and roof were put in place. I did the plumbing and then helped Roddy Kentish who was welding railings to the roof so it could be used as a play area. Roddy was a skilled welder and had a thick country Jamaican accent and was a joy to work with. He was one of the Mangrove Nine and had been falsely imprisoned during the Mangrove riots . He was influenced as we all were by the Black Panthers.

At this time I found myself homeless due to domestic matters and was lucky to meet up with some of my friends from Southall and Hayes who were looking for somewhere to squat. We found that somewhere, quite nearby but it needed plumbing and plastering and we looked around the area and found a kitchen sink unit in a nearby derelict house. As we were taking it back the two people carrying it were stopped by a police car and were charged with theft and spent the night in the cells. Luckily there was a good local Law Centre and a left-wing solicitors and they won their case and the police returned our sink unit.
There were six of us, two women and four men in the squat. We lived there for nearly five years. During that time, we lived mainly on vegetables and brown rice. The various squatters in the street clubbed together and we bought the rice and other items in bulk from a wholefood wholesale supplier, and then weighed it out. We were able to live cheaply. Nobody was on the dole and we got by having squatted a room for an office with a phone in it and set up “We People” an agency with a false bank account with a full time paid person to answer the phone and we shared the various jobs that came in such as house cleaning, removals, plumbing, carpentry and other odd jobs. There was a magazine called Time Out at the time which mainly advertised events in London and the workers there had a disagreement and left and formed their own magazine – City Limits. We People had advertisements in there and we got enough work to get by. There were two radical papers in the area at the time, Oz and Ink.

The council eventually gave us a licence, the rent for which was very cheap as I think they realised that squatters were keeping the properties in good shape.
Our next door neighbour had been a Jamaican dairyman and he told me that during the war, to help out the war effort they were sent to a southern state in the USA. They were told in the local bar that they did not serve blacks whereupon he said we slapped our British passports on the counter and demanded a drink. He thought their example had had a radical influence on the local black population kicking off the civil rights movement.
Down the road was a school squatted by Spanish republicans and we had dances and meetings there. We also squatted a building for a community centre we named The Point where we put on our own classes and had a cafe. It was taken over by dossers and we had to throw them out. We even installed truss rods through the building which are designed to stop the further bulging out of the brickwork.

Because I had no visible means of support the inland revenue started sending me increasingly extravagant demands and eventually sent round the bailiffs but I had moved my few possessions to another room. Then they summoned me to appear before the Recorder of London. But just before I was about to appear a young lad from the inland revenue interviewed me and I told him I was living in a commune and had no money. He said how about thirty quid so we settled for that.  I thought later that for the poor, income tax is essentially a form of social control.

While we were squatting the Grunwick Strike started and we formed the West London Support Group and early every morning attempted to block the scabs bus from entering the factory. We were up against the snatch squads of the Special Patrol Group. To protect ourselves we took lessons from a sympathetic teacher of Chinese martial arts. One quite small woman in our group when the police were running about managed to trip one of them over and then screamed in his face and he was visibly scared.

The snatch squads would run into the crowd blocking the bus, targeting individuals. We discovered that if a large enough number of us grabbed the person being snatched the police were not able to take them. We also developed a technique for moving the entire mass of people in one direction or another by forming a linked circle within the crowd which could then be moved about and directed as one mass to break the police cordons which they were powerless to resist. We gained permission from the strike organisers to cut off the water mains supply.

One day Arthur Scargill and the Yorkshire miners turned up.  Arthur started to make a speech and was immediately snatched so we all had to go down the police station to get him out.

We also would go to south London to stop the National Front. Our Kung Fu instructor was arrested but almost immediately was back with us again, he explained he scraped his heel down the officer’s shin so he relaxed his grip. We understood that the National Front were too afraid come anywhere near our area which was very likely for them a wise move.

All Saints Road became a no-go area for a while after a police car was abandoned with all its windows smashed. It had to be towed away later by a breakdown truck.

The squatting movement was well organised with its own estate agency  called the Rough Tough Cream Puff estate agency where people coming down from up north could get briefed where there were squatting vacancies and how to get in and what  the letter of the law was.

One squat in a terraced row near Latimer  Road made their back gardens into one collective space and even had a sauna.

I helped Tony Allen in our house paint his famous graffiti using  a large vehicle belonging to the  band I was in called Steel and Skin. The band  was formed by the aptly named Peter Blackman whose mission was to educate school kids about the West African origins of Caribbean culture via slavery.
I used the van to cover Tony while he wrote the immortal words –

SQUAT NOW WHILE STOCKS LAST

Another graffiti, I think on Basing  Street was a quote from Blake THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE HORSES OF INVENTION

Piers Corbyn was a spokesman for us squatters and Release was a legal support team based locally. The Clash with Joe Strummer and Pink Floyd with Roger Waters all emerged from the area.  And Crispin Flintoff also.

Some of the squats eventually became housing associations and some people were offered 100% mortgages and then the law made squatting illegal.
Despite its obvious limitations the squatting movement was a sort of Do-It-Yourself Socialism. It demonstrated how a satisfying creative lifestyle can evolve outside of consumerism and the rat race.  And gives the lie that the individual is primarily motivated by self-interest.  I have found that those who lived through it remember it  with affection.