London: The Biography

After the first confrontation there was no sustained attack but intermittent forays. Cars were overturned and shops looted. “I discovered he was an Irish boy and he said that it’s the first time he has had so much food in six months because he’s unemployed.” Yet the most violent incident took place in the Tangmere precinct of the estate. One of the policemen despatched to guard the fire-fighters putting out a blaze in a newsagent’s shop, PC Keith Blakelock, slipped and fell in the face of a pursuing mob. D. Rose, in A Climate of Fear, takes up the narrative. “The rioters came at Blakelock from all sides … he was kicked on the ground and stabbed again and again.” Here we have an example of the sudden viciousness of a London mob. “In the words of PC Richard Coombes, the mob were like vultures, pecking at his body as his arms rose and fell to death with their blows.” Another observer described them as “a pack of dogs,” inadvertently using a simile which has become customary in dealing with the threatening crowd. Older than Shakespeare’s line in Coriolanus, “What would you have, you curs?,” it suggests the wildness and the untamed savagery latent within the civic order. “The instruments were going up and down being flayed at him. The last I saw of PC Blakelock was he had his hand up to protect himself … Blakelock’s hands and arms were cut to ribbons … His head seems to have turned to one side, exposing his neck. There he took a savage cut from a machete.” And there he died.

It was another terrible episode in the history of London violence, where all the rituals of blood and vengeance have their place. The Tangmere precinct itself “is a big, squat building, shaped in conscious imitation of a Babylonian ziggurat.” Babylon is ever associated with paganism and savagery.

There were gunshots, and sporadic fires started upon the estate, but by midnight the rioters had begun to disperse. It started to rain. The violence ended as quickly and as suddenly as it had begun except, that is, for examples of brutality among the police towards various unnamed and still unknown suspects. That same pattern of vengeance was no doubt also part of the aftermath of the Gordon Riots.

It would be absurd to declare that these two events, separated by two hundred years, are identical in character and in motive. The fact that one was on a general and the other on a local scale, for example, is a comment on London’s huge expansion over that period. One travelled along the streets, and the other was confined to the precincts of a council estate; this also testifies to changes within the society of London. Yet both sets of riots were against the power of the law, symbolised by the walls of Newgate Prison in the one case and by the ranks of police officers in riot gear in the other. It might be said that both therefore reflect a deep unease about the nature and presence of authority. The Gordon rioters were generally poor, part of the forgotten citizenry of London, and the inhabitants of the Broadwater Farm Estate were, according to Stephen Inwood, predominantly “homeless, unemployed or desperate.” There may, again, be a connection. In both cases, however, the riots burned themselves out fierily and quickly. They had no real leaders. They had no real purpose except that of destruction. Such is the sudden fury of London.

Black Magic, White Magic

A woodcut from the title page of Astrologaster or the figure casterby John Melton; Londoners were notoriously fearful and superstitious so astrologers and seers of every variety were readily available. Many astrologers congregated in lodgings around Seven Dials.

CHAPTER 53

I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There

And in this dark city, whom or what would we expect to see? In 1189 Richard of Devizes records that “a sacrifice of the Jews to their father the devil was commenced in the city of London, and so long was the duration of this famous mystery, that the holocaust could scarcely be accomplished the ensuing day.” But then it truly became a city of devils as the citizens fell upon, and slaughtered, the innocent inhabitants of old Jewry.