Steve Braunias
The 40-year mystery death
English rain, constant, sometimes heavy, always miserable, falling all day on that grey, bleak Monday in April in Southall, west London, where a New Zealand teacher was killed and his name became immortal.
Blair Peach suffered a fatal blow to his head 40 years ago this week. It’s widely believed he was attacked by a police officer. He was 33.
On Tuesday in London, the anniversary was marked with a vigil, a plaque, intense speeches calling for justice; in Auckland, on Easter Monday night, old people gathered in a little room up the stairs at the Grey Lynn RSC to watch two actors stand behind a table and read out the script of a play by Auckland writer Dean Parker about Peach’s life and death.
“He was my first boyfriend,” said Vicki Carnell. They met at a party in Napier, where Peach grew up. She lived in Wellington, and came to stay with her sister in the school holidays. He was 18, she was 16: “A very young 16. We did nothing more than kiss and write letters to each other afterwards. He came across as quite militant in the play, but he was anything but. He was a gentle, quiet person.”
Peach was at an anti-racism demonstration when he was killed. It was during the 1979 election campaign, and the National Front — that particularly English disease of white resistance against dark-skinned migrants — was on the rise. It held a public meeting in Southall as a deliberate provocation. Southall has the largest Sikh community in England.
Left-wing causes consumed Peach. He believed passionately in the Anti-Nazi League and joined an estimated crowd of 3000 to protest against the National Front. The police sent about 2500 officers, including the Special Patrol Group (SPG), a template for New Zealand’s Red Squad unit in the 1981 Springbok tour — the riot shields, the batons, the charge. There were clashes. Teenagers attacked police with bricks, bottles, a petrol bomb.
Police were required to give the National Front “safe passage”, and the role of the SPG was to “disperse” protesters. A subsequent inquiry supplied these statistics: 345 arrests, 97 police injured, 59 prisoners injured. And this, reducing Blair Peach to a parenthesis: “25 members of the public injured (1 fatal).”
Peach was on his way home. It had got dark. A police cordon had closed off the main road, and he turned into a side street. At least 11 witnesses saw an SPG officer get out of a police van and hit Peach over the head with a weapon. He collapsed. An Indian family across the road told him to come in. He lay on their sofa and was given a glass of water.
The surgeon who later operated on him wrote, “I ascertain the patient had walked into a house, become verbally aggressive, and lost consciousness.”
“I had a phone call at about halfpast 10 at night to say he was in hospital and had been hit,” said Celia Stubbs, now 78, from her home in England. She had a flat, procedural manner of speaking about what happened the night her partner was killed.
She preferred to talk about Peach’s commitment to social justice — he was active in the Teachers’ Union, the Socialist Workers Party, and the AntiNazi League, and taught at a special needs school — but didn’t mind talking about their relationship.
“I first met him when he was at school in Napier because my exhusband Tony taught him.”
She explained that she’d come out to New Zealand from England with her husband, Tony, who was Peach’s English teacher at Colenso College in Napier. The couple moved to Wellington the same year Peach enrolled at Victoria University. Phil Dadson was a school friend of Peach, and attended
the Grey Lynn play this week; he said, “Blair became very entwined with their family. Tony was a mentor in a way for Blair.”
Peach moved to England after the Stubbs returned to live there. “My exhusband had left me by the time Blair showed up,” said Celia. Peach, who was four years younger than her, had also come from a broken marriage.
Victoria University historian Richard Hill was also at the Grey Lynn show. He met Peach and Stubbs in London. He said, “I strikingly remember how good he was with Celia’s two daughters, one of whom was deaf. Just a wonderful stepfather.”
“He was like a dad with Rebecca and Catherine,” said Celia. “He had a real affinity with children. He was really loved by the kids at his school.”
After the phone call on the night of April 23, 1979, she took a taxi to the hospital. “He was dead by the time I arrived. It was just after midnight.”
WHO KILLED Blair Peach? There has always been speculation that the attack was racially motivated. “He was very swarthy,” said Dean Parker, who wrote the show performed at Grey Lynn this week, and who marked him
on the soccer field when they played each other’s school teams. “Dark. You’d think he was Lebanese maybe. Semitic in some way.” Dadson: “He could easily have been mistaken for a person of colour. He had an almost Sri Lankan or Indian look to him.” Hill: “He could have been Middle Eastern. He could have been from any number of exotic locations.”
To Suresh Grover, who was demonstrating at Southall on the day of the killing, Peach has remained a hero of England’s migrant community. “People see him as someone honourable who came and supported us, and paid with his life,” he said. Grover has campaigned ever since for a public inquiry into the killing.
Yes, he attended the infamous 1980 inquest which ruled death by misadventure. Coroner Dr John Burton has long been pilloried for his conduct — he attempted to hold the inquest without a jury (overturned at the Court of Appeal), was dismissive of Indian witnesses who saw the attack, and bizarrely, expressed his unsupported view that Peach might have been murdered by a protester wanting to create a left-wing martyr.
Burton also concealed the Cass Report from the jury. Named after the police inspector who investigated Peach’s death, it identified three SPG officers as possible suspects.
Cass recommended criminal proceedings against them for obstructing the police investigation and perverting the course of justice. He was particularly damning of the senior officer in the SPG van — later identified as Inspector Alan Murray. Murray denied any involvement in Peach’s death when the report was finally made public in 2010.
By email this week — Murray is now a professor of accounting at the University of Warwick — he wrote that he had nothing further to add.
Peach supporters continue to regard Murray as their prime suspect. In 1984, a rather covert approach was made to Murray to talk about that day in Southall — and, remarkably, he accepted the invitation.
Rod Edmond, a New Zealander who knew Peach and is now a retired professor of English at the University of Kent, sent Murray a letter.
He said this week, “He’d left the police and was living in St Andrews. I wrote to him posing as an old New Zealand friend of Blair’s who had recently arrived in the country and was haunted by what had happened and I wondered if he’d be willing to meet and tell me what he thought.
“He told me to come to a pub on the edges of St Andrews. It was lunchtime at a rather shabby looking place. I stood at the bar and ordered a drink and two guys came in.
“One stood back and the other came across to the bar and engaged me in casual conversation. Then they disappeared, and came back with Alan Murray. He told me he’d sent his friends in to check me over because he was frightened I might have come with a knife or something.
“He was shortish, decently built. Scottish, strong Scottish accent. And very articulate. He was a smart policeman and destined for higher things in the force. That’s why he resigned in disgust at the way he was treated. The Cass investigation effectively destroyed the career he had in mind for himself.
“We talked for about two hours. He wanted to tell his side of the story. He described the day — about how chaotic it was, about how undermanned the police were, how they hadn’t expected the demonstration to be as large, and violent, as it turned out.
“He painted a picture of the police under enormous pressure.”
But the nub of it was that Murray denied he or anyone in his SPG team hit Peach, or even saw Peach.
Edmond: “I had a curious drink with someone who left me very uncertain as to what had actually happened. He was surprisingly open.”
What would Celia Stubbs say to Murray? “I’d say, ‘I wish you’d be truthful about it.’ But I don’t even feel particularly vengeful.”
She doubts a public inquiry will ever be called. Her focus is on her work; she visits two detention centres for asylum seekers every week. Yes, it’s very much the sort of thing Peach would be doing had he lived. “I know Blair would have wanted me to move on. There are awful things happening in the world the whole time.”
People see him as someone honourable who came and supported us, and paid with his life. Suresh Grover, demonstrator