Why Stephen Lawrence’s killing echoes racist murder exploited by Max’s fascist movement
ArOuND midnight, Whit Sunday 1959, a carpenter called Kelso Cochrane was walking home in the Notting Hill district of West London. He had just attended nearby St mary’s Hospital after fracturing his left thumb at work.
Aside from that painful accident, his future looked promising. In three weeks he would marry his trainee nurse fiancee. He was saving money to become a lawyer.
but thanks to a confluence of factors, that marriage and legal career will forever remain what-might-have-beens.
Cochrane, 32, was a black immigrant from the Caribbean island of Antigua. Notting Hill, then a slum district, was still simmering with racial tension after the previous summer’s unprecedented race riots.
The route the carpenter took from hospital to his home brought him past the earl Of Warwick pub, a favourite of the white neo-fascist supporters of Sir Oswald mosley’s union movement (um), which was actively stoking racial hatred in the area.
Within moments, Kelso Cochrane would be dying of a stab wound to the heart. At least six young white men were involved in the attack, which made headlines around the world.
but no one has ever been charged with, let alone convicted of, the killing. Witnesses’ fear of the perpetrators, and the incompetence or racism of the police investigators, were at the root of this shaming failure. That scenario should sound familiar to us today.
In 2011, the current Labour shadow Home Secretary, Diane Abbott, wrote about the killing for a Jamaican newspaper.
She said: ‘Kelso Cochrane is an iconic figure in british race relations. He was the Stephen Lawrence of his day: a symbol of racial injustice.’
STEPHEN was the black teenager from South-east London set upon and murdered in the street one night in 1993 by another gang of white racists. The initial police investigation failed due in part to ‘institutional racism’, the macpherson report later found.
It was only when this newspaper took up the case and called the suspects ‘murderers’ in a famous 1997 front page that the campaign for justice gained traction.
Another young man with a future ahead of him was max mosley, youngest son and loyal follower of fascist leader Sir Oswald.
After the riots in the late summer of 1958, max’s father announced that he was standing in the Kensington North constituency at the General election the ollowing year. max would have a minor participatory role in the vitriolic street politics of the um’s opportunistic intervention.
The murder of Kelso Cochrane around midnight on may 16, 1959, was both a culmination and a turning point. The focus of suspicion was on members of a local crime family and their associates, who were not paidup members of the um — in spite of a later boast to the contrary by mosley’s West London organiser Peter Dawson — but supported, and were encouraged by, its racist policies.
many locals considered the identity of the killers to be ‘the worst-kept secret in Notting Hill’. but no one would talk, and the police even suggested robbery rather than racism was the motive — at best a shameful and misguided attempt to keep a lid on racial tensions. The police allegedly did the same after the Stephen Lawrence killing.
Sir Oswald was quick to seize upon this, and said that blaming the um for death and disorder was a Tory smear. He added: ‘The only cure for these troubles is to send the Jamaicans back to a fair deal in their own country.’ There was no expression of regret for Kelso’s murder.
Kelso was buried in June at Kensal Green cemetery, a funeral attended by more than 1,000 people. The um attacked the bishop of Kensington for officiating, and challenged him to bury a white man to prove ‘he has no form of racial prejudice’.
The same month, a large protest meeting was held outside St Pancras Town Hall. It was addressed by Father Trevor Huddleston, who would found the Anti-Apartheid movement the following month (in 1961, max mosley would be convicted of obstructing a police officer while taking part in a counterdemonstration at a Trafalgar Square anti-apartheid vigil).
Huddleston told the crowd: ‘Within this country we have the seeds of racial discrimination that could be an absolute disaster to the future of Great britain. Colour discrimination is the supreme issue of our generation.’
Sir Oswald’s response? In July, he held a um meeting on the very spot where Cochrane was murdered.
He also openly demonstrated his support for those who were suspected of being involved in the killing. Three months after the murder, Sir Oswald attended court to support two brothers who had been charged with assaulting and shooting another local black man.
DECADES later, one of the men told author mark Olden, an expert on the case, that mosley had even paid for their defences.
(When Olden, with Kelso’s cousin John Prince and brother, Stanley, attempted to talk to people in Notting Hill as recently as 2004, they found that the wall of silence and fear remained. In 2009, a blue plaque was raised at the spot where the murder took place.)
Sir Oswald lost his deposit in the 1959 General election. John Prince says: ‘I was proud of the fact that british society eventually rejected him — that ordinary working- class people would stand up to mosley and his fascists.’
max did not reject, has never rejected, his father or his policies. He has not apologised for his own small role in Notting Hill’s darkest chapter. In his memoir, he simply states: ‘I tried to help but members of his party conducted the campaign. The result was very poor, a pity . . .’
max was also quoted in an Oxford student newspaper as saying of the Kensington North campaign — which became known as ‘ the ugly election’: ‘The election was fun, as all elections are.’
After graduating — and twoand-a-half years after Cochrane’s murder — he would be the um’s election agent in moss Side, manchester, another urban constituency with a large Afro-Caribbean population.
As the mail revealed yesterday, a vile racist leaflet was published in his name, accusing black immigrants of spreading disease and calling for them to be sent ‘home’.
When asked under oath at his 2008 privacy trial about the existence of such a pamphlet, mr mosley replied: ‘Absolute nonsense.’