Celia Stubbs was born in Singapore in 1940. Her family moved between Australia, Malaysia and England before settling in England in 1950.
Celia married and moved to New Zealand, where she met her future partner, Blair Peach. Blair was killed by the Special Patrol Group at an anti-fascist demonstration in Southall in west London on 23 April 1979. His death and the following cover-up of Sir Commander Cass’s report led Celia to setup INQUEST in 1981, alongside a group of other activists and bereaved family members.
Celia was the secretary of INQUEST’s Executive Committee during the 1980s and closely involved in the running of the organisation and was also involved in other organisations, such as the Hackney Community Defence Association (HCDA). A lifelong campaigner, Celia began working as a social worker in 1977 until retiring in 2003. Throughout this period, she has also been supporting asylum seekers.
Celia is a core participant in the Undercover Policing Inquiry as she was spied on because of her relationship with Blair and her campaigning following his death.
Celia Stubbs was interviewed by Naomi Oppenheim.
You can listen to more of her oral history in Series 1: Episode 1 of the Unlawful Killing podcast.
So they asked for people to come and support them and in fact it was through both our trade unions that we went. It was the Easter holidays so- and I was working and my children were staying with their father. So I went off to work with friends and he went with his friends, who one of them was a witness at the inquest, she saw him hit, Amanda Leon, they went earlier and we were to meet up but we never met up because of the way the police cordoned off the town. And even they were cordoned off in the Broadway. I arrived and I was on the east, and in fact we were chased by police on horses through Southall Park for, seemingly for no reason. And so I sort of wandered round with a couple of – I’d come with a group of people from work, union members – and we got separated but I was with another one and we decided just to go back to Hackney about quarter to eight, because… And that’s what we did, and that was about the time that, you know, Blair and others were forced up Beechcroft and he was hit by a policeman on the corner of Beechcroft and Orchard Avenue.
Did you…
And, yes, and they were trying to get hold of me and then they phoned my neighbour, David Ransom, just up the road, and he came and told me, so I went to the hospital in Ealing where Blair was, but he was dead when I arrived.
I’m so sorry. What happened then after?
Well, it was the middle of the night but already Commander Cass, who was chosen as the person to do a report on Southall, and Detective Inspector Helm, who was very senior, they came, and we were in this house of one of the people who’d gone earlier with Blair, because he lived in Ealing, and they came to the house and took me. I took a friend with me, Sarah Hellman, and she came with me to some police station where they interviewed me in the middle of the night in quite a sort of, Helm especially was very unpleasant.
