So, let’s go from there then. So, autumn of 1999.
Yeah, Wednesday 22nd September 1999 was a dark and stormy day. Thunder, torrential rain. Two people were struck by lightning and killed in one of the Royal Parks that afternoon. So that evening it was still hot and sultry and the French windows were open, and on the television a European football match was kicking off, Sturm Graz were playing Man United, and we heard two gunshots. We didn’t know they were because behind our estate there is an Indian housing association, they celebrate everything with fireworks, and we didn’t realise until next morning when Mary goes to work along the road and couldn’t get past the bit where the tape was.
And then at lunchtime I went off out and there on the front of the ‘Evening Standard’ was Victoria Park Road, just across the road from- what’s going on? And it was the police shooting dead Harry Stanley. And I don’t know how we came to hear about the meeting, but there was a meeting organised a few days later. And as we went along to it the Indian subcontinent people were letting off fireworks. I think it was an Indian election result.
Anyway, and we arrive at this meeting and there are a few of Harry’s neighbours, there are, there’s a doctor from our practice and one or two others. And the rest of it is itinerant revolutionaries from all over London who’ve come to bring capitalism to a halt. And so you have to explain to these visitors what’s going on. So I explain how it is that we’re getting fed up with the police treating where we live like occupied territory. You know, they sit in their cars with that funny mixture of complete arrogance and total fear. They know they’re hated by everybody but they know they can get away with anything. And I had also to explain to them that only three days later the police shot somebody else in that area. They’d got a, what they believed to be an armed raid on a post office going off, and they shot a bloke in the hand. And all this lot haven’t any idea.
And the campaign was being started by people from these political groups. Two of them were serious people in the Socialist Workers’ Party and one, who was a family friend of Harry’s, was from a newspaper called ‘Fight Racism, Fight Imperialism’. And they were up on the top and they got it started. And at the end of it, I went and chatted to Harry’s son. Harry’s widow couldn’t face it at the time. And Mary went and chatted to the lawyer who was representing Harry, because Harry had had, as we will discover later on, a long and inglorious career of grubby little criminality and had been providing legal aid work for Hickman & Rose for some time.
Anyway, somebody from Hickman & Rose was chatting to Mary to see if – because we’d heard the gunshots – whether we were witnesses, and I got chatting to Jason, and then to the political people. And we were part of the campaign from that minute onwards, not the leadership, not family, and therefore we are probably a category that’s a bit unusual, because most of the people who you’re going to be talking to probably are family, campaign leadership or lawyers, and we’re not any of those. So we were back-up and support, what have you. And it got underway from there and we learnt quite a few lessons quite quickly. Do you want me to run through those, or have you got some questions, yeah?
