Oral Account

Tony Ward

Tony Ward was born in London in 1957. Tony was a member of Radical Alternatives to Prison [RAP] from the late 1970s and editor of their journal The Abolitionist. He was involved in the founding of INQUEST in 1981.

In 1982, Tony was hired as INQUEST’s first paid worker, alongside Dave Leadbetter from 1982 until 1990. In 1986, Tony’s book Death and Disorder was published by the organisation. It examined several deaths in police custody in the preceding decade which raised issues around protest and public order policing.

In 1990, Tony began an academic career in law, but remained involved with INQUEST as chair of the executive committee and was then a member until 2004. As a worker from 1982 to 1990, Tony was deeply involved in many aspects of the running of INQUEST, including casework, parliamentary lobbying, campaigning and research.

Tony Ward was interviewed by Alfie Meadows.

You can listen to the full oral history interview at the Bishopsgate Institute.

Yeah well, this came about through the Matthew O’Hara committee. Now, I never met Matthew O’Hara himself, but he died, well at least according to us, he died as a result of medical neglect while he was in prison. He didn’t actually die in prison, but they failed to treat his diabetes and he died a short while after he was released.

Which prison was he in?

I think Pentonville. And I think, I’m not sure, that he himself was a member of RAP, but certainly Andrew Roberts who was the main sort of driving force on this committee was a member of RAP and Matthew had been a friend of his. So, I became involved with Andrew in that committee and, so that committee, along with more sort of high profile campaigns for Blair Peach and Jimmy Kelly, are probably the two that people might still remember 40 years on, we became involved – this would have been 1980(s) still, I think, we started discussing setting up some sort of umbrella group that would be around to support other people who found themselves in the same situation.

People who’d died in police custody or…

Yes, well, people who’d died in custody or as a result of police violence or some sort of encounter with the police.

Who else, where was the, was the Matthew O’Hara committee located anywhere, did it have a base?

Well, it was, yeah well, it was kind of around Dalston and they used to meet in a place called Centerpoint [Centerprise?], which actually is not that different from where we are now, one of these little sort of community places in east London. So yeah, as I say, it was kind of that Hackney/Dalston area.

Okay. And then what was the first meeting like when these different campaigns came together? Do you remember anything about it?

Yeah, well, the first… well… I’m not absolutely sure now which meeting was the first, because there was a series of meetings. So… but there were at least a couple of meetings at Centerpoint [Centerprise?] and then there’s one I remember a bit more clearly which was in the Mary Ward Centre in sort of Bloomsbury. And that’s where we really discussed in some detail setting this thing up. And we tossed about various names and the name INQUEST was actually my suggestion after we’d tried various acronyms. And I mean even before we started the interview you reminded me of a couple of these: there was CASK, which was Campaign Against State Killing. And I’ve forgotten what the other one was. And none of these quite worked.

I mean I think we felt that to call Matthew O’Hara’s case perhaps a state killing would be a bit over-dramatic, you know. But, you know, it made a nice acronym. Perhaps we ought to be slightly wider than that. So we came up with INQUEST, sort of on similar lines to Amnesty and Liberty.