As the subtitle tells us, this is "a history of Britain's first Urban Guerilla [sic] group."
I was at school when the Angry Brigade flourished. They had a campaign of bombing property targets (they claim that no-one was ever killed, although some people were seriously injured). As such, they were mild compared to the Baader Meinhof 'Red Army Faction' in Germany or the Brigato Rosso in Italy. It was a time of political violence. Internationally the peasants of North Vietnam were defying the military might of the USA. The CIA were undermining Chile whose democratically elected communist president Salvador Allende would die during a coup against him. Spain and Portugal were still run by fascist dictators who had been installed before the second world war and Greece was taken over by the Colonels in a military coup. Czechoslovakia was to enjoy a brief 'Prague spring' before tanks from the Warsaw Pact took back control.
In the USA, the Symbionese Liberation Amry kidnapped Patty Hearst and she subsequently took part in a bank robbery they organised, as related in American Heiress by Jeffrey Toobin.
Things were even different in the UK. The demands of the Catholics in Northern Ireland for equal suffrage had been met with British troops on the streets and soon political dissidents were to be interned without trial. And the antics of the Angry Brigade were soon to be quashed by the police acting with questionable legality. Not only were people arrested and questioned without recourse to legal representation, sometimes for longer than the then maximum of 24 hours, but also there were so many questions raised about the searches and the interviews that the jury acquitted half of the defendants, clearly believing that the police had planted evidence and made up confessions. The trial was one of the longest in British criminal history.
These years saw the birth of Gay Liberation, Women's Lib and Feminism, and Black Power. The lasting legacy of all this activism was the real gains made in terms of equal rights and equal opportunities for women, ethnic minorities and homosexuals. Things are not yet perfect but they are much better than they were.
Not that the Angry Brigade were innocent. Bombers aren't. They also used a sub machine gun to spray bullets at the Spanish Embassy in London. In a bizarre twist, all but one of the bullets missed. For 48 hours the Embassy officials were unaware of the attack, until a cleaner found a bullethole in a pane of glass; the bullet took even longer to be located. During this period the Angry Brigade issued one of their Communiques complaining that the authorities had suppressed news of the attack. It was this that led the police to realise that the communiques really did come from a group that was carrying out attacks!
One of the targets of the Angry Brigade was the 1970 Miss World contest. There had been controversy because the organisers had allowed two contestants from South Africa, one black and one white. TheBrigade bombed a BBC Outside broadcast van. During the competition, Women's Liberation protesters threw flour bombs and heckled the host, Bob Hope. This protest was the subject of a movie called Misbehaviour released in 2020 but so far as I remember the Brigade's bombing went unmentioned.
Of particular interest to me was the fact that John Barker, one of the leading lights of the Brigade, was inspired by the Situationists and in particular The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, the subject of a biography Guy Debord by Andy Merrifield.
The book is even printed in a way that reminded me of the underground magazines of the period with black and white photos and drawings mingled into the text. To add to the authentic feel, the proof reading is imperfect. It is topped and tailed with pieces from John Barker who was convicted (he claims to have been framed yet admits he was guilty) and Stuart Christie who was found not guilty.
November 2025; 248 pages
Published by PM Press in 2020
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