Blair Peach

Blair Peach, a New Zealand-born teacher and anti-racist campaigner, was killed at Southall on 23 April 1979, when he was struck on the head during the demonstration against a National Front election meeting. Wikipedia says he was born Clement Blair Peach on 25 March 1946 in Napier, New Zealand, came to Britain in 1969 and taught at a school for children with special needs in Bow, east London. He was active in the Socialist Workers' Party, the National Union of Teachers and the Anti-Nazi League. Paul Foot wrote in Socialist Worker that he was a patient activist who did not seek the press spotlight.

Wikipedia says Southall had a large Sikh and Hindu population after the Partition, and the demonstration was a response to the National Front's meeting in the town hall. David Renton writes in the London Review of Books that Peach went to it with four friends. He was struck near Beachcroft Avenue, was taken into 71 Orchard Avenue, where an ambulance was called at 8.12 pm, and died just after midnight with a fractured skull.

Key moments

• 28 April 1979: Foot writes that about 15,000 of the Asian people of Southall marched in his memory, chanting his name.
• 13 June 1979: his funeral, according to a photograph caption in Renton's article. Wikipedia says Sikhs carried his coffin in a multiracial procession.
• 1979 to 1980: Commander John Cass of the Metropolitan Police led an inquiry that used thirty officers and 31,000 hours of police time. Renton writes that Cass concluded the blow was struck by a police officer, one of six Special Patrol Group officers he identified, and recommended that three officers be prosecuted for attempting to frustrate the investigation. He did not recommend a murder charge. Wikipedia says Cass found no "evidence of a conclusive nature" against any one of the six.
• About three weeks after receiving the report: the Director of Public Prosecutions announced that no officer would be prosecuted for murder or for conspiring to pervert the course of justice, Renton writes.
• 28 April to 27 May 1980: the inquest. The jury was not given the Cass report, and it returned a verdict of death by misadventure, Renton writes.
• 1988: Wikipedia says the Metropolitan Police paid his family 75,000 pounds in compensation, without a formal admission of wrongdoing.
• April 2010: the Cass report was published, a year after the death of Ian Tomlinson, once Commissioner Sir Paul Stephenson agreed to a request from Peach's family, according to Renton.

Remembered for: his death at Southall, which no one has been tried for. Blair Peach Primary School and Nursery in Southall is named after him, and Wikipedia says the National Union of Teachers created the Blair Peach Award in 2010.