This exhibition, at Gunnersbury House Museum, Pope’s Lane, W5 4NH, until 5 July 2025, is highly recommended by Chris Bambery  

‘Peoples Unite: How Southall Changed the Country’ is a look at the impact this West London community has had. In the 1950s, Southall became home to migrants from the Indian sub-continent, mainly from the Punjab. They would later be joined by others from East Africa. This small but excellent exhibition focuses on this community, and in particular how it responded to the racism it would encounter from the police and organised racist groups. The first organisation it highlights is the Indian Workers’ Association, which helped organise the newly arrived workers. 

West London had been home to new industries in the inter-war years. The new workers, many Welsh and Irish migrants, became organised through strikes like that at Firestone tyres on the Great West Road. However, in the 1950s and 1960s the union leaderships were wary of tackling racism towards new migrants from the Subcontinent and the Caribbean. 

The Indian Workers’ Association 

The R. Woolf Rubber factory in Southall had a 90% Asian workforce by 1962, but they got less money than their white colleagues and were barred from the better-paid jobs. Conditions were harsh. In 1964, the company was forced to recognise the Transport Workers Union but little changed. The Indian Workers’ Association stepped in and recruited 452 members to the union. In November 1965, there was a seven-week strike in demand of safer working conditions. To its shame, the Transport Union did not make it official or give strike pay. Management tried to bring in scab workers from Northern England, mainly of Pakistani origin, attempting to use sectarian divide and rule tactics, but the IWA explained what was going on and they returned home. The strike won. 

This represented a real turning point and the IWA would organise other workplaces. Many from Southall were finding work at Heathrow Airport where union organisation was strong. However, the IWA was linked via the Communist Party of India to the Communist Party of Great Britain which looked to the Labour Party and trade-union officialdom as the agents of change. From 1964 to 1970, there was a Labour government, and again from 1974 to 1979. Racists and fascists began targeting Southall in the 1960s where the British National Party, an openly pro-Nazi organisation, stood in local elections with some success. 

By the mid-1970s, a global economic crisis shook Britain and racists and fascists tried to blame rising unemployment on migrants. The racist speeches of Tory ex-minister, Enoch Powell, attacked immigration, claiming race war was on the cards, while the Nazi National Front (which the BNP had joined) looked set to become the third biggest party in London. NF gangs began targeting Southall, setting out on ‘Paki bashing’ raids, to use their racist terminology. 

On the night of 4 June 1976, the Nazis found a target, an eighteen-year-old Sikh engineering student, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, who was stabbed to death on Southall High Street. A 22-year-old Suresh Grover, soon to be a leading anti-racist activist, who had just moved to Southall from Nelson in Lancashire (in large part to get away from the racism he encountered there), came across a pool of blood and asked a cop what had happened. He said a young man had been killed, but then added ‘it was just an Asian’. 

The Asian youth movement 

Coming in the wake of other attacks and of the racist speeches of Tory ex-minister Enoch Powell attacking immigration, racism in general was on the rise and the NF looked set to become the third biggest party in London. On the Monday after the attack, angry Asian youth gathered to launch the Southall Asian Youth Movement. The older generation had accepted that they must ‘play the game’ and rely on the police and the law. The younger generation saw the police and the law as being in cahoots with the Nazis. 

The police denied Chaggar’s murder was racist, to the shock and anger of the community. The Southall Youth Movement organised a demonstration through Southall in protest against this murder and all other racist killings. Other Asian Youth Movements sprang up in places like Bradford while the SYM went to Brick Lane in East London to help the local Bengali youth get organised against the constant NF presence there. The SYM was stepping ahead of the older IWA which looked to the law and Labour politicians to deal with racism. 

The seminal event came in April 1979 when the National Front organised a rally in Southall Town Hall during the general election campaign, on St George’s Day. Neither the police or the local council agreed to ban this obviously provocative meeting. A sit-in outside Southall police station did not change their minds. The Anti-Nazi League and the SYM called a demonstration against the Nazi rally. 

On the day of the NF rally, Southall was occupied by riot police. They began blocking off the town centre, where the Town Hall was and clashes were developing with local youth and anti-racist supporters. When police ensured a small number of NFers were allowed through to hold the meeting, anger grew. The police repeatedly baton charged protesters. An ANL member and East London teacher, Blair Peach, was struck by weighted baton wielded by a member of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group, and  taken to hospital, where he died of his injuries. 

A medical centre had been set up at the Peoples’ Rights Centre, a cultural and advice centre. It was the home of the reggae band Misty in Roots, made up of young Afro-Caribbean residents of Southall. Riot police stormed the building, baton-charging doctors, nurses and lawyers as well as those would seek shelter there. One such was Tariq Ali who had earlier addressed protesters. He was hurled down the stairs. He and others were made to walk a gauntlet of baton-wielding cops before being thrown in police vans. Members of Misty in Roots were dragged by their dread locks. The band’s manager, Clarence Baker, was so badly beaten he was in a coma for six months. The exhibition centres on all this, celebrating Misty in Roots and their involvement in Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, together with the SYM. 

It also charts the politicisation of the community in the aftermath of all this, and of the farcical trials which followed. I have to say I think it underplays the police violence that day. They operated as a colonial army of occupation. 

This is a small but valuable exhibition which I would encourage you to visit if in London. The rest of the museum, housed on the former country home of Lord Rothschild, is worth a view too. If you would like to find out more about the Southall Youth Movement I can  recommend two documentaries both available on You Tube.