Overview

The truth about one of Britain's most infamous race murders has never been revealed. At around midnight on May 17 1959, a white gang ambushed 32-year-old Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on a Notting Hill slum street. After a brief scuffle one of them plunged a knife into his heart. The impact was as profound as the aftershock of Stephen Lawrence's murder more than forty years later. The previous summer Notting Hill had been convulsed by race riots. The fascists Sir Oswald Mosley and Colin Jordan were agitating in the area. So the news of an innocent back man stabbed in west London reverberated from Whitehall to the Caribbean. And when the police failed to catch the killer, many black people believed it would have been different if the victim had been white. Murder in Notting Hill is a tale of crumbling tenements transformed into a millionaires' playground, of the district's fading white working class, and of a veil finally being lifted on the past. Part whodunnit, part social history, it reveals startling new evidence about the murder.

Full Product Details

9781846945366

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Reviews

In the story of race and justice in this country, the murder of Kelso Cochrane is like an unhealed wound. Today's readers will see many similarities with what happened in relation to Stephen Lawrence -- the missed opportunities in the investigation, the denial of the race motive, the obvious official discomfort and confusion -- but this is a tragedy in its own right, and all the more dreadful in a time when racism was often overt and tolerated. Mark Olden has written a first-rate, highly readable account of the known facts, but he has also gone farther, tracking down surviving witnesses and, with due care and caution after all these years, shedding new light on the case. For anyone interested in justice in modern Britain this is an important book. (Brian Cathcart, Author: The Case of Stephen Lawrence; Jill Dando: her Life and Death; Were You Still Up For Portillo?)

Author Information

Mark Olden is a TV producer and journalist based in London.

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