Stuart Christie at work on the gas network, 1970
Dublin Core
Title
Stuart Christie at work on the gas network, 1970
Description
Stuart Christie (2011): '1970 (summer): from 1969 to 1971 I was working long hours [and well-paid] for the then William Press & Son engineering company, converting North London and the Home Counties from town gas to natural gas. It was a period that coincided with a peak in the Europe-wide anti-Francoist and anti-US/Vietnam War activities of the anarchist ‘First of May Group’ and the birth of the so-called ‘Angry Brigade’. I was the chargehand on D28, the van in this photo, and thereby hang a number of tales. The following account is from ‘Edward Heath Made Me Angry’:
“The police ‘leaked’ a story to the Daily Express [about Europe-wide non-lethal attacks on aeroplanes and properties of Iberia Airlines and other Francoist institutions]. The man responsible, according to ‘police sources,’ was a person readily identifiable as yours truly. Unfortunately, libel actions are only a rich man’s way of getting richer. Had I been Randolph Churchill I could have walked off with enough money to live without working for the rest of my life. As it was, I continued converting the Home Counties — to Natural Gas — and limited my response to a statement issued through my lawyer, Ben Birnberg, denying any involvement in the actions. On the afternoon in question, I had been at a garden party at the home of two close friends up Crouch Hill, Valerie and Graham Packham. One of my ‘alibis’ was a senior police officer who lived next door.
Almost a fortnight after the attacks on the Iberia planes another incident occurred on 22 May that was to mark the emergence of what was to become known as the ‘Angry Brigade.’ It was the discovery of a small explosive device with a timing device on the building site of the high security police station in Paddington.
Coincidentally, the previous week had seen the spectacular escape of Andreas Baader from Tegel Prison in West Germany. This was the birth of the ‘Red Army Fraktion,’ the RAF. If astrology was involved in this conjuncture — which also saw the first Weather Underground communiqué in the States and their bombing of New York City’s Police Headquarters — the people in these groups must have been born on very different cusps, as they were to evolve in very different ways.
Things began to heat up in the early summer of 1970. On my way home from Harrow on the Hill one evening— it was in the run up to the June elections — I became aware that I was being followed in what appeared to be a fairly substantial surveillance operation either by the police or MI5’s ‘Watchers’ from Euston Tower in Gower Street. Knowing I was being shadowed made it relatively easy for me to lose them around the back streets of Wembley and Willesden, and I didn’t think much more of it — until the same thing happened the following day.
While driving out of our base at the North Thames Gas Board yard at Harrow-on-the-Hill, I noticed a green car following me. My normal route took me through the back doubles of North London to get home to Finsbury Park. This routine was to avoid the rush-hour traffic rather than MI5’s cloak and dagger men from Gower Street. I knew this part of London like the back of my hand, having converted most of it to Natural Gas so I took my followers on a Cook’s tour of the Betjemanesque suburbs, during the course of which I discovered that I had at least three cars and two motorcyclists tailing me. Wherever I went the lambs were sure to follow. Failing to shake them, I eventually ended up driving along Finchley Road at a mere fifteen miles an hour, with the surveillance cars and motorcycles following me like a funeral procession with outriders. If I had had a passenger I would have got him to walk in front of the car, hat in hand.
When we got to Highgate Hill the traffic into London from the A1 and M1 motorway had built up.
Suddenly, the Devil made me pull out and accelerate into the oncoming northbound traffic, pulling into the correct lane when a gap presented itself, or forced to by large lorries heading straight for me. The Hillman Hunters decided not to pursue me. A few minutes later I was in the back streets of Archway and heading for home, taking care to park my car streets away from our flat. My official address was the old office of the Anarchist Black Cross, which we had given up, but I still had a key and collected our mail every other day.
The next day when I arrived at work, a cavalcade of cars and vans were parked all around my sector. I thought at first that it might have something to do with the election, but no — it was the ‘watchers. … ‘
‘…One day I cracked a joke to my shop steward and unit manager about the increased surveillance, but they didn’t believe me — at first. Then they checked for themselves and reported back on the two-way radio that they had counted six parked Hillman Hunters and Minxes with similarly sequenced registration plates on my conversion sector, occupied by what were obviously plainclothes policemen or spooks. There were also two motorcyclists in the area — with green army bikes, green army-issue crash helmets and heavy-duty military raincoats.
Gerry, my foreman, laughed and said that I was being paranoid. Jokingly I suggested we swap cars for the night [I had a Ford Corsair GT 2000E]. It was Monday and the sector was not a particularly difficult one, so I left early and managed to drive off in Gerry’s car [a flash Daimler Sovereign] without being spotted by the waiting column of undercover cars. Gerry returned to the Harrow base in my car and then went on to a pub. Surprise, surprise — he found he was being followed. This time the procession was tailing him. First they waited outside the pub, from there they followed him to the Chinese restaurant and waited outside until he finally went home — at one in the morning.
For three weeks after that I used up every trick ever seen in a B film, including lying on the floor of the William Press van and being driven to my car which had been parked up in a helpful lady’s garage four or five miles away (I had converted her appliances on a previous sector) and more fast car chases around the North Circular Road. Every Gas Board contractor in Harrow on the Hill — and there were hundreds of us — knew the men in the Hillman Hunters and, occasionally, to be different, a Triumph Vitesse, were policemen and would constantly wind them up by asking for the time, ‘officer’. They had the time all right. What they didn’t have — for a while — was the opportunity.
They finally brought in a van with mirrored one-way windows and observation vents side and top, which they parked in front of my van. When this arrived I promptly turned my van round so they could only see our rear. Even so, all they could have learned was how to convert gas appliances, play poker and tell jokes. It may seem incredible to the seasoned reporter, though readily acceptable to the general reader, that the First of May Group had no plans to blow up Harrow School, and the police had no reason to watch me at work on a William Press’s conversion van.
One thing that drove the police crazy at this time was that after a week of following the Corsair, I started turning up for work every Monday morning in a brand new car. Sometimes I changed my car twice or three times in a week. The police couldn’t understand what was going on.
What had happened was that a friend — a member of the People Show, an improvising radical theatre troupe — had a day job managing the Hertz Rental office at Luton airport, and he was providing my car fleet. The police went to Luton to question my friend as to who was renting these cars, claiming they had been used in a spate of bank robberies in the London area, but he refused to tell them anything unless they provided a court order, which they never did.
It took them almost six weeks to discover where I lived. They watched and waited until I left for work one morning, then they made their move. Having watched me leave, they sent a woman detective to ring the doorbell…’ But that’s another story entirely.'
“The police ‘leaked’ a story to the Daily Express [about Europe-wide non-lethal attacks on aeroplanes and properties of Iberia Airlines and other Francoist institutions]. The man responsible, according to ‘police sources,’ was a person readily identifiable as yours truly. Unfortunately, libel actions are only a rich man’s way of getting richer. Had I been Randolph Churchill I could have walked off with enough money to live without working for the rest of my life. As it was, I continued converting the Home Counties — to Natural Gas — and limited my response to a statement issued through my lawyer, Ben Birnberg, denying any involvement in the actions. On the afternoon in question, I had been at a garden party at the home of two close friends up Crouch Hill, Valerie and Graham Packham. One of my ‘alibis’ was a senior police officer who lived next door.
Almost a fortnight after the attacks on the Iberia planes another incident occurred on 22 May that was to mark the emergence of what was to become known as the ‘Angry Brigade.’ It was the discovery of a small explosive device with a timing device on the building site of the high security police station in Paddington.
Coincidentally, the previous week had seen the spectacular escape of Andreas Baader from Tegel Prison in West Germany. This was the birth of the ‘Red Army Fraktion,’ the RAF. If astrology was involved in this conjuncture — which also saw the first Weather Underground communiqué in the States and their bombing of New York City’s Police Headquarters — the people in these groups must have been born on very different cusps, as they were to evolve in very different ways.
Things began to heat up in the early summer of 1970. On my way home from Harrow on the Hill one evening— it was in the run up to the June elections — I became aware that I was being followed in what appeared to be a fairly substantial surveillance operation either by the police or MI5’s ‘Watchers’ from Euston Tower in Gower Street. Knowing I was being shadowed made it relatively easy for me to lose them around the back streets of Wembley and Willesden, and I didn’t think much more of it — until the same thing happened the following day.
While driving out of our base at the North Thames Gas Board yard at Harrow-on-the-Hill, I noticed a green car following me. My normal route took me through the back doubles of North London to get home to Finsbury Park. This routine was to avoid the rush-hour traffic rather than MI5’s cloak and dagger men from Gower Street. I knew this part of London like the back of my hand, having converted most of it to Natural Gas so I took my followers on a Cook’s tour of the Betjemanesque suburbs, during the course of which I discovered that I had at least three cars and two motorcyclists tailing me. Wherever I went the lambs were sure to follow. Failing to shake them, I eventually ended up driving along Finchley Road at a mere fifteen miles an hour, with the surveillance cars and motorcycles following me like a funeral procession with outriders. If I had had a passenger I would have got him to walk in front of the car, hat in hand.
When we got to Highgate Hill the traffic into London from the A1 and M1 motorway had built up.
Suddenly, the Devil made me pull out and accelerate into the oncoming northbound traffic, pulling into the correct lane when a gap presented itself, or forced to by large lorries heading straight for me. The Hillman Hunters decided not to pursue me. A few minutes later I was in the back streets of Archway and heading for home, taking care to park my car streets away from our flat. My official address was the old office of the Anarchist Black Cross, which we had given up, but I still had a key and collected our mail every other day.
The next day when I arrived at work, a cavalcade of cars and vans were parked all around my sector. I thought at first that it might have something to do with the election, but no — it was the ‘watchers. … ‘
‘…One day I cracked a joke to my shop steward and unit manager about the increased surveillance, but they didn’t believe me — at first. Then they checked for themselves and reported back on the two-way radio that they had counted six parked Hillman Hunters and Minxes with similarly sequenced registration plates on my conversion sector, occupied by what were obviously plainclothes policemen or spooks. There were also two motorcyclists in the area — with green army bikes, green army-issue crash helmets and heavy-duty military raincoats.
Gerry, my foreman, laughed and said that I was being paranoid. Jokingly I suggested we swap cars for the night [I had a Ford Corsair GT 2000E]. It was Monday and the sector was not a particularly difficult one, so I left early and managed to drive off in Gerry’s car [a flash Daimler Sovereign] without being spotted by the waiting column of undercover cars. Gerry returned to the Harrow base in my car and then went on to a pub. Surprise, surprise — he found he was being followed. This time the procession was tailing him. First they waited outside the pub, from there they followed him to the Chinese restaurant and waited outside until he finally went home — at one in the morning.
For three weeks after that I used up every trick ever seen in a B film, including lying on the floor of the William Press van and being driven to my car which had been parked up in a helpful lady’s garage four or five miles away (I had converted her appliances on a previous sector) and more fast car chases around the North Circular Road. Every Gas Board contractor in Harrow on the Hill — and there were hundreds of us — knew the men in the Hillman Hunters and, occasionally, to be different, a Triumph Vitesse, were policemen and would constantly wind them up by asking for the time, ‘officer’. They had the time all right. What they didn’t have — for a while — was the opportunity.
They finally brought in a van with mirrored one-way windows and observation vents side and top, which they parked in front of my van. When this arrived I promptly turned my van round so they could only see our rear. Even so, all they could have learned was how to convert gas appliances, play poker and tell jokes. It may seem incredible to the seasoned reporter, though readily acceptable to the general reader, that the First of May Group had no plans to blow up Harrow School, and the police had no reason to watch me at work on a William Press’s conversion van.
One thing that drove the police crazy at this time was that after a week of following the Corsair, I started turning up for work every Monday morning in a brand new car. Sometimes I changed my car twice or three times in a week. The police couldn’t understand what was going on.
What had happened was that a friend — a member of the People Show, an improvising radical theatre troupe — had a day job managing the Hertz Rental office at Luton airport, and he was providing my car fleet. The police went to Luton to question my friend as to who was renting these cars, claiming they had been used in a spate of bank robberies in the London area, but he refused to tell them anything unless they provided a court order, which they never did.
It took them almost six weeks to discover where I lived. They watched and waited until I left for work one morning, then they made their move. Having watched me leave, they sent a woman detective to ring the doorbell…’ But that’s another story entirely.'
Date
Summer, 1970
Collection
Tags
Citation
“Stuart Christie at work on the gas network, 1970,” Stuart Christie Memorial Archive, accessed November 21, 2024, https://stuartchristie.maydayrooms.org/items/show/425.