Murder in Notting Hill

by Mark Olden

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 thirty 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, True Crime

205 pages, Paperback

First published November 16, 2011

Reviews

[Avesta · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's quite a controversial work of non-fiction... and whilst it provides ample evidence of how Kensington gradually turned from a white working-class area to a diverse upscale and posh area thanks to gentrification, and the detrimental effect it had on local residents, and whilst it certainly does pull you in and make you continue reading - every other aspect is terrible.

This book has been heavily dramatised, and a big issue here - is the fact that Olden is writing a murder mystery... about a real case that was unsolved by police... and attempts to solve it himself. Olden should have been quite careful when writing such a sensitive book - but I felt he was quite reckless instead - and I felt that I should not continue reading out of respect for a victim of hate crime and murder. I don't know how Olden obtained the case files; I think his publishing of such files is a breach of privacy, and I really don't understand why he wrote this book using REAL EVENTS - he could have cast his intended message (gentrification, yada yada...) without literally using real events and people...

And perhaps the most absurd thing is how he claims to have solved the case - beating the police to it - and establishing who the murderer was (which was once again, heavily dramatised...).

You can find such sources proving his claims (which I find indirectly suggest police incompetence) in the news - there's an article in the Daily Mail pointing out Olden's claim of solving the case. Not the best newspaper to resort to, but go figure...

[Richard Atkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a major story amidst the tense race relations of the late 1950s, the murder of Kelso Cochrane has been all but forgotten in popular memory.

Mark Olden places the story of the botched and half-hearted police investigation in its wider context - the Notting Hill riots, the previous uproar over prison sentences for racist attacks, the resurgent wave of fascism in the local area embodied both by Oswald Mosley's "respectable" Union Movement and the White Defence League street movement. He also discovers a more-than-likely culprit, but it is too late for justice. A moving tale which shows how policing and race relations have changed in Britain - and how they haven't.

[Adrian Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Came to this via BBC A Good Read. A grim account of an unsolved racist murder in London. The shocking parallels of Stephen Lawrence are laid bare. Largely well written apart from some unnecessary diversions. A dreadful story.

[Ann Baxter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very moving book of an important part of histoy

[Stewart Home · Rating 4 out of 5]

The racist murder of Antiguan carpenter Kelso Cochrane on 17 May 1959 is the centre-point of this book, but it spins off in a lot of other directions. No one was ever convicted for the butchery but Olden makes a strong circumstantial case that a painter and decorator called Pat Digby wielded the knife that killed Cochrane. Digby denied that he was the culprit, and had he not died from a heart attack four years ago, then stringent British libel laws would have forced Olden’s book to take a very different shape to the one it has now. There is no smoking gun in this case, although this book suggests Digby’s bloody knife may still lie hidden under some Notting Hill floorboards. Olden’s text is in part a narrative of his attempts to identify the killer, and the naming of Digby represents its climax.

Read the full review here: http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/ar...

[Katrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well-written and interesting. A really good introduction to the facts of the case and the people whose lives intersected with Cochrane's death. I'm just not sure I get the point of the book really. I'm going to have to think about it some more. But I would say that it's a must read.

[Stewart Spaull · Rating 5 out of 5]

Harrowing yet compelling. Couldn't put it down.