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The Angry Brigade was an libertarian communist* anti-imperialist guerrilla group in the late ’60s, growing from the student anti-war movement and the militant, far left revolutionary groups of Spain to launch a series of bombing campaigns between 1970 and 1972.

In every generation, there are young people who take up the task of revolution directly, intensely, and most seriously.

The Brigade was quite clear in their aims; they sought to attack property, not people, and their targets included banks, fascist embassies, and the homes of Conservative MP’s, including then Home Secretary Robert Carr, courts and, as depicted in the film Misbehaviour, a BBC Outside Broadcast van at the 1970 Miss World event.

These small bombing campaigns secured media exposure to the demands of their cause and the police estimate that some 25 bombings could be attributed to the group. Collateral damage was kept to a minimum during their ‘campaign of terror’ with only one person suffering slight injuries.

The trial of the Stoke Newington cell, ‘the Stoke Newington Eight’, became one of the longest criminal trials in English history, lasting from 30th May to 6th December 1972. Of the eight, John Barker, Jim Greenfield, Hilary Creek and Anna Mendelssohn (who wrote as a poet under the pen name of Grace Lake) were found guilty and sentenced to ten years imprisonment, whilst a further four were acquitted,

including Stuart Christie, who had previously been in Spanish gaol for his part in an assassination plot on Franco, and Angela Mason, who went on to become the director of Stonewall, receiving the OBE for her services to LGBT rights in 1999. Jake Prescott, who was the first of the group to be captured and imprisoned in 1971 famously reflected that whilst he was angry, the rest were ‘the slightly cross brigade’.

@workingclasshistory has an excellent two-part podcast interview with John Barker.