Murder in Notting Hill - Softcover

Mark Olden

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846945364 ISBN 13: 9781846945366

Publisher: Zero Books, 2011

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

In the story of race and justice in this country, the murder of Kelso Cochrane is like an unhealed wound. 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?

"Mark Olden, a London journalist, displays a terrier-like devotion in locating elderly Notting Dale inhabitants for interview and trawling public archives for information. In pages of atmospheric reportage he brings 1950s Notting Dale vividly to life, with its boozers, nightclubs and cinemas frequented by the likes of Colin MacInnes... Any lingering hope of justice has apparently gone. In the meantime, we can read this superb work of social history, in all its gritty actuality." Ian Thomson, The Spectator.

“Olden constructs a pacy, cross-cutting account of the murder and its aftermath, richly evoking the colours and tensions of the period... Closer to the present day, [he] recounts poignant journeys to visit old men eking out their pensions in sad decrepitude, reminiscing about the good old days of criminal gangstership and, finally, revealing to him Notting Hill's 'worst kept secret', the identity of the murderer. The author concludes that investigative mistakes, as well as a reluctance to inflame racial tensions any further, meant that ‘Cochrane had little chance of ever getting justice.’ This book is at least a belated shadow of some.” Steven Poole, The Guardian.

"By juxtaposing the present rom-com property porn incarnation of the area with the seedy dangerous slum of the late 50s, Mark Olden has come up with the best book about Notting Hill since the Colin MacInnes' classic [Absolute Beginners]." Tom Vague, author Rachman, Riots and Rillington Place.

About the Author:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Zero Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1846945364
• ISBN 13: 9781846945366
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 205