Evil To Him Who Evil Thinks:
The 1974 London Uprising, Part 1 by Chris Oakley
At the time Ted Heath went to the country in 1974 to decide his
government’s political future, there hadn’t been an armed revolt on
Britain’s home soil since the ill-fated 1745 Jacobite insurgency by
Charles Edward Stuart. The American Revolution of 1775, the Indian
Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, and the so-called “Troubles” in Ulster during
the late 1960s and early ‘70s had all transpired on distant shores;
as a consequence the Territorial Army had gotten somewhat rusty when
it came to quashing domestic insurrections. But they were shortly to
get a crash course on that subject courtesy of a group of left-wing
extremists who took their inspiration from radicals in the U.S. and
Europe and, for a time, would have Britain perched on the brink of a
civil war....
******
The British Popular Liberation Front(BPLF) was, to say the least,
an eclectic organization. Despite its militant-sounding name the BPLF
hadn’t always been inclined towards violence; in fact, at the time it
was first established in 1970 many other leftist organizations openly
criticized it for being insufficiently committed to what Karl Marx had
dubbed “the class struggle”. But just over two years into its existence
the group’s ideological direction would begin to take a sharp turn in
the direction of armed resistance to the established order of British
society when one of its founders was fatally injured in a scuffle with
Manchester police while resisting arrest for demonstrating without a
permit. The official police report of the incident asserted, and most
eyewitness accounts tended to agree, that the activist’s death had been
an unfortunate instance of an overzealous officer losing control of his
temper and exceeding the accepted bounds of the use of physical force.
But his comrades in the BPLF were convinced his death had been a
government-orchestrated assassination. Determining that force had to
be met with force, they held a secret meeting at an abandoned farm in
Kent in October of 1972 at which the group’s executive committee voted
unanimously to adopt more militant tactics in their quest to institute
a socialist government in Britain; they also took the pledge to avenge
their comrade’s death at any cost. It was this pledge it particular, in
the eyes of most British historians today, which first set the BPLF on
the road to its ultimate demise and the uprising that turned London into
a war zone throughout much of January and February of 1974....
******
In hindsight, the real surprise is not that the BPLF attempted to
overthrow the British government but that it waited until rather late
in the day to do so. As early as 1971 some of the more hardcore members
of the group had been agitating for an insurrection to topple the Heath
government and institute the BPLF’s version of a socialist regime. But
the group’s principal leaders felt that acting too hastily would cause
Scotland Yard to crack down on the group so hard it would be seriously
weakened or even fall apart altogether. The Manchester incident and the
October 1972 Kent meeting would change all that, pushing the organization
irrevocably towards insurrection; throughout 1973, in an operation whose
scope and effectiveness would astonish police investigators when it was
finally exposed, the BPLF secretly stockpiled an arsenal right under the
noses of not only Scotland Yard but also the internal security agency MI-
5.
The Heath government, stretched between the twin difficulties of
trying to save its own political future and keep a lid on the civil
unrest in Northern Ireland, had little time and even less resources
left over to do the kind of intelligence gathering necessary to get
a full picture of the BPLF’s plans. Few of Heath’s security advisors
were even aware of the insurrection plot’s existence until ten days
before it was due to be launched-- and even then, they had to learn
about it from London’s Fleet Street tabloids. News Of The World, in a
rare departure from its customary diet of celebrity scandals and men
in power behaving badly, published an anonymous letter from a source
close to the BPLF warning that “a day of reckoning” was about to come
for 10 Downing Street and claiming “the oppressed masses” were about
to rise up “to smash the edifice of Tory neo-fascism into rubble”.
******
Like many urban insurrections which had happened before Heath’s
tenure as prime minister of Britain and many others that have happened
since Heath left office, the 1974 London revolt made extensive use of
homemade weapons. One of the principal figures of the BPLF’s conspiracy
to overthrow Heath was a former Oxford chemistry student who used his
science background to show his comrades how to turn the most everyday
household cleaning products into lethal explosives and make devastating
bombs out of ordinary kitchen appliances. When British army and police
authorities finally ran him to ground, they would discover he had been
personally responsible for no less than three dozen bomb attacks against
metropolitan London, including an abortive attempt to blow up the prime
minister’s 10 Downing Street residence.
On January 19th, 1974 the BPLF held another secret conference, this
time at the Soho flat of the group’s leader; at this meeting the group’s
members voted unanimously to begin their planned uprising within seventy-
two hours. Among the targets for their initial attacks: Buckingham Palace,
the National Gallery, the Ministry of Defence, and the Bank of England. If
all went according to plan, London would be thrown into total chaos within
hours of the BPLF’s first strikes on the city. Shortly before the attacks,
the group’s propaganda wing would phone various press bureaus to issue(in
the words of the BPLF propaganda chief) “a declaration of people’s war” on
the Heath government-- a gesture intended as much to drive home the group’s
commitment to making revolution as it was to garner the maximum amount of
possible publicity for the revolutionaries’ cause.
The next day those BPLF members entrusted with the task of carrying
out the first series of attacks in London began surreptitiously moving
themselves and their weapons into position in order to be in the closest
possible proximity to their targets when the signal was given to attack.
One of those targets, as it happened, was the United States embassy in
London, where the main topic of conversation among the staff at the time
was the mushrooming Watergate scandal back in Washington. Few people at
the embassy even suspected that anything out of the ordinary was going on
beyond the embassy gates, much less that the building was under imminent
threat of attack. But one of those people was the embassy’s director of
security, and since the News Of The World published the “day of reckoning”
letter he’d been trying to get the White House’s consent to put his Marine
guard detail on full alert; to the security director’s frustration, though,
Nixon was too distracted by Watergate to even telephone him.
On the evening of January 21st the general secretary of the BPLF, who
at that time was known to the public only by the code-name “Claudius”, had
a brief two-word dispatch sent to all BPLF branch leaders throughout the
London area. The message said simply: IT’S ON. There was no turning back
now for either side in the war that was about to erupt on the streets of
the British capital. The only question was who the first casualties would
be in that war.
******
The clock had just struck 5:00 AM in London on the morning of
January 22nd when the first explosions rumbled through the air near
the Covent Garden Market. Almost simultaneously, machine gun fire was
heard outside the offices of the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign
Secretary; less than five minutes after the first explosion at Covent
Garden Scotland Yard started receiving frantic phone calls that the
Chancellor of the Exchequer’s office was under attack. Back at No. 10
Downing Street, Prime Minister Heath was awoken by a senior MI-5 aide
with the shocking news that the BPLF had announced this was the start
of its rebellion against his government. Heath immediately sprang into
action, ordering three Territorial Army battalions deployed to London
to crush the uprising while it was still in its opening stages.
Much to the dismay of the BPLF guerrillas, their attempt to
break into Buckingham Palace and seize the royal family proved an
absolute failure. The palace guards, despite initially being caught
by surprise, acted with great heroism and professionalism in their
defense of the royals; their actions bought the royal family crucial
time to evacuate to safety and gave the British Army an opportunity
to dispatch elements of the SAS to the palace to provide the guards
with additional tactical support against the insurgents. By the time
the smoke cleared four guards, six BPLF fighters, and three SAS men
lay dead on the palace grounds; the remaining insurgents, deciding
discretion was the better part of valor, retreated as quickly as they
could to await another opportunity to attack the palace-- an opportunity
they’d never get.
Things went noticeably better for the BPLF guerrillas in their
raid on the National Gallery. The museum was virtually deserted at that
time of the morning, enabling the insurgents to seize it with barely a
single shot fired. When the battle plan for the uprising had first been
devised the insurgents had intended to simply lay waste to the building,
but as the strategy for their revolt evolved it occurred to the BPLF’s
leadership the museum might serve as a valuable bargaining chip to force
the Heath government to negotiate a resolution to the showdown on terms
that favored the militants. So they placed a rather sizable bomb in the
heart of the gallery and threatened to reduce the building to rubble if
the Heath government did not meet the BPLF’s demands in full and quickly.
It was in the effort to avert the National Gallery’s destruction
that the SAS would make its second major contribution to the defense of
the British government in the London uprising...
