No Justice over Ricky Bishop

Rocky Bishop is just one of the 1,619 people have died while in contact with the police, whether in custody, being pursued, or shot since 1990 – around one every six days on average.

Of course not every one of those is a result of police actions; a few will have died of natural causes, some may have taken their own lives, but the great majority of them are previously healthy people who have been killed, some accidentally but others deliberately by the actions of police. It’s hard to know how many we should describe as manslaughter and what fraction as murder, but a very large number died as a result of actions that had they been carried out by a member of the public would have resulted in convictions.

But, as you may know, and as certainly many of us at the sixth anniversary of the shooting by police of Mark Duggan did know, not a single police officer has been convicted of any crime for these many deaths.

Whenever someone dies at the hands of the police, the first reaction is always to cover up. Police deliberately spread false rumours about the victim – he was a drug dealer, he choked swallowing a package of drugs, he was carrying a gun, he was a dangerous criminal, a gang leader…. And the papers and media broadcast these falsities, creating an atmosphere where the public believes the victim had it coming to him.

One of the most blatant cases was that of an innocent Brazilian electrician, catching the tube on his way to work, gunned down as he sat quietly in the carriage at Stockwell Station. A few days ago it was Rashan Charles, where police spread the lie he was a drug dealer and swallowing drugs. As so often, once the idea had been firmly lodged in the public mind, they issued a correction, which got much less publicity.

Not only this, there is seldom if ever a proper investigation. If we were a suspect in a possible murder or manslaughter case we would be questioned at length, almost certainly arrested and statements taken, but after these lethal incidents occur there seldom seems to be any proper inquiry. Often we find the officers involved have not been questioned days or weeks after the event.


Doreen Jjuko, Ricky Bishop’s mother holds white roses

Sixteen years after her son Ricky Bishop died in Brixton police station, Doreen Jjuko is still calling for justice. He was in a car stopped by police who searched him but found no drugs, and taken to Brixton police station, though not arrested. Four hours later he was dead. The judge at his inquest denied the jury the possibility of a verdict of manslaughter and brought in a verdict of death by misadventure.


Sister Unity had also brought flowers in memory of Ricky Bishop

His family are convinced the 12 officers concerned are guilty of murder, and as they marched through the centre of Brixton they and their supporters shouted out ‘Who Killed Ricky Bishop?‘ with the answer ‘Police killed Ricky Bishop!’ and going on to name each of the 12 officers, calling them murderers.

The march went very slowly along Brixton’s main street, stopping for some minutes in front of Brixton’s busy Underground station, blocking one lane of the road, but getting their message across to those in the busy street. A police car with two officers drew up beside the march, blocking the second lane – and thus the whole of the north-bound traffic, and the officers got out to tell the marchers they were obstructing the highway and putting themselves in danger, trying to persuade them to leave the road and walk along the pavement.

It seemed an act of senseless naivety, but the protesters were surprisingly polite in their refusals, simply telling the police that if they stopped murdering people they arrested and investigated crimes by fellow officers properly they would not be marching, but otherwise they ignored them and carried on their slow march to Brixton Police Station for a rally at the tree outside, which they call the ‘lynching tree’.

This tree was for some years adopted by the community as a memorial to those killed at Brixton Police Station, with pictures and tributes to Ricky Bishop, Sean Rigg and others. But when police knew that all the family members would be at the annual United Families and Friends march in Whitehall on October 31st 2015, police stripped the tree and have kept it bare since. Their action showed an appalling disregard for community relations, disgusting many.


Rhonda, Ricky Bishop’s sister tapes the flowers to the memorial tree

There were speeches and Sister Unity performed her poem ‘The Lynching Tree Down Brixton Way‘ which she wrote after hearing an interview with Doreen Bishop in 2004, and then there was a silence and candles were lit in memory of Ricky. Had he lived he would now be 41, the same age as my elder son.

Doubtless soon after the vigil ended, the police would come out and remove the flowers, the pictures and the candles. At least I hope they at least waited until the vigil had ended, but I had to leave shortly before.

Continue reading No Justice over Ricky Bishop

No Third Runway

Heathrow has over the years shown a voracious appetite for growth, always at the expense of the local community who have continually been made promises that have never been kept. The airport was set up in war-time under the false pretence it was needed for military use and the lies have continued ever since.

Of course it has created jobs in the local area – and for some time there were many skilled jobs, but increasingly now they are low paid and low skilled jobs in what has become more and more a shopping centre with an airport attached. Increasingly jobs will be lost as automation at the airport continues, and Heathrow is likely in the future to create less employment than almost any other possible use of its huge site.

What it does bring to the area – and in great variety – is pollution. Most obviously noise pollution, now affecting a large swathe of West London and further out in Berkshire, but also air pollution, not just from the planes and vehicles using Heathrow, but from the cars and lorries which bring and take away passengers and freight, and by the congestion that these cause to other non-airport related traffic in the area.

By the 1970s it had become clear that Heathrow was in the wrong place, and that London needed a new site for its major airport. Had the right decision been made, Heathrow would long ago have joined Croydon as a former London airport (and Croydon was probably rather better placed.) But Government buckled to the interests and lobbying of a powerful aviation lobby, joined by others, and Heathrow continued to be allowed to expand, with a fourth terminal, and then a fifth, and then the push for the ‘third runway’.

I took part in an photographed the protests against that third runway and the celebrations when that proposal was defeated, with even the Conservative Party leader David Cameron making a clear promise it would not be built. But Heathrow and the vested interests came back, with the setting up of an inquiry by the government on premises that were almost bound to favour further expansion, and the spectre of the third runway re-emerged, despite the ever-increasing argument of the enviromental catastrophe it would be.

I’m not a fan of Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative MP who had organised a rally on Richmond Green – and had resigned when his party changed tack to back Heathrow expansion, and was fighting a by-eleciton on the issue, but I went to photograph the rally which was supported by all the local groups fighting against the plans.

What I hadn’t expected was to be harassed by one of Goldsmith’s crew, who told me that this was a private event and that I couldn’t take pictures, threatening to get the police to evict me. I told him that this was a public meeting in a public place and I had every right to report it, but for several minutes he followed me around trying to stop me. I told him rather forcefully to go away and talk to the police – and he did, so I was bothered no more. But so much for freedom under the Conservatives!

I wasn’t sorry when Goldsmith lost his seat to Sarah Olney – also opposed to Heathrow expansion, and whose supporters were also present (looking rather less like estate agents) and it was something of a disappointment when he regained it – by 75 votes in the June 2017 election. Goldsmith took the seat in 2010 from Susan Kramer, a Liberal Democrat MP who had been a staunch fighter against Heathrow expansion.

From Richmond I took a train and a bus to the Three Magpies on the Bath Road at Cranford on the northern edge of Heathrow. Nearby some activists from Rising Up! were blocking the motorway spur into the airport while on the bridge above the road a few hundred yards away I covered the ‘family friendly’ rally that was also taking place – with a huge and unnecessary police presence.

More at:

Climate Crisis rally against Airport Expansion
Rally against Heathrow Expansion

Continue reading No Third Runway

Down with Arsenal!

I hate the idea of Arsenal. I don’t mean the north London football team, which has always seemed to me one of the more acceptable London teams to support, though if I retained any interest in the game I’d more likely go to QPR or Brentford, the latter a team that several of my team mates when I played under-11 football in the cub league ended up at. But I wasn’t one of the stars of the side and even on the good days when we scored 40 or 50 goals in a match I seldom strayed goal-wards but stayed was left back in my own half. Though I was reasonably lethal to the opposing forwards and we seldom if ever let a goal in.

Arsenal, the intelligent camera assistant is a little device that sits on top of your camera and thinks for you, currently on Kickstarter. I watched one of the videos on the site and was appalled.

I don’t think I’m being a Luddite when I say that ‘I hate the idea of Arsenal.’ It represents the apotheosis of all that is wrong with photography on Flikr and other web-sharing photo sites, reducing the medium to a mechanism for making pretty pictures. Decorative wall art.

I’ve nothing against some of the automation that Arsenal offers (though I’m not convinced it will entirely provide.) It would be good to have something that makes it easy to get the right depth of field – something that was easy when we used manual focus and prime lenses with depth of field scales, but the switch to auto-focus and zoom lenses has made largely guesswork.

But when it comes to using a databank of pictures to decide how to come up with the best treatment for a particular scene this seems to be a certain recipe for the kind of dreary uniformity that distinguishes much of those pretty pictures that attract thousands of on-line ‘likes.’ And also occupy a certain section of the art photography market.

I used to confuse students by telling them that ‘photography isn’t about making pictures’, and I think this device illustrates well what I meant it wasn’t. Photography for me is about having something to say and finding a way to say it effectively. And that means trying to say it in a different way, not how other pictures have done it, though that isn’t easy. The pictures that are best have an element of visual surprise and don’t correspond to rules or stereotypes.

Arsenal sits on top of the camera which sits on top of a tripod, which to me is generally a basic mistake in taking photographs. There are some highly specialised areas where a tripod is needed, but only a very small percentage of good photography is make using one. If you want to do time-lapse photography I think ‘Arsenal’ would be a good buy. But if you want to use an 8×10″ – which admittedly is a little tricky hand-held – you won’t find Arsenal able to cope.

Way back in the 1890s, Kodak and art photographers such as Alfred Steiglitz liberated the camera from the tripod in many areas of photography, and advances in materials and equipment in the roughly 120 years since has meant that cumbersome appendage is seldom needed.

Hull Photos: 21/7/17-27/7/17

21st July 2017

If it wasn’t for Sky Sports the Whalebone Inn would be a near-perfect pub. When I took these pictures it was a Tetley’s pub, which didn’t endear it to me, but it now has a good range of real ales. While the memorabilia make it something of a museum, so too apparently do some of the regulars. Back in 2010 writer and film-maker Dave Lee described it in his blog as “probably the city’s last remaining example of a true docker’s pub; it has traditionally been frequented by them and most of the current clientele seem to be former fishermen.”

I think the pub has gone through several phases of closure and internal reorganisation, but its exterior has seen relatively few changes. The blank wall at the left now sports a door and windows, that dreaded ‘Sky Sports’ banner was hanging there, and there are new notices including a new decorated large name board replacing the Tetley’s name sign across the frontage and the hanging pub sign with its sailing ship has gone.


36g26: Whalebone Inn, Wincolmlee frontage, 1983 – River Hull

22nd July 2017

The first railway bridge on this site was built in 1853, to carry the Victoria or East Dock Railway over the River Hull. A single line bridge with speed and axle load restrictions it became inadequate to deal with the growing traffic to the Eastern docks as well as that going to Hornsea and Withernsea, and was replaced with a twin track bridge, with Hull Corporation paying the extra needed to provide a foot and cycle way along its north side. From 1864 it was also used by trains from Hull to Hornsea on the Hull and Hornsea Railway which diverted from the Victoria Dock Branch at Wilmington Station just to the east of the bridge.

This old footbridge and cycle path is now longer in use, instead there is a wider foot and cycle path where the trains used to run. When Dr Beeching shortsightedly axed much of our railway network, passenger trains to Hornsea and Withernsea stopped in 1964 but goods traffic on the Victoria Dock line continued until 1968. The Hornsea line was a useful route and well loved and could well have survived at least in parts as a light rail project; much is now a walking and cycling route.

The bridge opened by rotating around a central axis under the operating cabin, powered by two powerful electric motors, with the electricity being supplied through high-level electrical cables. The bridge had a three-man crew – a mechanic and two steersmen with each motor having its own controls, and the system also required three manned signal boxes, one also serving the nearby Wilmington station. The 160 foot long bridge which weighs around 500 tons could be opened and closed in around 2 minutes. When open there was 53ft 6in of clear water to the west of the bridge and it had been designed so that a further river channel could if ever needed be dug on the east side allowing another 40ft of passage.

The Grade II listed bridge was restored in 1991 and the opening mechanism is said to be in full working order. It is one of 12 Hull bridges due to be opened (plus one long permanently open) in an event on the Autumn equinox creating “a symbolic wall denying the freedom of movement across the city” between East and West Hull as part of Hull 2017’s Freedom Season. The River Hull has always been a symbolic and physical divide between the two.


36g51: Wilmington Bridge, River Hull, 1983 – River Hull

23rd July 2017

J.A.Bell (Hull) Limited was incorporated on 10 Jan 1947 and later dissolved. A possibly related company, J A Bell II Ltd, also a general construction & civil engineering firm, was set up in Hull in 1993 and last submitted results in 2000. Without looking at records in Hull I can’t place it precisely, but I am convinced the building is no longer standing.

The picture was taken after I had photographed the Wilmington Swing Bridge and the next possibly identifiable pictures hows the premises of Enterprise Plastics Ltd – but Google tells me nothing about them. I think this was somewhere in the streets to the between Wincolmlee and the Beverley and Barmston drain. There seems to be a wild area at left of the house and some distant rooftops, but to the right is the builder’s yard. The high brick wall at its back has a ladder leaning against it from the other side and behind the parked car are some roof timbers for a building and a heap of sand.

Although the front door has been bricked up, there is a letter box in it, suggesting – as does the car – that the building was still be in use with an entrance at the side or rear.


36g54: J.A.Bell (Hull) Ltd, Wincolmlee area, 1983 – River Hull

24th July 2017

At the left of this image is the roof of the 1864 NER Sculcoates Goods Shed (Grade II listed six years after I took this picture) and in the distance the Sculcoates Tannery, established here on what was then called Church St by John Holmes who came from Doncaster around 1803. They later also had a larger works at Campbell St on Anlaby Rd, but the entire business moved to the site on Air St at the top of Wincolmlee in the 1930s. Now Holmes Halls (processors) Limited it was still tanning and dressing leather and dressing and dyeing fur on part of the site in 2016, along with the RE:GROUP recycling facility for oils etc. A few of the buildings remain, though the close more modern building, the taller factory and the brick chimneys have gone. Further along the bank, almost disappearing around the bend the small brick wharf-side building is still present on Bankside. On the right of the picture on the other bank of the river is one of Hull’s well-known mills, still standing – of which more in tomorrow’s picture.

This image was one of a series of five which together covering a 360 degree view from a position close to the end of the bridge. These were of course taken on film; in 1983 digital images hardly existed and were generally crude and pixillated – or even made up of ANSI characters, and I don’t think digital image stitching software existed as there was nothing for it to stitch. I intended not to produce a single panoramic image but a series of images that would be mounted in sequence with a small gap between them.

Making actual photographs join together before the days of digital stitching was a very tricky business, and would have needed rather move pictures, preferably taken with a longer lens, careful cutting of prints with a scalpel, shaving the edges and sticking them together with rubber cement, retouching with a brush and diluted black dyes and then rephotographing the whole. It was only really possible with very carefully taken images using standard or longer lenses.

These pictures were taken with an extreme wide angle – probably a 21mm lens – and the distortion inherent in rectilinear wide-angle images would have made accurate joining impossible.

It was easier to use a panoramic camera, but these were generally expensive – with some costing the price of a house in Hull – although cheap but limited Russian Horizon cameras became widely available in the 1990s. I bought a Japanese swing lens camera for around a month’s wages in 1990, but cameras of this type – first used with curved daguerreotype plates though mine took standard 35mm film – only cover an angle of view of a little over a third of a circle, not the full 360 degrees. Everything changes with digital, first of all with stitching software and then with cameras with panoramic modes – though I’ve never quite been able to get these to work adequately for anything except the web.

Photoshop will do a good job of joining any adjacent pair of these 5 images together but gives up on a third. But with dedicated stitching software I can join three of them. Possibly I could join all five, but since one of the missing others is almost entirely a section of stone wall and the other largely long grass I decided to stop at three. The result is an image roughly 15,000 by 4,000 pixels, a 3.75:1 aspect ratio that doesn’t display well on screen as a single image, but would print nicely at around 40 inches by 12 inches. But I will put it on-line in a smaller version later.


36g65: River Hull north of Wilmington Swing Bridge, 1983 – River Hull

25th July 2017

This was the next of the 5 images making a 360 degree panorama, and shows two of Hull’s listed buildings, the British Extracting Company Silo off Foster St at left and the Wilmington Swing Bridge at right. The silo at the oil extracting mill with the attached riverside receiving house was built in 1919, and designed with its interesting Baroque Revival detailing by architects Gelder & Kitchen of Hull, responsible for many of Hull’s finest buildings. It was listed Grade II ten years after I took this picture and is one of Hull’s most photographed buildings, both from the exterior and by urban explorers on the inside.

The company had bought the site which was a brickyard in 1915 and it had a rail link to the Hull Docks branch. The factory mainly produced margarine and cooking oils from rape, flax, linseed and other vegetable oil plants brought in by river and was a part of British Oil and Cake Mills. They also set up a soap factory adjoining this – Lever Brothers didn’t like the competition and bought up British Oil and Cake Mills in 1925, closing down the soap factory. The mill had been disused for over 10 years when I took this picture and was listed around ten years later. The company logo with a capital R and a crown was still clearly visible on the blue water tank in 1983, and the blue contrasted nicely with the long fire escape which was yellow (and I also photographed the building in colour and made a bad screen print of it.) The factory buildings to the right of the mill have all now been demolished.


36g66: River Hull, British Extracting Company and Wilmington Swing Bridge, 1983 – River Hull

26th July 2017

A few more from Goole.

Grab hopper dredger Goole Bight, built in 1958 at Yarwood & Sons in Northwich, 325 tons gross, was owned by the British Transport Docks Board which became Associated British Ports and was privatised in 1983. Sold to Humber Work Boats (Barton) Ltd in 2001 she became Abigail H. Unfortunately she sank at Heysham in 2008 and was scrapped at Ramsey Shipyard the following year.

The dredger used to work on a more or less daily basis to remove mud from inside Goole docks, which would then be dumped downstream at Goole Bight on the River Ouse, the sharp bend between Swinefleet Reach and Goole Reach around which ships have to go to reach the port. Dumping of mud is also allowed further downstream at Whitgift Bight.

There are several ships called Sabine, but this one is a Russian general cargo ship of 2,478 tons built in 1970 and still working, currently as I write in the Black Sea heading for Rostov-on-Don, rather a long way from her home port of St Petersburg.

In the background you can see the two water towers, Goole’s famous ‘salt and pepper pot’. When I took the picture I had just come across a wide lock gate on a footpath and I think this must have been at Ocean Lock.


36h24: Goole Bight and Sabine in Goole Docks, 1983 – Goole

27th July 2017

Goole’s two listed water towers, described in an earlier post, are here seen from the opposite side and a closer position. The slender brick tower from 1885 proved too small and was replaced by its fatter reinforced concrete neighbour in 1927. Both are Grade II listed.

Between the two is the spire of Goole’s Parish Church, St John the Evangelist in Church St, next to the docks and also Grade II listed. Built in 1843-48, architects William Hurst and W B Moffat it was paid for by the Aire and Calder Navigation Company.

The railway tracks are those leading to various parts of Goole Docks from the main line which was just behind me as I took this photograph, not far from a public footpath. The building at left is on the corner of Mariners St and Stanhope St and was the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Goods Offices.


36h44: ‘Salt and Pepper Pot’ and Goole Parish Church, 1983 – Goole

You can see the new pictures added each day at Hull Photos, and I post them with the short comments above on Facebook.
Comments and corrections to captions are welcome here or on Facebook.
Continue reading Hull Photos: 21/7/17-27/7/17

Looking at Lens

Although I regularly take a quick glimpse at the New York Times ‘Lens‘ blog, often just with my newsreader that doesn’t actually show the pictures, I don’t that often find things that are of enough interest to comment on here. Much of what they publish is interesting, but generally I only write about things if there is something I feel I can add to in some way or take a special interest in.

In the last week or so, there have been quite a few posts there that interested me, and I particularly warmed to some of Nathan Farb‘s pictures in 1967’s Other Summer of Love, perhaps because they reminded me of when I was young and a student, though Manchester in England was very different to the New York Lower East Side of his pictures. But there was just a little something of the same spirit of counter-culture in the air.

The slide show with this piece has 21 pictures, enough to get a good idea of the work, whereas sometimes on Lens I find there just isn’t enough. Usually of course you can find more pictures elsewhere – and Lens sometimes provides a link or you can search for yourself, but then things can get rather time-consuming.

That piece led me on to the large format and very posed portraits of Harf Zimmermann, who, inspired by Bruce Davidson’s book ‘East 100th Street‘ took his camera into the homes and onto the streets to photograph his fellow residents and workers in the East Berlin neighbourhood where he lived. His pictures have for me a kind of dissonance like I often feel in dreams between the people and place and perhaps seem more like theatre sets with actors rather than real people – whereas the colour images he took when he returned to the same area in 2010, judging by the couple of examples in the article, Exposing Life Behind the Berlin Wall, simply look like high-quality versions of family snaps.

East Germany was of course a police state, where it was healthy to assume that everyone except you was a Stasi agent (especially if you were not.) Rather like living in G K Chesterton’s nightmare novel ‘The Man Who Was Thursday‘. Though working as I do with many protest groups I find I often look around and wonder which of us present is one of the 144 undercover UK police stated recently by the authorities to have infiltrated more than 1,000 political groups since 1968 – around the time I first got involved in such things.

But there is also something very German about the pictures – and not just in some of the obviously German backgrounds. They didn’t remind me of Davidson, but they did remind me of August Sander and his attempt to study and classify the people of his country, interrupted by the Nazis who seized and destroyed his ‘Face of Our Time‘ in 1936.

I then went on to find several more ‘Lens’ posts worth looking at, including Fighting For Basic Rights in Morocco, Amid Crisis and the remarkable Venezuela’s Youth Wait to Live Again.

John Morris 1916-2017

Many words have been written and said about the photo-editor John G Morris who died last Friday, 28th July 2017, and he has obviously played a large role in photography over so many years. Probably the most widely read of the obituaries is by Andy Grunberg in the New York Times, and although excellent in many respects it is a shame it was not more carefully brought up to date after being retrieved from the ‘morgue’ where it had been lying for some years in waiting for Morris’s death.

His was a long career as a photo-editor, working for some of the greatest names in photographic publishing – Life,  Ladies’ Home Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic and Magnum Photos.

His was a career in which he undoubtedly recognised the power of a number of images which subsequently became iconic. Although we now can be sure that the legend that he wove around Capa’s actions on D-Day was almost entirely false, he saw the power of one of the 11 frames that Capa exposed which many editors would probably have rejected out of hand for being unsharp – and it was an image that was only more widely recognised for its expressive potential quite a few years later. Had Morris told the truth about it and given the facts that the investigation by A D Coleman and his team have made clear, the image might have been published and long forgotten.

Again, while working for the New York Times, it was Morris who recognised the power of two of the iconic images from Vietnam, and fought to get Eddie Adam‘s picture of a summary execution of a suspected Vietcong by a Saigon police chief on the front page, and fought the paper’s ‘no-nudity’ policy to get  Huynh Cong (Nick) Ut‘s image of a naked young Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm bombing raid published – again on the front page.

It was Morris too who invited W Eugene Smith to join Magnum following his break-up with Life, and apparently suggested him (after Elliot Erwitt had turned it down) for an assignment to photograph Pittsburg – which almost ruined Magnum financially after Smith turned what had been meant as a three week assignment into a year working on what he believed to be his ‘magnum opus’, though it only really got an adequate publication as ‘Dream Street: W. Eugene Smith’s Pittsburgh Project‘ in 2001, 23 years after Smith’s death.

A D Coleman in Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (36): John G. Morris Dies (Update) has written about some of the obituaries for Morris, including the New York Times one, pointing out some of their many errors. Its also worth reading the comments on his piece, particularly one by Robert Dannin, who calls the story that Morris made up “nothing more than an unprofessional excuse to conceal his apparent embarrassment at Capa’s work on the Normandy beachhead.”

It’s perhaps a little harsh. I can imagine Morris’s immediate shock on looking at the processed film and seeing only 11 images. And then looking a little more closely and seeing that those eleven were all blurred. A little fabrication to protect his friend’s reputation would be understandable. But to invent such an elaborate story and to keep up the deception for as long as Morris and Capa did was clearly unacceptable – and something of a stain on the reputation of both.

Morris was obviously a man who cared about photography and cared for photographers – and you can read a tribute to him by one of those he helped and was a friend to, Peter Turnley, on The Online Photographer. We can remember him for that and should also put the record straight over Capa’s D-Day pictures.

A Day at the Cleaners

Small grass roots unions such as the CAIWU, UVW and IWGB representing mainly migrant workers have spear-headed the drive to get the London Living Wage for low paid workers, particularly cleaners in London. Many are Spanish speaking and have found asylum here following various upheavals in Central and South America and others have Spanish passports. With some exceptions, the larger unions have found it hard to engage with these workers, partly because of language difficulties.


Alberto Durango of the CAIWU speaks inside Lloyds against racist sacking by Principle Cleaning Services

Many of those who have come to work in this country have come from more skilled work in their own countries and their qualifications mean little or nothing here or they do not have the language skills needed for similar jobs here. Generally they are more articulate and more politically aware than equivalent British-born workers, and often surprised at what British workers put up with from managers and trade union officials. Perpared to work hard, they demand to be treated with dignity and respect – as some of their placards say ‘We are NOT the dirt We clean’.

When I can, I photograph their protests, though these seldom make the UK newspapers and probably get more coverage around the world than in the UK. The pictures do get shared on social media and the presence of the press at them does increase their impact. Protests are a way of embarrassing the companies to take action, with their noise and visual impact making an impression of those who work in the same building or close by, and also through social media and publication on a wider audience and companies are generally sensitive to any possible damage to their image.

The demands the cleaners make are always reasonable. Everyone should be paid a wage that is enough to live on – the London Living Wage as a minimum. No-one should be bullied or harassed at work, or given impossible workloads. People should get decent conditions of service – sick pay, holidays, pensions… What they are fighting against is largely outsourcing of cleaning work, where reputable companies that would never cut salaries and conditions of their own workers to the bone employ cleaning contractors, generally on fairly short-term contracts which go to the lowest bidder – who trim their bids at the expense of the workers. They cut staffing levels, overworking the cleaners and lowering the standard of cleaning, they cut pay and conditions as far as they are able.

That can mean the legal minimums of pay and conditions, but protests by unions like the CAIWU can manage to persuade those setting the contract to include the insistence that all workers should be paid at least the London Living Wage, and they could also insist on a decent standard of conditions.

But outsourcing of cleaning and other services is just a part of a wider problem that seems particularly rife in the UK. Unnecessary levels of management where company A pays company B to provide a service which they then sub-contract to company C – with sometimes as many as five companies involved, each taking its profit for shareholders between the company that the work is done for and the guy who actually does it.


A security officer starts pushing the protesters, then has clearly been watching too much football…

and suddenly makes a rather unconvincing dive to the floor, pretending he has been hit

The Cleaners and Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU) is a small union with no paid staff and run on the contributions from members and some donations but it is an active one. I hadn’t realised when I travelled up to meet them at Liverpool St Station that they were intending to protest at three offices across the lunch time and early afternoon.

We started by walking to Lloyds, and the cleaners briefly occupied the foyer there before being forced to leave and protesting outside. The union accuse Principle Cleaning Services there of racial discrimination over the sacking two African workers, and of sacking a third African because of his trade union activities.

There was a curious incident when one of the security officers who had been pushing some of the cleaners suddenly dived to the floor, claiming he had been hit – see above. I was standing close to him and would have seen and certainly heard if a blow had been struck. But occasions like this make me realise how much better as evidence it would have been if I had been taking video rather than still photography. Usually there is at least one other photographer present with a video camera, but not on this occasion.


Cleaners leave 155 Moorgate to continue the protest on the pavement outside

The cleaners then walked to Moorgate, to rush in to the lobby of Mace’s headquarters building in Moorgate in a noisy against cleaning contractor Dall Cleaning Service; they accuse the manager there of nepotism and say two cleaners have been improperly dismissed and reductions made in both conditions of service and the actual working conditions.

Again after a short protest inside they walked out to continue the protest in the busy street outside.


The receptionist at the offices housing Claranet’s London HQ pushes CAIWU organiser Alberto Durango

Finally, I caught a bus with them to Holborn, and the offices of Internet service provider Claranet, who with their cleaning contractor NJC have ignored the union’s attempts to negotiate for the London Living Wage where the protest followed the same pattern.

Cleaners at Claranet for Living Wage
Cleaners at Mace protest Dall nepotism
Cleaners in Lloyds against racist sacking

Continue reading A Day at the Cleaners

June 2017

I’m still working around a month behind on getting My London Diary (MLD) up to date, and despite my efforts don’t seem to be getting any close to finishing publishing the work on time. I do try to post Facebook albums more or less straight away, usually including just the same images I send to one of my agencies and the main caption.

Posts on MLD take longer because I like to include more images. Some of the images I like best are ones that I don’t think an agency would like, and there are often more pictures I think worth posting on-line. Sometimes there are whole stories that I don’t think worth sending to agencies, and I also include some pictures of walks and events that are not news at all in the diary.

Captions on pictures for the agencies are generally fairly concise and factual and on MLD I often want to tell more of the story – and give a more personal and often more political point of view. Captions on MLD have a different function – and assume that people looking at the pictures will be reading the whole story rather than just finding an image in a search.

All of these things takes time – as does putting everything together as web pages.

June 2017


LSE Cleaners Victory Party
Withdraw US troops from Korea
Time for PR – Save Our Democracy
Women protest DUP/Tory talks
Football Lads Alliance at London Bridge
Anti-fascists oppose the EDL


EDL march against terror
London University Security officers
SOAS J4W & IWGB Security Workers


‘Day of Rage’ march for Grenfell
Al Quds march


Zionists protest Al Quds Day March
Brian Haw remembered
Ted Knight speaks for Central Hill


Class War protest Grenfell Murders
No Tory DUP Coalition of Chaos
Grenfell

Justice for Grenfell Downing St protest
Justice for Grenfell Ministry protest
London Co-operative Housing Group report
Stop demolishing council estates
May has to go march!
May has to go rally!
Irish Abortion Rights
Protests follow Hung Parliament Vote


Street Theatre against LSE Inequality


DPAC Trash The Tories in Maidenhead
LSE Cleaners strike Day 7
Liar, Liar protest at BBC
LSE Cleaners strike for equality

London Images

Continue reading June 2017

Another Night

The following evening I was out again taking pictures of a protest, this time in Westminster at Old Palace Yard, opposite the Houses of Parliament. It’s a gloomy place at night, and even worse it was raining.

At times the rain was light, even almost stopping. Then it would poor down. I felt sorry for the protesters, from Disabled People Against Cuts and Black Triangle, including many in wheelchairs, though I think most had decent waterproof clothing and a number also umbrellas.

Of course I had an umbrella too, but it is seldom practical to use one when taking pictures – unless you have an assistant to hold it – and also I needed to work most of the time in a very restricted area between a ring of wheelchairs and the speakers, much of the time in a kneeling position so as not to impede the view of those sitting in the chairs. Occasionally sitting on the damp paving stones. Working with a micro-fibre cloth held on the lens filter, taking it away to take a picture, then wiping and covering up the lens again.

Most of these were taken with the LED light source, with a couple at the start of the event when there was still some weak light from the sky without any added light. Another photographer was videoing the event, and sometimes his LED video light lit up part or all of the scene for me – though other times it shone directly towards me and made taking pictures more or less impossible. I did take a couple of pictures with flash, but in rain it gets to be pretty useless, lighting up the rain drops and giving odd spots across the picture. With exposures around 1/15s to 1/60s spots of rain don’t show up except sometimes as streaks – which look very much like rain. But with the slow shutter speeds and probably a certain amount of shivering from me quite a few of the exposures were blurred even when there were no raindrops on the lens, and quite a few frames were unusable.

I also discovered one of the problems of the Neewer CN-216 LED light. It doesn’t have a battery cover – or at least mine doesn’t, and at one point after it got a slight knock, all 6 batteries fell out and rolled across the wet paving stones. Fortunately I and some of the other people around managed to pick them up, but now I put a length of masking tape across them and the back of the unit after replacing the batteries.

As the evening went on the rain worsened. There was quite a long list of speakers, including the Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, for whom the heavens opened pretty drastically. Fortunately he had brought fellow Labour MP Rebecca Long-Bailey with him to hold an umbrella. They and other MPs came out from the debate on government plants for a cut in Employment and Support Allowance, despite a UN report condemning the ‘grave and systematic violations of disabled people’s rights’ which had resulted from the UK government welfare reforms..

It was really an evening that called for an underwater camera, or at least an underwater housing. I do carry a cheap plastic bag affair in my camera bag, but find it such a pain that I hardly ever use it. Fortunately I managed to keep the cameras under my coat much of the time, though having the front of it open to do this meant I did get rather wet. I was cold too, and very pleased when I could pack up and go home.

I wasn’t particularly happy with my work at this event – and so many of the images were ruined – but under the circumstances I felt I’d done a decent job to get any results at all. You can see more at End Discriminatory Welfare Reforms.
Continue reading Another Night

Night Work

I don’t often photograph the Tower of London, but it would, I thought, a nice background for a picture, something that says ‘London’, and I went to the protest being held outside the Tower against the European Custody and Detention Summit being held there hoping to use it in my pictures.

Unfortunately the protest was taking place in the early evening and this was November. There were groups at two locations, one on Tower Hill, where there was a view of the Tower behind the protesters, and a second down below Tower Bridge, where there wasn’t really a much of a view of the bridge and the Tower was completely out of sight.

I’d taken two light sources with me, the Nikon SB800 flash, and a cheap LED light, the Neewer CN-216, which has an 18×12 array of small LEDs  – 216 in all, hence the model number. It takes 6 AA cells, which adds considerably to its weight and will just about fit in a large jacket pocket. The flash, with only 5AAs is a little smaller and lighter.

Knowing it would be dark, I’d also packed the Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 and the two pictures above were both taken using this on a Nikon D810. I had the camera on shutter priority and both images were taken at 24mm, using the camera in full-frame mode at 1/50s and f2.8  – but there the simiilarities end. One used the flash at ISO 1,800 and the other the LED light at ISO 6400. Though it seems bright, those LEDs don’t really put out that much light.

I’ll leave it to you to decide which was which. The differences are easier to spot on the 7,360 x 4,912 pixel images, but after processing – including noise reduction – in Lightroom was less than I expected, and looking through the whole set at full screen size my guesses as to which used flash and which were LED where often wrong.

Both are relatively small light sources and so suffer similar problems with light falling off at roughly the square of distance, and I worked a little more ‘head on’ to groups than usual when I could to avoid too much having to dodge and burn in Lightroom.  One advantage of the LED was that I was able to hold it at arms length from the camera – much trickier with flash – and see the results of angling it away from closer subjects. The higher ISO I used with the LED meant that ambient lighting contributed more to the LED lit images and probably I would have been better using ISO 6400 with the flash as well. But I was worried about image quality, though it turns out I need not have been.

Increasing the ISO to 3200 for the wider group, taken with flash and using a Nikon 20mm f2.8  at 1/30s, f/2.8 on a Nikon D750 gave a good balance.

Down below Tower Bridge there was a little more light and I used the flash very little, relying on the LEDs for most pictures, though in some areas there was enough light from the street lights to make them the main light source.  The view of Tower Bridge in some of the pictures isn’t instantly recognisable.

I did have a few problems with fiddle fingers, and working in  S – shutter priority – mode does mean you get underexposure when you push the control dial in the direction of higher shutter speeds. With flash too the exposure drops – though with Auto FP High Speed Sync you no longer get just a fraction of the frame exposed. Fortunately Lightroom can cope with considerable underexposure if – as I do – you shoot RAW images.  And ISO settings don’t really have a great deal of meaning.

In low light conditions you also get problems with slow shutter speeds and subject movement, as well as camera shake. None of the lenses I was using has image stabilisation but it would have been of little or no help. But you do need to make a lot of exposures and to have a little luck.

More pictures of this protest by the Reclaim Justice Network which includes prison activists, refugee solidarity groups and anti-arms trade campaigners against this trade fair for  major arms companies, security companies, prison builders, and others profiting from expanding and privatising the criminal justice system at Custody Summit at the Tower.

Continue reading Night Work