At roughly midnight on 17 May 1959, Kelso Cochrane, a 32-year-old carpenter from Antigua, was ambushed by a group of white youths on a derelict street corner of Notting Hill in London. He was walking home from hospital after getting his broken thumb treated, and one of the attackers stabbed him in the heart. The next day, antiracism campaigners wrote to the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, comparing his murder to the lynchings then taking place in the American deep south. But the police had already decided that racism was not the motive for the crime – just as they initially did more than three decades later, when the black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered in strikingly similar circumstances.
In 2012, when two men were finally convicted of Lawrence’s murder after a long and tireless campaign by his parents, he received a measure of justice. Cochrane never did. His murder remains unsolved 65 years on. After a protracted effort by members of Cochrane’s surviving family and their lawyers, the Metropolitan police agreed that the National Archives could release files the family hoped would answer their questions. The files – which were due to be opened in 2054 – leave little doubt that Cochrane’s murder was indeed a lynching, as antiracism campaigners claimed at the time. They also raise questions about the police’s efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice in the decades since then.
