On Saturday 17 April 1999, a bomb exploded in Brixton market in south London, injuring 48 people, including a 23-month-old child. Newspapers showed an X-ray of the toddler’s head with a nail embedded in the skull. Immediately, people knew that someone wanted to kill in an area that had a large Black community.
This was the first of three nailbombs that were planted in the capital targeting minorities. The following weekend, a second bomb exploded in the Bangladeshi area of Brick Lane. Thirteen people were injured; it might have been more if a passerby hadn’t spotted a suspicious bag and put it in the boot of his car, dampening the blast.
On Friday 30 April, at approximately 6.37pm, a third bomb exploded in the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho, killing three people and injuring about 70. I was one of the injured. I was standing in the pub about 4ft away from the device when it exploded. My foot touched the bag as I went to the bar. Aware of the previous weekend’s events, I momentarily thought it could be a bomb. But you don’t believe these things could ever happen to you. So I took my drink to a table to wait for my friends. The doors at the front had been pulled back as it was a warm evening and the start to a bank holiday weekend. The pub was filling up.
Then it happened. I woke up flat on the floor with my head against the wall. I don’t know how long I was out for, but when I came round, the pub was full of thick yellowish smoke and I couldn’t see more than a couple of feet in front of me. However, I knew the table that I had placed my drink on, which had been screwed to the floor, had gone.
Movies don’t get it right. People don’t scream. Not for a while. It was eerily silent.
I crawled on my hands and knees, hoping to find daylight. Left knee, right knee, on to the pavement of Old Compton Street. Ears ringing with white noise, I stood up covered in blood and detritus and took in the scene around me. Injured people lay on the street. Chaos. Diners, drinkers, shoppers and emergency services rushed to help. A woman in her early 20s appeared next to me with a pint in her hand, smiling. She looked at me dismissively, then pushed me out of the way, saying she wanted “to get a better view of the poofs”.
In a daze, I wandered round the corner and into a restaurant, where a waiter led me to a sink to try to clean up a little. I wanted to find my friends. Eventually, I walked into another gay venue called The Yard, full of shiny, happy people. Like a ghostly yellow apparition, I slowly walked towards the bar. Drinkers stared, mouths open, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea before Moses as I approached the barman for help.
Miraculously, my friends were there and saw me. They took me in a taxi to University College Hospital. In the reception area, a member of staff told a guy to get off his phone. He yelled at her: “How dare you! I’m phoning my boyfriend’s mother to tell her that the man we both love has 60% burns.”
I was examined and told that I had a hole in my shoulder, a big one in my back and a chunk of flesh missing from my thumb. My hair was singed and my legs, from my hips to my ankles, were solid purple, green and black.
People standing further away from the bomb suffered life-changing injuries and some endured amputations. According to a detective I spoke to afterwards, I avoided worse injuries because I was standing at the side of the pipe bomb, rather than at one of the ends. Otherwise my legs would have received the full force of the blast. I felt guilty about that for a long time.
I lived in a cheap little flat in south London that didn’t even have a proper shower. When I got home with my friends that night, I tried to bathe but I couldn’t wash my hair – every time I tried to put my head under the water, I smelled burning and death. As my friend washed my hair in the sink, a radio news bulletin reported two fatalities from the blast. It all started to hit me.
Friends came and went all night; when they left at dawn, I realised the world was now a very different place for me. I had what I now know was PTSD. A five-minute walk to the supermarket took me nearly half an hour because I was clinging to the walls in the street, terrified.
Less than two months later, I had gone from a slim but fit 30-year-old to an emaciated wreck, weighing less than seven stone (45kg), with grey skin and eyes sunk into my head.
Carried out by a loner who just hated people – I’m not even going to write his name – the nail bomb campaign was the deadliest far-right attack in British history. When he was growing up, his friends used to taunt him because he couldn’t get a girlfriend. He said that he thought gay men should be put to death. He also claimed he wanted to start a race war.
That failed – and the bombing campaign heralded a change in attitude from some of the UK’s most popular newspapers. Until then, the words “poofs” and “queers” were used in editorials, even in front-page headlines, especially since the advent of the HIV pandemic. Similarly hateful words were used to describe people from other minority groups. These words, in print, encouraged constant, casual discrimination and affected the way that LGBTQIA+ people and ethnic minorities were talked about and treated.
As far as I am concerned, every single journalist, editor and newspaper proprietor who contributed to these attitudes in print is complicit in the deaths of three people who were standing just feet away from me, and the life-changing injuries of many others, both physical and psychological. In preparation for this feature, I emailed one of the red-top tabloids and asked if they would like to apologise about how they used to write about minority groups. After a brief chat, I didn’t hear back.
Maybe that’s progress of a kind. If I’d challenged them about this 25 years ago, I might not have had any response at all, or one that was openly dismissive. This horrific episode did at least shake the most openly bigoted elements of the media. I therefore find it particularly alarming that hate crime and discriminatory speech are on the rise again, including the disparaging of transgender, Muslim and Jewish groups and individuals.
Please, please think about the language you use and that you let others use in front of you. If you don’t call out derogatory words about people who are somehow regarded as different, hate is normalised and you’re complicit.
A few weeks ago, for the first time, I saw the photograph at the top of this article. A passing photographer, Chris Taylor, had captured me just after the bombing, kneeling by another victim who was stretched on the pavement. Twenty-five years later, it still got to me. I kept bursting into tears for hours afterwards. But it also gave me the opportunity to piece together what I was actually doing after I crawled out of the wreckage.
I had no idea that I was touching someone lying on the street. It astonished me to think that I was trying to help someone, even in my bewildered state, staring into space. I found that comforting.
Until I thought about another possibility. Maybe I didn’t even know there was a body there at all and I was just trying to stand up after crawling out of the wreckage? I don’t want it to be true because it would mean I wasn’t acknowledging the injured guy lying on the pavement. Who was he? Was he dying? What happened to him? Was I being disrespectful, ignorant, rude, selfish? I will never know. That’s painful.
You may think that this picture doesn’t mean anything to you. But, just like comforting the injured, stopping hate crime is a collective responsibility.
If you’ve ever crawled out of a bombed building with dying and injured people on the floor all around you, whether there’s a God or not, you will know that we are all equal in life and death.
Jonathan Cash’s play The First Domino, starring Toby Jones, inspired by the 1999 nail bombings, will be broadcast by BBC Radio 4 Extra later this month. He takes part in Fragments, a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the bombings, on Sunday 14 April at 7.15pm.
