In the late 1950s a deep strain of community activism took root in North Kensington, west London. Many of the grassroots campaigns there over the next six decades – including notable battles against racism and for better housing – could be mapped through the life of Eddie Adams, who has died aged 85.
Eddie, whom I first met while doing research for a TV documentary, was born in London, the son of an Italian mother, Maria Agostinelli. She died when he was young and he was adopted by Sheila Knubley, a housewife, and Samuel Adams, an electrician. North Kensington and Notting Hill, where his new family lived, was then synonymous with poverty and slum housing, and he had to sleep on a coat on the floor as a child.
The 1958 Notting Hill race riots brought a new infamy to the area. The far right, including Britain’s wartime fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, descended on the district, inflaming tensions. Eddie, a self-described “roughneck” teddy boy with a quiff, heard Mosley speak – and spent the rest of his life opposing the bigotry he promoted.
Eddie joined the Young Communist League, and it was through them that that he became a London Recruit: one of the men and women who used the protection their white skins afforded to carry out secret missions against apartheid South Africa. In 1969 he detonated propaganda leaflet bombs in Cape Town and set off a pre-recorded message through a loudspeaker in a crowded railway station. In 1970, he returned for a second mission.
In North Kensington – aside from occasional direct action protests such as scaling the gas works near Ladbroke Grove to protest against empty homes in the area – his activism was usually more prosaic: campaigning for better public housing, greater public space and more local amenities. For years he worked at the North Kensington Law Centre, which “pioneered a social justice movement aimed at making the law accessible to everyone”. This radicalism extended to Eddie’s years as an electrician, and as a shop steward for the ETU, the electrical trades union.
Eddie and his wife, June Laurence-Edmonds, whom he married in 1970, made a dynamic campaigning team. When June died in 2019, Eddie was bereft. By then, much of his time was spent gathering the memories of the area’s older residents and publishing local history books.
In 1959, Eddie had watched the funeral cortege of Kelso Cochrane, a young black man murdered in an unprovoked racist attack in the area. Fifty years later, in 2009, he helped organise a series of events commemorating Kelso, whose murderer was never convicted, including arranging for a new mosaic to be placed on his grave.
He is survived by his son, Max, and daughter, Rosie, and two grandchildren, Marcel and Kayla.