On 28th September 1975 an attempted armed robbery took place at the Spaghetti House Italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, London. The robbery went wrong when a member of staff managed to escape and alerted the police. The three robbers, finding the restaurant surrounded by armed police officers, barricaded themselves a basement storeroom with a number of hostages. The siege lasted until 3rd October when the gunmen surrendered and released all the hostages unharmed.
All three robbers were black. The ringleader, Franklin Davies, was originally from Nigeria and the other two, Wesley Dick and Anthony "Bonsu" Munroe, were of Afro-Caribbean origin. They had been involved in black liberation organisations, and during the siege claimed to be acting for political reasons and started making political demands. The police, however, always insisted that they were simply common criminals and only claimed political motives after the robbery went wrong. Certainly, if the gang did have some political purpose in mind when they first entered the Spaghetti House, they had not prepared very thoroughly. One of their demands was for the release of two black prisoners from jail, and they were surprised to be informed that the two men named were already free, having served their sentences.
"A Hole in Babylon" was based on a play by the Trinidadian-born writer Horace Ové, and looks at the possible motives of the robbers. The word "Babylon" in this context has a complicated series of meanings. It can be used to refer to, roughly, the Establishment, to white society or to Britain as a whole, or to the police. It was originally a specifically Rastafarian term but by the seventies was coming into use among the wider Afro-Caribbean community in England.
Ové was rather readier than were the police to believe that the men's actions had a political meaning. In the course of the play we see, in a series of flashbacks, that the robbers' attitudes towards British society have been conditioned by the racism they have experienced, especially from authority figures. While in prison Davies, for example, was frequently targeted by racist prison officers, including one who was quite openly a supporter of the extremist racist National Front. The men make no secret of the fact that their purpose in raiding the Spaghetti House was to steal money, but claim that they want the money to fund black schools and to make donations to black liberation movements in Rhodesia and South Africa.
Another point touched on in the play is class differences within the black community in Britain. Munroe is originally from a middle-class background and was training to become a doctor before he abandoned his studies to concentrate upon the Black Power movement, a decision incomprehensible to his mother who regards her son as a drop-out and his new acquaintances as a bunch of scruffy and disreputable ne'er-do-wells.
This programme was originally broadcast in 1979 as part of the BBC's "Play for Today" series, recreates the events of the siege. It was shown again recently as part of a BBC celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of "Play for Today". That series had a reputation for putting out programmes with a left-wing political slant, but the expression "left-wing" had a rather different meaning of in the seventies to the one it bears now. The Left in this period were largely preoccupied with social class and socio-economic issues rather than with today's racial and sexual identity politics, and surprisingly few of the "Plays for Today" dealt with the experiences of ethnic minorities. This one may have been chosen for the celebration because it was one of the few exceptions. Some "Plays for Today" have by now started to look like "Plays for Yesterday", dated comments on seventies politics with little to say to the world of 2020, but, given the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that relations between the police and Britain's black community can still be edgy (if less so than they were forty or fifty years ago) mean that "A Hole in Babylon" still remains relevant. 7/10
All three robbers were black. The ringleader, Franklin Davies, was originally from Nigeria and the other two, Wesley Dick and Anthony "Bonsu" Munroe, were of Afro-Caribbean origin. They had been involved in black liberation organisations, and during the siege claimed to be acting for political reasons and started making political demands. The police, however, always insisted that they were simply common criminals and only claimed political motives after the robbery went wrong. Certainly, if the gang did have some political purpose in mind when they first entered the Spaghetti House, they had not prepared very thoroughly. One of their demands was for the release of two black prisoners from jail, and they were surprised to be informed that the two men named were already free, having served their sentences.
"A Hole in Babylon" was based on a play by the Trinidadian-born writer Horace Ové, and looks at the possible motives of the robbers. The word "Babylon" in this context has a complicated series of meanings. It can be used to refer to, roughly, the Establishment, to white society or to Britain as a whole, or to the police. It was originally a specifically Rastafarian term but by the seventies was coming into use among the wider Afro-Caribbean community in England.
Ové was rather readier than were the police to believe that the men's actions had a political meaning. In the course of the play we see, in a series of flashbacks, that the robbers' attitudes towards British society have been conditioned by the racism they have experienced, especially from authority figures. While in prison Davies, for example, was frequently targeted by racist prison officers, including one who was quite openly a supporter of the extremist racist National Front. The men make no secret of the fact that their purpose in raiding the Spaghetti House was to steal money, but claim that they want the money to fund black schools and to make donations to black liberation movements in Rhodesia and South Africa.
Another point touched on in the play is class differences within the black community in Britain. Munroe is originally from a middle-class background and was training to become a doctor before he abandoned his studies to concentrate upon the Black Power movement, a decision incomprehensible to his mother who regards her son as a drop-out and his new acquaintances as a bunch of scruffy and disreputable ne'er-do-wells.
This programme was originally broadcast in 1979 as part of the BBC's "Play for Today" series, recreates the events of the siege. It was shown again recently as part of a BBC celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of "Play for Today". That series had a reputation for putting out programmes with a left-wing political slant, but the expression "left-wing" had a rather different meaning of in the seventies to the one it bears now. The Left in this period were largely preoccupied with social class and socio-economic issues rather than with today's racial and sexual identity politics, and surprisingly few of the "Plays for Today" dealt with the experiences of ethnic minorities. This one may have been chosen for the celebration because it was one of the few exceptions. Some "Plays for Today" have by now started to look like "Plays for Yesterday", dated comments on seventies politics with little to say to the world of 2020, but, given the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement and the fact that relations between the police and Britain's black community can still be edgy (if less so than they were forty or fifty years ago) mean that "A Hole in Babylon" still remains relevant. 7/10
