Kelso Cochrane

Man who stabbed Antiguan carpenter through the heart in Notting Hill 'race killing' finally named after 50 years

• A new book claims the identity of the killer had been an 'open secret' since Kelso Cochrane's death
• 'Weapon is still under the floorboards in the house where alleged murderer, Patrick Digby, lived with his mother'

By LOUISE BOYLE
UPDATED: 08:14 EST, 8 September 2011

       

                              

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2034957/Patrick-Digby-killed-Kelso-Cochrane-Notting-Hill-book-says.html

Kelso Cochrane was a carpenter from Antigua. On his way home from the hospital with a fractured thumb on May 17, 1959, he was attacked by a group of white youths and stabbed to death in the streets of Notting Hill, London. More than 1,200 people showed up at his funeral.

While police reported the incident as a robbery, the black community in London was outraged and convinced that the murder was an act of racist motive. Just a year previous, race riots had broken out around the area, and with the addition of Cochrane’s murder, the community decided they’d had enough. Soon after the murder, Claudia Jones organized events to celebrate Caribbean culture, as she put it, “in the face of the hate from the white racists,” and these events are looked upon as forerunners of the first Notting hill Carnival.

For 50 years the murder of Cochrane had gone unsolved, until investigators received claims that a man named Patrick Digby had confessed Cochrane’s killing to a group of friends and expressed that he’d never be caught. Allegedly, the weapon used to kill Cochrane is still under the floorboards in the house where Digby lived with his mother at the time of the murder.  

Though officials had feared that Cochrane's death would only feed the tension between blacks and whites in the community, it actually spurred the beginnings of the Notting Hill Carnival, which is now an event known to bring a variety of races together to celebrate one culture.