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.

The History of Notting Hill Carnival

In Trinidad, during the days of slavery, slaves were forbidden to play musical instruments and wear costumes, apart from when the traditional imported European Carnival took place, six weeks before Easter. On those occasions their participation was limited to providing entertainment for the slave owners.

It was also known that slaves were forbidden to be in the streets after dark unless they were accompanying their owners. When the Laws were repealed and freedom from slavery was announced in 1833, the slaves took to the streets in song and dance, indulging in their culture and using their artistic skills to mimic their former owners and pour scorn on the system that had them enslaved for so long.

Consequently, slaves would dress like their previous owners, powder their faces to look pale like their masters or make masks to resemble their masters, distorting images and features if they regarded their masters as particularly evil or ridiculous.

  These celebrations of freedom provided the only opportunity for Black people to express their feelings about their slave owners and they quickly developed the art of costume making, creating fantastic costumes which satirized their situation as Africans, transported to the Caribbean as slaves. In Trinidad the tradition continued, going from strength to strength, as people from all over the island began to take part and associate themselves with Carnival. The skills of costume making, steel drumming and calypso became what today is a huge festival of arts and culture, of which Trinidadians everywhere are justifiably proud, drawing on all aspects of their cultural heritage from Africa and Europe.

  The arrival of Trinidadians in Great Britain, remembering their great Carnivals back home, provided the spark which ignited the Notting Hill Carnival. From a small procession through the streets with just a few people in costume and carrying steel drums in the 1960s, has evolved a huge multi-cultural arts festival, attended by up to two million people. It is a great tourist attraction that brings life to London during the month of August.