1981 Toxteth Riots - Events

Events

Over the weekend that followed, disturbance erupted into full-scale rioting, with pitched battles between police and youths in which petrol bombs and paving stones were thrown. During the violence milk floats were set on fire and directed at police lines. Rioters were also observed using scaffording poles to charge police lines. The Merseyside Police had issued its officers with long protective shields but these proved inadequate in protecting officers from missile attacks and in particular the effects of petrol bombs. The overwhelming majority of officers were not trained either in using the shields or in public order tactics. The sole offensive tactic available to officers,the baton charge, proved increasingly ineffective in driving back the attacking crowds of rioters. At 02:15 hours on Monday 6 July Merseyside police officers fired between 25-30 CS gas grenades for the first time in the UK outside Northern Ireland. The gas succeeded in dispersing the crowds. In all, the rioting lasted nine days during which 468 police officers were injured, 500 people were arrested, and at least 70 buildings were damaged so severely by fire that they had to be demolished. Around 100 cars were destroyed, and there was extensive looting of shops. Later estimates suggested the numbers of injured police officers and destroyed buildings were at least double those of the official figures.

Such was the scale of the rioting in Toxteth that police reinforcements were drafted in from forces across England including Greater Manchester Police, Lancashire Cumbria, Birmingham and even Devon to try to control the unrest.

A second wave of rioting began on 27 July 1981 and continued into the early hours of 28 July, with police once again being attacked with missiles and a number of cars being set alight. 26 officers were injured. However on this occasion the Merseyside Police responded by driving vans and land rovers at high speed into the crowds quickly dispersing them. This tactic had been developed as a riot control technique in Northern Ireland by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and had been employed with success in quelling the Moss Side riots by the Greater Manchester Police. A local man David Moore died after being struck by a police vehicle trying to clear crowds.

The riots, like those around the same time in Brixton, Handsworth, and those in 1980 in Bristol, were generally seen as "race riots", but there are many reports of similarly frustrated white youths travelling in from other areas of Liverpool to fight alongside Toxteth residents against the police.

One facility looted in the riots was a sports club called the Racquet Club, which was opened in 1877 on Upper Parliament Street, when Toxteth was an upper-middle-class area. When the riot started, the clubhouse included 3 squash courts and 12 bedrooms. During the riot, the clubhouse and all of its facilities and records was burnt and destroyed, and it did not reopen until 20 May 1985, in another building.

Dozens of senior citizens were evacuated from the Princes Park Hospital during the riots.