Andrew Leak (Tug Haven, Dover), 2024
45cmx35cm
Oil on Expensive European canvas
A poem I wrote some months ago, about an arson attack by Andrew Leak on a Border Force centre for processing migrants in Dover, Kent. He supposedly was reading Tommy Robinson's Enemy of the State at the time, alongside Mark Collett, a neo-nazi political activist and former chairman of the Young BNP. A lot of the poem has a sort of convulsed roaming lyric in the form of 'a Yaxley.
Leak died hanging himself with a regimental tie at a nearby petrol station in the driver's seat of his white Seat following the attack, described as using crude incendiary devices. He was never part of any regiment, it was tie purchased from a local charity shop.
At the end of Brendan Behan's play An Giall, Leslie is a Cockney solider held hostage in Dublin lodging house in exchange for an IRA man who is to be hanged in Belfast. Civic guards (Garda) accidentally shoot him on a raid in the house. The Bells of Hell is sung as his corpse rises & he sings along. I'm singing it right now, incidentally.