HG 'Bert' Lawrenson, no HN nominal, was a detective inspector in the Metropolitan Police Special Branch in the early 1960s. By 1968, he was a detective superintendent and second in command on C Squad, the part of Special Branch that dealt with the Communist Party of Great Britain. He also co-authored a review of public-order policing following the trouble at the March 1968 Vietnam Solidarity Campaign demonstration.
Lawrenson participated in setting up the Special Demonstration Squad in 1968. He retired from the police at the rank of acting chief superintendent in 1969, then worked for blacklisting organisation the Economic League. He only makes a fleeting appearance in inquiry documents and most of the details of his Special Branch career are not in the public domain.
Lawrenson's first documented appearance as a Metropolitan Police detective was in the pacifist newspaper Peace News in 1963. The front-page story reported that he had been sent to warn the activist group Spies for Peace not to disclose further top-secret details of government plans for what to do after a nuclear war that it had acquired.
Detective superintendent Lawrenson was the sole representative from Special Branch on an eight-person Working Party on Public Order, formed on 28 March 1968, in the wake of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC)-organised demonstrations in London in October 1967 and March 1968.
The working party’s detailed report, published in December 1968, made several proposals for how the Metropolitan Police should deal with protests in the future. Notably, however, these did not include proposals for, or an acknowledgement of, the SDS.
The report stated that intelligence from Special Branch was valuable to the public-order branch (A8). Still, it concluded that even the organisers of large demonstrations could not predict crowd numbers or behaviour.
It took a stance against the use of riot-control equipment such as water cannon and CS gas. This position was not based on principle but on a pragmatic assessment. The authors concluded that, despite media reports to the contrary following the March 1968 demonstration, the level of violence did not warrant such measures.
Moreover, the report argued that using such weapons could escalate violence from protestors. Instead, the report recommended aggressive interventions in demonstrations, including the formation of police-officer 'wedges' to disperse crowds.
Lawrenson does not appear in the timeline of officers connected with the SDS, and his name only appears in a handful of documents released by the Inquiry. Until mid-1969, he was second in command in C Squad to HN2857 Arthur Cunningham , who had oversight of the SDS.
On 1 August 1968, a day after the SDS was founded, Lawrenson was present at a meeting in which MI5 was told about the formation of the SDS. On 2 August, Detective Chief Inspector HN325 Conrad Dixon and his deputy, Detective Inspector HN1251 Phil Saunders visited the Security Service to tie up arrangements for the SDS to have a liaison at MI5.
On 29 August 1968, Superintendent Lawrenson invited MI5 to Special Branch to iron out the final details of the cooperation. Lawrenson did not attend, but the meeting notes give an imprecise summary of SDS operations up to that date.
Before the SDS was set up, Lawrenson reported on groups active in the anti-Vietnam war movement. After the first large demonstration against the war in Vietnam in London on 17 March 1968, Lawrenson authored a report on a smaller protest a week later by the Youth Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
After the SDS had been set up in July 1968, as acting chief superintendent, Lawrenson signed off several reports by Conrad Dixon. For example, in early October 1968, he signs a report by Dixon, on behalf of his chief superintendent, regarding the decision by CND not to support the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign's (VSC) demonstration of 27 October and about the internal mood within the VSC.
Six months later, in March 1969, Lawrenson's name appeared in a report on the Committee for Solidarity with Vietnam demonstrations on 9 March 1969 and 16 March 1969. The Special Branch files cited in this section were released to journalist Solomon Hughes after a Freedom of Information request in 2008
At the hearings of the Undercover Policing Inquiry in November 2020, former SDS undercover HN336 'Dick Epps' revealed that Lawrenson worked for the blacklisting organisation the Economic League. The passing of information from undercover officers to blacklisting organisations is one of the major issues under investigation by the Inquiry. In his witness statement, Epps said:
Shortly after I joined the Branch, the then Chief Superintendent of C Squad, I think his name was Lawrenson, retired and he joined the staff of the Economic League, and I was aware of that.
Epps also went on to work at the Industrial Unit in Special Branch after his deployment with the SDS ended.
Mike Hughes, the long-term researcher on the Economic League and the author of Spies at Work, assumed that Lawrenson was appointed head of the league's London Regional HQ's research department after he left the police, staying in that role until 1980, when the London office moved to Croydon and the league appointed someone called Derek Knight-Jewell, who did not have a security background.
Given Lawrenson's knowledge of left-wing activists gained during his time in Special Branch, his move to the blacklisting organisation the Economic League is concerning.
Operation Herne , the Metropolitan Police's investigation into the undercover-policing scandal, which was supposed to investigate the links between Special Branch and the Economic League, did not mention that Bert Lawrenson worked there. This underscores concerns about how thorough the Operation Herne investigation was.
The police’s Operation Reuben report mentioned a dedicated liaison officer from the Special Branch Industrial Unit, also known as the Industrial Intelligence Section, with the Economic League. The inadequacies of the Operation Reuben report are addressed elsewhere.
As Dave Smith , a core participant in the Inquiry as a victim of trade-union blacklisting, pointed out in his opening statement at the hearings in November 2020:
Basically, you've got people in the Industrial Unit, Bert Lawrenson used to be their boss, he trained them. He then goes off and works for the Economic League. And you've got someone in the Industrial Unit who's the official liaison officer.
There is a relationship there between the Economic League and Special Branch Industrial Unit that needs to be investigated by this Inquiry.
No application was made for anonymity for Bert Lawrenson and therefore no procedural Inquiry documents exist.