25 years on from the murder of Stephen Lawrence: 'there is an indescribable pain that will never go'

One Sunday afternoon in his late teens, Mat Bickley was waiting at a bus stop in Greenwich. He had been to a nearby pie and mash shop and was on his way home, when a police car pulled up and a group of officers climbed out. 

By that age, he had already grown used to being subjected to random stop and searches – around four or five a year – even on his way home from grammar school, despite ensuring his shoes were freshly polished, his top button done up and that he always wore regulation black socks. 

But that afternoon in Greenwich sticks out in Bickley’s mind. “They said ‘someone of your description has just stolen an item of clothing’,” he recalls. “I was told to drop my trousers and empty my wallet. Then they all just laughed and jumped in the car and drove off. You knew it was people playing with power.”

Nine others were waiting in line for the bus at the time. Bickley describes their reaction as “a mixture of dismissiveness, bemusement and shock”.

A few years later, in 1993, when his 18-year-old cousin Stephen Lawrence was stabbed to death in a racially-motivated attack in Eltham, south east London, those three words were applicable once again. It was a murder which exposed the fault lines in British society and shone a light on the appalling racism endemic at the time.

As well as marking the 25th anniversary of the Lawrence murder, this week also happens to be 50 years since Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, in which he decried immigration and warned that in 20 years “the black man will have whip hand over the white man”. 

In a chilling sign of the inflammatory ramifications of Powell’s words, secretly recorded police videos of Lawrence’s killers, taken after the murder - used as evidence in the eventual murder trial and aired as part of a new BBC documentary - captured them praising the politician for his racist stance. 

Bickley believes that, in terms of race relations, modern Britain can be split into two distinct eras: “before Stephen and after Stephen”. 

“It is a moment in our history that feels like a watershed,” he says. 

The 47-year-old, who nowadays lives with his wife and two young children in Kent and works in creative media, insists that we have taken strides forward as a multicultural country in the years since the murder. Although a march in Brixton on Friday evening in support of Windrush-era migrants threatened with deportation by the Home Office, backs up his claim that at “an institutional level I don’t think much has changed”.

As for the murder of his cousin, the sense of injustice he feels burns as keenly as it did a quarter a century ago. “There is an indescribable pain that is always just below the surface,” he says. “That will never go.” 

Bickley was, in fact, Stephen’s second cousin (his mother, Lillian, is the sister of Doreen Lawrence’s mother), but the families were very close. 

He grew up in a four-floor Victorian house in Brockley, south London, not far from the Lawrences. Lillian was a seamstress, who later lectured in social care at Goldsmiths University. His father, Edgar, was a builder who would often employ Stephen’s father, Neville Lawrence, to do plastering work.

Every Saturday, Doreen – who he knows as Joy – Neville and their three children Stephen, Stuart and Georgina would come over to play. The families would go for picnics in Crystal Palace or Greenwich, and spent every holiday together.

Bickley was four years Stephen’s senior, but the pair shared similar interests, not least a love of art. They would draw together and make their own comic books, in between trading Star Wars figurines and re-enacting the popular television series the A-Team and Knight Rider.

As they grew older, however, racism began to intrude on this happy childhood. Bickley recalls that drivers would throw things and shout abuse out of their cars; “NF” - or National Front - would be regularly daubed on walls and streets, while its members handed out leaflets offering to pay for migrants’ tickets home (the Lawrences had come to Britain from Jamaica in the Sixties).  

Mat Bickley

But, Bickley adds, he and Stephen never really discussed it, and preferred to focus on the future. “We were raised to believe anything is possible,” he says.

He last saw his cousin a few weeks before his murder. At the time, Bickley was applying to university (he went on to read fine art at Middlesex) and Stephen was studying A-levels in English, craft, design and technology and physics at Blackheath Bluecoat Church of England School, and had dreams of becoming an architect. 

The pair bumped into each other coincidentally outside an art shop near Trafalgar Square. “He was buying pencils for his architectural drawings,” Bickley recalls. “We talked about buckling down for the exams. I was joking around, but also told him I was really proud of him.” 

He has stayed in touch with some of Lawrence’s school peers and says they have gone on to “really good careers and become solid grounded people”. His younger brother, Stuart, who Bickley helped get measured for his wedding suit at Savile Row, is now a successful teacher in south London. “Stephen definitely would have realised his ambitions,” he says. “He had flair and he was committed”. 

Instead, during a phone call in the early hours of April 23, 1993, Bickley was told that his cousin had been stabbed to death the previous evening in an unprovoked attack.

In the painful blur of the days that followed, Bickley became a “doorman” at the Lawrence home, attempting to marshal those coming and going. Later still, he helped chair weekly meetings of police and public sector organisations at Woolwich Arsenal, alongside the Lawrence family solicitor Imran Khan. The failings of the police investigation, he says, became plain at an early stage.

“The police attitude then was [to be] disinterested. It felt as if they were there because they couldn’t ignore us. Not because they wanted to be there,” says Bickley. “There are a lot of police officers that genuinely care. But at the time I think they felt it was a lot of fuss over nothing.”

Despite the police receiving numerous anonymous tip-offs naming the five murder suspects – Gary Dobson, Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, Luke Knight and David Norris – the initial investigation was hamstrung by a failure to secure proper evidence, and the killers remained free. 

In 1999, the Macpherson report exposed the “institutional racism” of the Metropolitan Police at the time, which even extended (it was later discovered) to recruiting undercover officers to spy on the Lawrence family. The report also blamed “professional incompetence” and the failure of senior leadership. To this day, the National Crime Agency has an ongoing investigation into whether this was the result of police corruption, as one of the killers, David Norris, was the son of a notorious local gangster.

Over the intervening two decades, Bickley has attended all the public hearings at which the Lawrence have family tried – and failed – to secure justice for their son. He has seen, at close hand, the strain it placed upon Neville and Doreen’s relationship, which led to their eventual divorce in 1999.

“They became islands to each other,” he says. “In their attempts to cope with their own grief they just became two people occupying the same space, but not together.”

It was only in 2012 that new forensic evidence led to the trial and conviction of Norris and Dobson for the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The three other members of their gang remain at large.

Bickley was present at the Old Bailey and recalls being sat in the public gallery alongside the families of the murderers.

“They [Norris and Dobson] looked pathetic,” he says. “They were broken and soulless, and I had no feelings for them. It wasn’t even anger. I felt vindicated not having them in my mind in the first place.”

Bickley adds that he has sympathy with Doreen - now Baroness - Lawrence, who earlier this month called for the Metropolitan Police to be honest about the likelihood of convicting anybody else over her son’s murder. “It’s not giving up, but more like a feeling of this can’t go on indefinitely,” he says. “She needs some light. She just wants closure. An honest factual answer.”

As for the other three suspects? Bickley insists “they have no place in my mind or heart” but he hopes they may still face justice in the British courts.

“I can’t live with hate,” he says. “It’s done more damage to me than good.”

BBC One series Stephen: The Murder that Changed a Nation is now available on BBC iPlayer