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We remembered the dead and we shall fight for the living
APRIL 28 was International Workers Memorial Day – and the day after the NUJ delegate meeting in Blackpool. London Freelance Branch passed a motion, proposed by Mick Holder, instructing us to organise an event to mark International Workers Memorial Day.
The journalists' altar at St Bride’s
The Branch Committee called a vigil to remember all journalist colleagues killed in the last year.
We met from 13:00 to 14:00 at St Bride’s - the journalists’ church off Fleet Street, which has a long-established altar honouring dead journalists of all faiths and none.
We paid our respects to our fallen colleagues in silence at the altar.
We were joined by London Freelance Branch and London Magazine Branch members, and two members of the unions Unison and Unite who came to express solidarity after seeing the call-out on the Trades Union Congress (TUC) website.
The current state of the altar came as a shock. Due to the unprecedented numbers of journalists killed in Gaza, the staff at St Bride’s had put a low table in front of the original journalists’ altar to display the names of the Gazan journalists killed. There was row upon row of A5-sized frames arranged across the width of the table. As of 28 April the display did not yet include the journalists killed in Gaza in 2025.
The need for an extra display of those killed was sobering. We sat in silence.
We discussed briefly the lack of reporting of our colleagues’ deaths in various mainstream outlets.
In the garden of St Bride’s
We then went to the garden at St Bride’s where we held up a banner saying: “stop killing journalists in Palestine.”
Taking turns, we read the names of all 181 journalists documented on the London Freelance Branch website as confirmed to have been killed in Gaza, Lebanon, Israel and Syria on and since 7 October 2023. Sadly, we did not yet have the names of the 7 journalists who we are informed have been killed reporting the war in Sudan or a reliably complete list of those killed elsewhere.
While reading the names of the dead, the “who, where and when” has never felt more painful.
London Freelance Branch thanks the staff at St Bride’s for facilitating our vigil.
Remembering journalists killed worldwide woefully incomplete