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PART III THE DISTURBANCES
142. Another reporter spoke of crossing to Kowloon by the Star Ferry at about 9.45 to 10.00 p.m. and learning from a police inspector in Kowloon that there had been some serious trouble at the junction of Nathan Road and Waterloo Road, where the police had been stoned. He took a taxi but the driver refused to go more than a little distance past Jordan Road, so he alighted there and walked towards Gascoigne Road, where he found a very large crowd, some thousands strong. He described it as a very noisy crowd, making a very ugly sound. Some members of the crowd were standing still, and others were slowly moving up and down the street; they were fairly representative of the community age groups. Again, although they were mainly on the pavements, some were scattered over the street itself. He saw about 100 policemen in riot squad formation. There was he said, some distance between the crowd and the police and there was an air of 'anticipation' about. The police then moved towards the crowd, first of all up Gascoigne Road, across the triangle of open space at the junction of Gascoigne Road and Nathan Road. Tear smoke was fired, but the wind was unfavourable and tended to blow it back towards the police. Prior to the firing, missiles had been coming in the direction of the police particularly, he said, from the upper storeys of tall buildings. After the tear smoke was fired, the crowd started to throw more bricks and bottles. Asked to indicate what started the missile throwing, he said he thought it began when a crowd of about 300 to 500 people arrived at the Astor Theatre about 10.30 p.m. It had marched up Nathan Road carrying banners and 'smali street signs'. Some were shouting and shaking their fists at the police and this seemed definitely to raise the temperature. Earlier on when going up Nathan Road in the taxi, he had passed two small groups of about 10 to 15 young people, fairly orderly and carrying banners at the time. He got the im- pression that those two groups, which he had passed near the President Hotel and Whitfield Barracks respectively, had amalgamated and swollen to the size of the crowd that arrived at the Astor Theatre at about 10.30 p.m. When he had first seen the two groups, they were behaving in an orderly fashion, but the crowd that arrived at the Astor cinema was behaving very differently. Prior to that, there had been the occasional brick coming from construction sites and bottles from apart- ments but nothing concentrated. Anticipating a little, he told us how, eventually, the police dispersed this crowd with tear smoke after a number of attempts and moved south pushing the crowd back. He said that when they did so, the crowd dispersed into the side streets and, as the police were unable to follow them, the groups would form up again in the lanes and alleys and come out somewhere else on Nathan Road. There was very little direct physical contact between the crowds and the police.
143. From all this it seems tolerably clear that after the contact with the Yau Ma Tei company at Public Square Street, when the crowd stoned the police and two baton charges were made, stone throwing and the smashing of buses etc.
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