Sixty years on, Kelso Cochrane’s daughter finally finds peace in north Kensington

The murder in May 1959 was a watershed in British race relations. Sixty years later, Mark Olden joins Cochrane’s daughter Josephine as she arrives in London to trace the last steps of the father she never knew

Josephine at the parish church of St Michael and All Angels (Mark Olden)

It was early in 2007, and Josephine Cochrane, a social worker in Brooklyn, New York, was having a bad day. “What’s the matter?” her supervisor asked. Josephine told her what was on her mind, something that had troubled her for decades, through years of imprisonment and addiction, and especially now she’d turned her life around.

She’d grown up without her dad, and didn’t know how he’d died. She said that her mother had never given her all the details: “Maybe she knew them, maybe she didn’t.”

“Why don’t you google him?” her supervisor asked. “What’s his name?”

“Kelso Cochrane.”