I’m at the little Premier corner shop on Hawthorn Street in Audenshaw: The scene, I’ve just been told, of a vicious fight — one that has since been picked up by the national press, with both the BBC and the MEN covering what has been termed a “mass brawl”.
After knocking on a few doors in the vicinity of Audenshaw School, where the brawl is said to have begun, a ponytailed man in his mid-to-late 20s, wearing glasses and a tracksuit, pointed me in the direction of the shop. It all took place outside the Premier, he told me.
The man unspooled a troubling theory: that a “race war” is playing out at the school in question, or at least that’s what he’s heard. “It was whites versus other skin colours,” he says, adding that the teachers who attempted to break up the fight were “punched and assaulted”. He uses the phrase “race war” twice in our conversation.
He’s not the only one to have heard the rumours. The man behind the counter at the Premier had read on Facebook the previous evening about the apparent fight between South Asian and white kids outside his shop, “and thought: Fucking hell.” Heading to work this morning, he expected a scene of chaos would greet him, broken glass or any other post-fight debris. He found nothing.
It was an anticlimax he was hugely grateful for. The shopkeeper tells me there’s a lesson in this, especially considering that the majority of the Facebook comments he read were posted anonymously. “Mate, I go on Facebook and think the world is about to end, then I come down here and nothing.”
Is that the full story? When The Mill learned on Tuesday morning that a major fight had broken out at Audenshaw School – an all-boys secondary in Denton – we didn’t initially think much of it. Playground fights aren’t really our bread and butter, after all. But within a few hours, it became clear the story was escalating.
On the curtly named ‘Denton community group’ – the major Denton Facebook group – an anonymously written question was posted to over 38,000 members on Monday evening. “As a parent of a child at Audenshaw… are parents sending their sons in tomorrow with what’s happened today?” It amassed over 100 comments.
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