Yesterday, we published a photo taken by a reader of racist graffiti that was sprayed outside Dee Dee’s bar in Herne Hill, south London.
Instagram photo of covered up graffiti.
Shortly afterwards, posts on Twitter and Facebook were claiming that the graffiti was painted by a teacher at Dulwich Hamlet Junior School, who lived nearby.
A petition was also started up asking for the teacher to be immediately suspended.
In response, the school have issued a statement (below), saying that the accused teacher was in fact on holiday at the time and adds – rather oddly – that they believe that the image was Photoshopped.
PRESS STATEMENT
A statement from the Head Teacher of Dulwich Hamlet Junior School
Today, Tues 26th May, I was alerted to the news that a “photo” had gone viral on various social media, including Twitter and Facebook amongst others, of a teacher at Dulwich Hamlet Junior School, Head of Maths and Year 5 who had supposedly spray painted a terrible racist phrase on a wall in Herne Hill.
The graffiti was supposedly applied in the last 48 hours by the teacher concerned.There is no truth whatsoever in this terrible story, but unfortunately there are already people posting disturbing and threatening messages on Facebook and Twitter . The teacher is currently on holiday in another part of the country where he has been, since Sunday lunchtime.
He is an exceptional man- a principled, kind and caring person with whom I have had the pleasure of working for the last six years. The pupils that he teaches and the parents of those pupils, have nothing but praise for the care and attention he gives to each and everyone of them.
We believe that the picture might have been “photoshopped”. If the graffiti was real, it is no longer there and we would wish to know when exactly it was applied and then removed.
We are concerned as to whether this has anything to do with a request made by the teacher and other local residents, to have a local bar’s license reviewed as there have been noise breaches in the past. Southwark Council are due to look at the bar’s licence in the next week or so.
Meanwhile we would kindly request that those threatening messages are removed immediately as we can only guess at the impact this has on a totally innocent teacher.
Sonia Case
Head Teacher
26th May 2015
This has also just appeared on Twitter:
Witness claims on alleged culprit of racial vandalism on @DeeDeesBar please RT so we can expose this #SayNoToRacism pic.twitter.com/CSV59Xuk8c
— #PoeticUnity (@RagzCV) May 26, 2015
Read more about this on the Herne Hill forum.