Narwhal tusk hero Darryn Frost on how the London Bridge terror attack still haunts him seven years on – and how he has worked with Bill Bailey on a remarkable BBC TV show
Invited to be the subject of a sculpture to mark his bravery during the 2019 London Bridge terror attack, Darryn Frost had just one request – not to portray him as a hero. Darryn famously used a 6ft-long narwhal whale tusk to fend off the jihadist attacker. His courageous actions, along with others who joined him, undoubtedly saved many lives that day. But while most people would consider Darryn deserves to be honoured, the former civil servant feels very differently.
“I would have hated it if the sculpture was heroic,” he says frankly. “If it had been some marble bust with posed grandeur going: ‘look at me, aren’t I great?’ that would have been the opposite of me. It was the saddest day of my life.”
Darryn was approached by the BBC to take part in their series Extraordinary Portraits with Bill Bailey, which pairs participants with some of the country’s most talented portrait artists. The aim is to create artwork that captures their journey, sparking emotional conversations. Yet Darryn was initially sceptical. “I was flattered, but I cringed,” he confesses. “Why would I want a sculpture of me? I’m just an average person. That was an incident on a single day and I don’t want that to define who I am. But then I thought – it happened and there is so much positive stuff that has happened since.”
Darryn’s life changed irrevocably in November 2019, when he was invited to attend a prisoner education and rehabilitation event in Fishmongers’ Hall, a historic building adjacent to London Bridge.
He was working as a communications manager for the Ministry of Justice and when his own boss was unable to attend, she asked if Darryn would go in her place. Tragically, also present was 28-year-old Usman Khan, a convicted terrorist who had been released from prison on licence the previous year.
With two knives and claiming to have a suicide bomb strapped to his waist, he fatally stabbed Cambridge University graduates Jack Merritt, 25, and Saskia Jones, 23.
Recalling the atrocity, Darryn says: “Half way through the day we suddenly heard shouting and screaming. People were saying some skateboarders had got into the building and it was just the cries of girls playing.
“The guy sitting next to me said: ‘That’s not the cry of children playing.’ That was my call to action. I stood up and went to investigate. I got to the huge spiral staircase and looked over the bannisters and I could see that someone was on the stairs and was bleeding.
“It was a horrific thing to come across. My first thought was that I needed to get something to protect her. I ran to the dining room, where moments before we’d been served lunch, to get a ladle and a lid. As I was making my way there, I saw these two-metre narwhal tusks, so I changed tack and grabbed one off the wall.”
Darryn ran back down the stairs and found former prisoner Steve Gallant, on his first day out on licence from jail, trying to fend off Khan armed only with a chair, as the attacker tried to push his way through a door.
Darryn says: “I opened the door and was presented with two horrific things. First was this guy dressed all in black, wearing protective gloves with two eight-inch kitchen knives taped to his hands.
“Behind him, on the brilliant white marble floor, was a girl lying motionless, clearly injured. I can still see that to this day.”
Darryn handed the tusk to Steve and ran back inside to collect a second one. By now the terrorist was outside, heading for London Bridge. Darryn recalls: “Everyone was shouting: ‘Lock the front door,’ and I shouted: ‘Unlock the front door, let me out.’
“I never thought about running away, I just thought: ‘I have to stop this man, he’s hurting people.’”
Darryn and several other men, including former prisoner John Crilly, who had armed himself with a fire extinguisher, chased after Khan along London Bridge.
“People were running away and spilling over into the road and a bus went into the central island, it was real chaos,” Darryn recalls.
“He couldn’t catch anyone so he turned around and came back. He saw me running towards him, so he ran at full speed at me with the knives up. Because he’d lifted his arms, about a centimetre of flesh was showing on his belly and I managed to stab him with the tusk. As I pulled it out, John Crilly let off the fire extinguisher and Steve Gallant got behind him and pulled him off balance.
“I dropped the tusk and jumped on his back and grabbed his wrists and held them out above his head so he couldn’t slash anyone, or detonate what he said was a bomb.” Shortly afterwards police armed with semi-automatic rifles arrived.
In shocking video footage of the incident, Darryn is seen bravely grappling with Khan on the ground, before being pulled away by an officer, seconds before police shot him. “And that’s when I blanked out,” Darryn says quietly. “I came to back in Fishmongers’ Hall.”
As Darryn sat there in shock, counter terrorism police ran in and Darryn found himself kneeling on the floor, with a gun held at his head, while the building was searched. Eventually, after giving a statement, he was sent home.
But his ordeal was far from over. And while he was immediately dubbed “The Narwhal Tusk Hero” by newspapers and hailed for his courageous actions, Darryn began to suffer nightmares about what he had witnessed, along with debilitating memory problems. Over the course of the next two years he experienced anger issues, gained weight and turned to alcohol to try to numb the pain.
He says: “People felt like we won because the public fought back using the most ridiculous items, such as a fire extinguisher and a narwhal tusk and subdued him so he couldn’t hurt anyone else.
“But afterwards I couldn’t control my emotions; I was getting angry at the state of the world and crying at Andrex puppy ads. I kept thinking: ‘I’m a strong person; I can get over this. I wasn’t physically injured; I should be fine.’ But I was replying to the same emails four times and getting really confused with basic tasks. It really did knock me.”
Darryn, 44, who lives in Northampton, eventually retired from his job through ill health and after receiving counselling he was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
He says: “I had severe depression. I was so damaged by it, I couldn’t see the point of living and I had survivor’s guilt. When I heard Jack and Saskia’s stories, I thought: ‘They sounded incredible. Why do I get to survive, when they don’t?’”
The attack also affected his relationship with his girlfriend. “It was tough, because she became my carer for the first three or four years,” he says frankly. “I couldn’t see or handle knives for the longest time. And my memory was so bad that I’d walk into a room and just be lost.
“She’d come in a few minutes later and I’d be standing vacant and she would physically move me to do things.”
Now, six years on, Darryn is determined to focus on the positive. In 2021, with Steve Gallant, he set up the charity Own Merit, a first-of-its-kind facility to house recently released prisoners and support them back into society.
He says: “If it hadn’t happened, I don’t think I would have been brave enough to do what I’m doing now and if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have been so dogged and determined to do it.
“There’s a new field of study called post-traumatic growth, where people do the most amazing things after horrendous experiences. It does drive people beyond what they think they can do. That’s one of the reasons I agreed to do Extraordinary Portraits, because there’s another story to the story of the narwhal tusk.”
In Extraordinary Portraits, Darryn is interviewed about his experiences by host Bill Bailey, before being introduced to sculptor Nick Elphick, who was determined to portray the real Darryn and not just the narwhal tusk hero.
Nick, 46, who is based in Llandudno, North Wales, says: “I realised that he was willing to give his life to save others, but he didn’t see himself as a hero.
“I also saw the sadness that he hides. I knew that I needed to portray him as a human being who has gone through trauma and come out the other side of something that almost broke him. I made him look strong, but I wanted to portray the weight on his shoulders.”
Nick, who previously created a bronze bust of the Queen for her Diamond Jubilee, spent three months working 15-hour days on Darryn’s statue, which was created using a mix of marble powder, polythene resins and glass fibre.
The finished work, one of six original artworks from the new series of Extraordinary Portraits, will go on public view at Bradford’s Loading Bay gallery.
Darryn, who moved to Britain 21 years ago from South Africa, says: “It was deeply moving to see it. Nick really got into my psyche. He listened to me and so the statue portrays my mood and how I was feeling in those dark days.
“He understood the challenges that I’ve gone through and the weight I felt on my shoulders. He recognised while the narwhal tusk is that incident and that day, there are two sides to me.”
Darryn, who was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for his bravery, adds: “It’s not a happy sculpture, but I’m actually glad about that. Because although people celebrate my actions, I do not celebrate what happened on that day. It is the day that ended two amazing lives.
“It is the worst day of my life and that sculpture captures that so well. Even though you are doing something for good, it’s a huge burden on you.”
- Extraordinary Portraits with Bill Bailey is available to watch on BBC One and iPlayer
