The most extreme events of the Great Unrest occurred in Liverpool which suffered a local general strike. As a result there was rioting, including bread riots and the largest military presence put on active duty into any city during this period and included two warships being moored in the River Mersey. Sustained rioting led to deaths, but again, cool-headness by commanders on the spot avoided the massacre which could have easily occurred if local politicians had had their way.
Liverpool: a city under siege
Unlike for the rest of Britain, in Liverpool, a major port on the North-West coast of England, rioting was pretty common occurrence. This was founded on the sectarian division between Protestants and Catholics in the city, which had a large Irish population. For example, the March 1911 Bootle by-election which the subsequent Conservative leader, Andrew Bonar Law, won, led to rioting and sectarian attacks. However, the strikes and accompanying unrest in summer 1911 went much further, effectively sealed off the city. A combination of strikes by seamen, dockers, and local railway men as well as numerous sympathetic strikes plunged the city into chaos and helped spark the national rail strike.[1]
The strike began on 5 August 1911, when 1,200 goods porters of the London and Yorkshire Railway Company struck. Within days they had been joined by thousands of other railway workers in Liverpool. This action was to trigger a national rail strike on August 18. Mounted police had been used against disturbances at pickets and food vans had been attacked and looted. On 9 August the council and the police requested military assistance and the following day 400 soldiers from the Warwickshire Regiment arrived. They were joined by two squadrons of Royal Scots Greys, plus a detachment of the Royal Service Corps to supply the supply the troops. In addition police were brought from Leeds and Birmingham and 200 police officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary, a police force equipped with rifles, were also shipped across to Liverpool. A break down of talks between ship owners and dockers led to a lock out of 25,000 dockers on 14 August. Convoys of vehicles carrying food had to be escorted by soldiers as they travelled through the city. On Sunday 13 August a rally on St. George’s Plateau turned into a riot with 200 people being injured. However, the riot which had been sparked by a couple of minor incidents was broken by police, and the infantry and cavalry on standby were only needed to patrol the streets afterwards. In no doubt of the potential carnage of shooting into a packed crowd, the commanding officer refused police demands on the spot to open fire.[2]
Magistrates requested more soldiers, especially lancers to run down crowds. On 14 August, the day a general transport strike was declared in the city, a detachment of the 18th Hussars were sent. Looting continued overnight, and as well as bayonet charges, warning shots were fired by Yorkshire Regiment infantry. The following day 3,000 rioters attacked five prison vans transporting people convicted for their part in earlier unrest. Only thirty-four soldiers and police accompanied the convoy. The hussars escorting the vans were caught out by the situation. Their horses were not equipped with the rubber shoes mounted police used and skidded on the street cobbles. In the panic they fired six shots, killing two and injuring two more. The ensuing rioting led to many injuries and the killing of a police office kicked to death.[3]
Unlike at Llanelly, later that week, the death of rioters did not ultimately calm the situation. The situation deteriorated. With the docks closed and rail services suspended no food was coming into the city. Tramway men struck on August 16, followed by power station workers and refuse collectors. Power in the city began to run short and volunteer workers had to be enlisted. Attacks began on bakeries by people desperate for food. By August 19, Churchill wrote the lord mayor advising him to recruit a special corps of dockers to unload food and fuel ships. He promised he would be ‘prepared to support you by force or otherwise’. With garbage piling up in the streets the city’s health committee noted that the average death rate had almost doubled since the strike had started.[4]
The general strike in Liverpool impacted on the surrounding region of Lancashire, Cheshire and the North Welsh towns dependent on food supplies through the city’s docks. Contact with the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea was also broken, as many steamship services had been curtailed. The Government Secretary on the island could only communicate with the mainland via the H.M.S. ‘Warrior’ berthed at the island.[5]
By the third week in August there were 2,500 soldiers in the city and an additional 4,000 special constables were sworn in to augment the police force. Public houses closed at 2 p.m.. With the national rail strike over, but with unrest continuing in Liverpool, a three-man team was appointed by the Home Office to investigate what was happening. The team consisted of two Liverpool MPs - Thomas O’ Connor, a Liberal and the Conservative, George Kyffin-Taylor along with D.J. Shackleton, the Home Office’s labor advisor. They provided Churchill with a more objective view of the developments in the disputes than the city council or local employers could offer. Despite the settlement of the national rail strike on August 19, the strikes in Liverpool, which had become highly entangled, continued. The complexity of the situation is shown by the example of loyal tramwaymen striking to protest about previously striking tramwaymen being reinstated. Thus the dispute continued until finally all the different grievances could be settled on August 26. [6]
The prompt dispatch of military units to Liverpool shows that by the summer of 1911 the government realised that in certain circumstances they were the only solution. There were lessons to be learnt from Liverpool, particularly from the attack on the prison convoy. Some of these would be integrated into the Army's 1912 pamphlet on action in civil disturbances. It would have been difficult to avoid the St. George’s Plateau riot, but the calmness of the military at the scene prevented the incident becoming more severe. In a city where rioting was all too common any authority faced a difficult task of balancing the need to minimize unrest and ensuring law and order.
References
[1] P.J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism. A Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1868-1939, (Liverpool, 1981), pp. 249-50.
[2] National Archives [henceforward NA], HO 45/10658, sub-file 452, ‘Disturbances’, undated. This gives a day-by-day account of the unrest; T.A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence. Order and Liberty in Britain, (London, 1970), p. 170.
[3] Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p.141; Waller, p.255.
[4] Liverpool Daily Post & Mercury, 18 August 1911, ‘The Unscavenged City’. [Scavenging was the term given to rubbish collection]. The death rate had risen from 13.3/1000 the previous August to 24.5/1000.
[5] NA HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 176, Home Secretary to Lord Mayor, 19 August, 1911.; sub-file 179, Government Secretary, Isle of Man to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 19 August 1911.
[6] Waller, p. 256; NA, HO 45/1065/212470, sub-file 356, T.P. O’Connor, G. Kyffin-Taylor, D.J. Shackleton to Home Secretary, 20 August 1911, 1 am and 11pm; 21 August 1911, 3 telegrams; 22 August 1911, 3 telegrams; Lord George Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes, (London, 1920), p. 172.
Showing posts with label Lord George Askwith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lord George Askwith. Show all posts
Saturday, 8 November 2008
The Great Unrest 1910-11. Part 5: Hull
Hull
Hull, on the North-East coast of England with docks that could be accessed at any tide, was the third largest port in Britain. Much of its trade was with Northern Europe, but had it increasing links with the rest of Europe and South America. However, the focus on trade with the ice-bound ports of the Baltic Sea made much work in the city seasonal. The local North-Eastern Railway Company had already recognized the trade union, however, this was not to prevent the city suffering unrest through the summer of 1911. Between them the North Eastern and the Hull and Barnsley railway companies owned the extensive docks. Most of the work in the city was related to the docks or industries processing imports, directly or indirectly for the merchant shipping trade.[1]
Housing was cramped and over-crowded. Public health in Hull was poorer and infant mortality higher than the national averages. Despite the city’s deprivation unrest had been uncommon until a series of strikes from the spring of 1911. Even in July when strikes had broken out among dockers on the south coast and at neighbouring Goole local dock trade union leaders were reluctant to call a strike, but on June 20 yielded to rank-and-file pressure. As was becoming common once the dockers struck other unions followed in sympathy. When Askwith, who was well known in Hull because of his work dealing with fishermen’s strikes there, arrived, local carters and railway men had also come out. Unlike the dockers though, these other workers did not have clear demands, thus making settlement of the dispute that much harder. Despite brokering a deal among the different sides of the dispute this was rejected by a crowd of 15,000 many of whom were women, that rioted in opposition to the settlement.[2]
The Home Office maintained that the Hull local authorities were responsible for dealing with unrest, but by the last week in June, this was proving to be beyond their capabilities. The Mayor of Hull, J.S. Taylor, faced pressure from ship owners wanting their perishable cargoes unloaded. They went over his head, straight to the Home Office. Meanwhile the Norwegian vice-consul and the Russian consul were also bringing pressure over ships that could not be unloaded owing to the dispute.[3]
Taylor faced the problem that even if they could be unloaded strikes in other trades prevented goods being taken from the docks. Food supplies in the town were beginning to run short and prices were rising. Given the international pressure which was soon exerted on the Foreign Office too, the government had to intervene. Despite thousands of rioters in the streets and with the town paralysed through strikes, procedure was adhered to. The chief constable of Hull applied to Leeds for twelve mounted police, to triple his mounted force. On the evening of June 29, it was clear that strikers were resentful of Askwith’s deal. Rumours that blackleg workers would start unloading a ship sparked a riot by about 2,000 strikers. Offices belonging to shipping companies, and depots belonging to the British Free Labour Federation were wrecked and many shops were looted. Seventeen people were hospitalised but there were no arrests. Police repeatedly baton charged the crowds which finally brought to an end eight hours of rioting. The mayor requested Metropolitan police. Five hundred were in Hull by the following morning. [4]
Combined with police from other constabularies the number imported into Hull soon reached a total of thirteen hundred. The insignia showing they were not Hull police was removed, but they were far better received than they were to be in towns like Cardiff and Liverpool. Askwith gave a gloomy report on the situation. He saw the mayor as ‘stupid and wobbling’ and feared that if an acceptable deal could not be found the town might ‘see such a revolution as it has nerve done before. The Chief Constable remained wary and following procedure contacted the Northern Command of the Army at York. This was forwarded to Macready for assessments. Two squadrons of cavalry, up to 400 soldiers, were held on standby in York, only ninety minutes by train from Hull.[5] However, these were not needed and on July 4 most strikers accepted the original settlement rejected the previous week and returned to work. The Metropolitans left immediately though other imported police stayed on until June 17. Like other leading northern towns, Hull received troops, two battalions of infantry, in August 1911 to deal with the rail strike. Drawing on the experience of June and July a cruiser H.M.S. ‘Attentive’ sailed to Hull to guard the dock gates from interference. It stayed until August 24.[6]
It was estimated that £300,000 worth of cargo [equivalent to £16.5 million today] had been delayed, some of which had naturally rotted beyond use. Churchill praised the mayor’s action in requesting help, but the council was shocked at the bill for the Metropolitans. After four days Hull had had to foot their normal pay as well as the special duty money. The ordinary pay per day for a police constable was 8s 5d and the special pay 12s [total per day is equivalent to £60 now]; police inspectors received twice as much. There had already been problems with local authorities in Glamorgan not paying for police sent to the area the previous November. Hull’s position attracted similar attention. It could be argued that such large bills for importing police encouraged other mayors to call for troops, who were funded by central government, rather than police on the first occasion. [7]
References
[1] Keith Brooker, The Hull Strikes of 1911, (Beverley, Yorkshire, 1979), pp. 1, 4, 6, 9.
[2] Brooker, p. 10; Lord George Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes, (London, 1920), pp. 148-150.
[3] National Archives [henceforward NA], HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 5, Under Secretary of State, Home Office [Sir Edward Troup] to Mayor of Hull, undated [28 June 1911?]; sub-file 10, General Shipowners’ Society to Home Secretary, 29 June 1911; sub-file 4, Under Secretary of State, Home Office to Mayor Hull, undated [27 June 1911?]; sub-file 24, J.S. Taylor to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1 July 1 1911.
[4] NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 13, Russian Embassy to Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [in French; diplomatic correspondence at this time was often carried out in French and as a result it is often difficult to find English language versions of treaties that the UK signed], 30 June 1911, sub-file 5, Letter to Mr. Blackwell, 28 June 1911, sub-file 9, Mayor of Hull to Home Secretary, 29 June 1911; Brooker pp. 20, 22.
[5] NA, HO 45/210615, sub-file 19, S.W.H. to Home Secretary, June 30, 1911; sub-file 12, Memorandum [handwritten], I.R.W., June 30, 1911; sub-file 26a, G.R. Askwith to President of the Board of Trade, 2 July 1912 [sic, should be 1911].
[6] Brooker pp. 21-22; NA, HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 158, ‘Hull, 19 August 1911; Home Secretary to Mayor of Hull, undated [19 August 1911]; Admiralty to Home Office, 19 August, 1911; NA HO 45/10656, Sir Edward Troup to Secretary, Admiralty, 24 August 1911.
[7] NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 21, Letter to Mayor of Hull, undated [July 1911]; Mayor of Hull to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, July 1, 1911; sub-file 14, Home Secretary to Mayor of Hull, 30 June , 1911; Parliamentary Debates. Commons. 5th Series, 1911, vol. XXXVII, June 19 - July 7, 3 July 1911, cols. 791-2.
Hull, on the North-East coast of England with docks that could be accessed at any tide, was the third largest port in Britain. Much of its trade was with Northern Europe, but had it increasing links with the rest of Europe and South America. However, the focus on trade with the ice-bound ports of the Baltic Sea made much work in the city seasonal. The local North-Eastern Railway Company had already recognized the trade union, however, this was not to prevent the city suffering unrest through the summer of 1911. Between them the North Eastern and the Hull and Barnsley railway companies owned the extensive docks. Most of the work in the city was related to the docks or industries processing imports, directly or indirectly for the merchant shipping trade.[1]
Housing was cramped and over-crowded. Public health in Hull was poorer and infant mortality higher than the national averages. Despite the city’s deprivation unrest had been uncommon until a series of strikes from the spring of 1911. Even in July when strikes had broken out among dockers on the south coast and at neighbouring Goole local dock trade union leaders were reluctant to call a strike, but on June 20 yielded to rank-and-file pressure. As was becoming common once the dockers struck other unions followed in sympathy. When Askwith, who was well known in Hull because of his work dealing with fishermen’s strikes there, arrived, local carters and railway men had also come out. Unlike the dockers though, these other workers did not have clear demands, thus making settlement of the dispute that much harder. Despite brokering a deal among the different sides of the dispute this was rejected by a crowd of 15,000 many of whom were women, that rioted in opposition to the settlement.[2]
The Home Office maintained that the Hull local authorities were responsible for dealing with unrest, but by the last week in June, this was proving to be beyond their capabilities. The Mayor of Hull, J.S. Taylor, faced pressure from ship owners wanting their perishable cargoes unloaded. They went over his head, straight to the Home Office. Meanwhile the Norwegian vice-consul and the Russian consul were also bringing pressure over ships that could not be unloaded owing to the dispute.[3]
Taylor faced the problem that even if they could be unloaded strikes in other trades prevented goods being taken from the docks. Food supplies in the town were beginning to run short and prices were rising. Given the international pressure which was soon exerted on the Foreign Office too, the government had to intervene. Despite thousands of rioters in the streets and with the town paralysed through strikes, procedure was adhered to. The chief constable of Hull applied to Leeds for twelve mounted police, to triple his mounted force. On the evening of June 29, it was clear that strikers were resentful of Askwith’s deal. Rumours that blackleg workers would start unloading a ship sparked a riot by about 2,000 strikers. Offices belonging to shipping companies, and depots belonging to the British Free Labour Federation were wrecked and many shops were looted. Seventeen people were hospitalised but there were no arrests. Police repeatedly baton charged the crowds which finally brought to an end eight hours of rioting. The mayor requested Metropolitan police. Five hundred were in Hull by the following morning. [4]
Combined with police from other constabularies the number imported into Hull soon reached a total of thirteen hundred. The insignia showing they were not Hull police was removed, but they were far better received than they were to be in towns like Cardiff and Liverpool. Askwith gave a gloomy report on the situation. He saw the mayor as ‘stupid and wobbling’ and feared that if an acceptable deal could not be found the town might ‘see such a revolution as it has nerve done before. The Chief Constable remained wary and following procedure contacted the Northern Command of the Army at York. This was forwarded to Macready for assessments. Two squadrons of cavalry, up to 400 soldiers, were held on standby in York, only ninety minutes by train from Hull.[5] However, these were not needed and on July 4 most strikers accepted the original settlement rejected the previous week and returned to work. The Metropolitans left immediately though other imported police stayed on until June 17. Like other leading northern towns, Hull received troops, two battalions of infantry, in August 1911 to deal with the rail strike. Drawing on the experience of June and July a cruiser H.M.S. ‘Attentive’ sailed to Hull to guard the dock gates from interference. It stayed until August 24.[6]
It was estimated that £300,000 worth of cargo [equivalent to £16.5 million today] had been delayed, some of which had naturally rotted beyond use. Churchill praised the mayor’s action in requesting help, but the council was shocked at the bill for the Metropolitans. After four days Hull had had to foot their normal pay as well as the special duty money. The ordinary pay per day for a police constable was 8s 5d and the special pay 12s [total per day is equivalent to £60 now]; police inspectors received twice as much. There had already been problems with local authorities in Glamorgan not paying for police sent to the area the previous November. Hull’s position attracted similar attention. It could be argued that such large bills for importing police encouraged other mayors to call for troops, who were funded by central government, rather than police on the first occasion. [7]
References
[1] Keith Brooker, The Hull Strikes of 1911, (Beverley, Yorkshire, 1979), pp. 1, 4, 6, 9.
[2] Brooker, p. 10; Lord George Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes, (London, 1920), pp. 148-150.
[3] National Archives [henceforward NA], HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 5, Under Secretary of State, Home Office [Sir Edward Troup] to Mayor of Hull, undated [28 June 1911?]; sub-file 10, General Shipowners’ Society to Home Secretary, 29 June 1911; sub-file 4, Under Secretary of State, Home Office to Mayor Hull, undated [27 June 1911?]; sub-file 24, J.S. Taylor to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1 July 1 1911.
[4] NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 13, Russian Embassy to Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs [in French; diplomatic correspondence at this time was often carried out in French and as a result it is often difficult to find English language versions of treaties that the UK signed], 30 June 1911, sub-file 5, Letter to Mr. Blackwell, 28 June 1911, sub-file 9, Mayor of Hull to Home Secretary, 29 June 1911; Brooker pp. 20, 22.
[5] NA, HO 45/210615, sub-file 19, S.W.H. to Home Secretary, June 30, 1911; sub-file 12, Memorandum [handwritten], I.R.W., June 30, 1911; sub-file 26a, G.R. Askwith to President of the Board of Trade, 2 July 1912 [sic, should be 1911].
[6] Brooker pp. 21-22; NA, HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 158, ‘Hull, 19 August 1911; Home Secretary to Mayor of Hull, undated [19 August 1911]; Admiralty to Home Office, 19 August, 1911; NA HO 45/10656, Sir Edward Troup to Secretary, Admiralty, 24 August 1911.
[7] NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 21, Letter to Mayor of Hull, undated [July 1911]; Mayor of Hull to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, July 1, 1911; sub-file 14, Home Secretary to Mayor of Hull, 30 June , 1911; Parliamentary Debates. Commons. 5th Series, 1911, vol. XXXVII, June 19 - July 7, 3 July 1911, cols. 791-2.
The Great Unrest 1910-11. Part 4: Action in South Wales
South Wales saw the most sustained striking and rioting in this period. During 1910-11 the whole region became a special military district overseen initially by Major-General Nevil Macready and then by Lieutenant-Colonel George Freeth. It saw the widest range of types of unrest with strikes and riots in the mining valleys, at the port of Cardiff and as a result of the national railway strike of August 1911. It also witnessed race riots against citizens of Jewish and Chinese origin, riots by black seamen and by middle class people against police brought into the region. Despite the myth, no-one was shot dead during the riots at Tonypandy, but two rioters (not strikers) were shot dead at Llanelly (now known more commonly as Llanelli) during the railway strike; two others were injured and other rioters died when they set light to a railway carriage containing detonators.
Action and Reaction in South Wales
The incident which is seen as marking the beginning of the period of ‘Great Labour Unrest’ was the riots in Tonypandy, Glamorgan in November 1910. Barbara Weinberger and Anthony Mor O’Brien do highlight the government’s intervention in the Newport dock strike in May 1910. However, as the government was unwilling to intervene to protect blackleg labour, this strike did not see the rioting that subsequent disputes were to witness.
Industrial action erupted in September 1910 across the South Wales mining districts over pay for working awkward seams; the strike became official on 1 November 1910. The rank-and-file miners were militant and were angered by the use of blackleg labour and their perception of the local police as a strike-breaking force. As Weinberger shows, that this was a fair view, particularly as the chief constable of Glamorgan, Captain Lionel Lindsay, openly aligned himself with coal owners’ interests and saw any resistance to their policies as rebellion. In addition, in contrast to other strike locations where the council offered a different focus of power to that of the leading employers, the mine owners had a monopoly of economic and political power in the valleys.[1]
Following established policy, Lindsay imported 142 police from other forces to help face gangs trying to spread the strike. On 8 November, following police attempts to disperse a crowd, substantial rioting broke out in Tonypandy. One man was killed by police during the rioting. The rising tension had already provoked a local magistrate to requisition military force, as had happened during the 1893 and 1898 strikes in the area. O’Brien feels that Lindsay did not call on military forces in Brecon or Cardiff because they may have had local affiliations making them reluctant to oppose strikers. Furthermore, O’Brien believes Lindsay, acting on his own initiative rather than through a magistrate, would have angered the War Secretary, Lord Haldane. Though he adopted a very bullish approach, in fact, Lindsay followed the procedure that Haldane had approved when presenting to the 1908 select committee looking at these issues. Lindsay telegraphed army headquarters in Shrewsbury, Chester and Salisbury Plain, rather than approaching local units. It was up to Army Commands as to the nature of the troops sent.[2]
Possibly, given the way that troops and police had effectively come under the direct control of mine owners in previous disputes in this area and used to carry out provocative action, Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, intervened and instead sent 270 Metropolitan police, 70 of whom were mounted. As O’Brien notes, Haldane, concurred with the Home Office action, and, being in ill-health, was happy to let Churchill take charge. Though there were no subsequent riots, unrest continued and the police faced up to 7-9000 demonstrators over subsequent weeks.[3] Sustained rioting did lead Churchill to subsequently despatch troops, but these were billeted away from turbulent areas. Fearing clashes between troops and strikers encouraged him to be cautious and to enlist help in finding a resolution.
Importantly, Tonypandy established the characteristics of the coming riots across Britain. An often overlooked precedent is the fact that the Rhondda Valley effectively became a military occupation zone under Major (brevet Lieutenant-Colonel from August 1911) George Freeth, initially under Major-General Sir Nevil Macready, but then in his own right.[4] His troops remained in South Wales until August 1911 and Freeth was well positioned to tackle the subsequent unrest such as the Cardiff dock strike and riots associated with the national rail strike. This model of a designated strike area with an officer able to dispatch forces where necessary, was applied across the country during the rail strike. O’Brien sees Churchill as having become convinced by the experiences of South Wales, to use the Army instead of police all in riot situations.[5] This is not borne out by subsequent events, especially in Hull. The continuing problem continued to be, the relative small number of police available and their expense when imported into a different area. In subsequent unrest, military units continued, as had been determined in 1908, to be the last resort, whatever local magistrates might demand.
It was the riots connected with the mining dispute in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales, which seemed to herald the period of great unrest. For almost a year a strike area, overseen by military forces was retained not only in the mining valleys. but also towns such as Cardiff and Newport. As events turned out, this was a sensible precaution as the region was convulsed by some of the worst rioting of this period. After the Tonypandy riots, the mining districts remained quiet but riots arose the following summer in Cardiff associated with the dock strike, at Llanelly during the railway strike and the apparent anti-Semitic riots at a number of towns following the railway strike.
In July 1911, with Askwith and Macready dealing with the situation in Salford, violence broke out during the Cardiff dock strike. The strike, which started on 14 June 1911, did not show any tendency towards violence until the afternoon of 18 July. Protests arose as non-union labour was being used to unload ships. At the docks, up to a thousand people began attacking warehouses and then the firemen sent to extinguish the blazes which were started. Local police, made up of the city constabulary, but also the separate dock and Cardiff railway company police, were able to clear rioters from around the docks. The local authorities followed procedure and enlisted what help they could with thirty police each coming from the Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire and Methyr Tydfil forces. Other neighbouring constabularies soon had their own problems with which to deal.
Large-scale meetings continued in the following days and 220 Metropolitan police were sent along with troops diverted from the mining districts. The police were being stretched thin, especially to cover areas such as the Barry Docks, away from the city. With Freeth commanding forces inland, he was able to dispatch two battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers to Cardiff and Barry. However, as he did, rioting again flared up in the mining valleys and units of the Loyal North Lancashire and Somerset Light Infantry regiments were sent to black spots throughout the region.[6]
In the days after 18 July, rioting turned from the dockside to targeting the city’s Chinese community and then, in the most serious riots on 22 July, at the Metropolitan police themselves, now stationed in Cardiff. A Chinese crew was escorted through the town by police on July 19 which provoked attacks on Chinese properties the following day. The strike continued but Askwith could not intervene as no side had asked him to do so. He stood ready to go to Cardiff whilst the situation deteriorated and the city’s strike committee blocked the movement of flour in the city, thus hitting the bread supply.[7]
On 20 July, having attacked various Chinese in the streets, over a thousand rioters surrounded Chinese laundries in the city and stoned them until all the windows were broken. Despite the presence of 220 Metropolitan Police and a battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers in the city to supplement the city police, the rioters were just followed around without intervention as they attacked laundries and Chinese they encountered in the street.
In just a few hours of race riots over £83 worth [£5,000 at today’s values] of clothing was destroyed and insurance claims from Chinese properties attacked, both laundries and boarding houses, topped £710 [nowadays worth £40,000]. It is easy to see where such attitudes came from. Chinese sailors were the only ethnic group of sailors who did not go on strike. They tended to be isolated in their own community; easy to identify and locate for attack. Writing to the Home Secretary and the President of the Board of Trade, Ben Tillett, general secretary of the Dock, Wharf Riverside and General Workers Union, part of the National Transport Workers Federation demanded ‘Chinese and so called Free-labour must go’ and that there was a sound ‘reason for the public to turn the Liberals out of office seeing that they have brought the Chinaman to oust the British worker’. It would be difficult to argue that such attitudes held by a respected trade union leader did not stoke up the racial violence seen in Cardiff.[8] Tillett's racism is ironic given that the Cardiff Chinese population was well established and Chinese sailors had not been brought in to break the strike, they had simply not struck in the first place. Given the union leader's attitude it would have been no surprise that the Chinese sailors were not unionised.
Tensions remained high even after the dock strike had finished with a riot among black British seamen who had been laid off. Having gone for seven to eight weeks without work around 400 surrounded the Board of Trade offices in the city on 16 August. They claimed that, as British subjects, they had more right to be chosen for employment than their Greek, Spanish or Italian counterparts who ships’ officers had begun to favour since the strike. Police broke the demonstration with baton charges, hospitalising seven protestors.[9]
Rioting with a racial aspect was not confined to Cardiff. On Saturday 19 August 1911, the same night as rioting rocked Llanelly farther West in Carmarthenshire, towns across Monmouthshire[10], inland from Cardiff, were hit by rioting which, at least initially, targeted Jewish shops. The Jewish population of South Wales was small, only around 5,000 in 1914. In Tredegar, where the rioting started there were only 150 Jews in 1911, less than 1 percent of the town’s population. The Jews were primarily shopkeepers, though Joseph Cohen, who was blamed by police for provoking the riot through raising rents, was the owner of a mineral water factory as well as housing. Of the eighteen Jewish shops in the town, sixteen were wrecked and looted on the first night. Cohen claimed that police had ignored his warnings, but, in turn, he had refused military protection and had fled to London, where he was granted an interview at the Home Office and appears as a key source of information for the government. [11]
With over 200 rioters, the local police force of nine constables was overwhelmed. Tredegar fell within the broad reach of Lieutenant-Colonel Freeth’s area and so he sent 170 soldiers, a mix of troops from the Somerset Light Infantry and the Worcestershire regiments. As the days passed, rioting continued at Tredegar and spread to Ebbw Vale and to Rhymney which had only two policemen on duty at any one time. A squadron of the 4th Hussars and a further 180 more infantry of the Worcestershire Regiment were brought in. These saw action bayonet charging stone-throwing rioters. Rioters who were arrested had to be kept under military guard, as there were too few police. Despite the extent of the rioting and the involvement of around 500 soldiers, injuries were not severe. After nine months of dealing with sporadic unrest in South Wales, Freeth’s forces were pretty experienced at working in this anti-riot role.[12]
Though members of the Jewish Boards of Deputies and of Guardians in London warned the government that there would be further attacks on Jewish property and some Jewish shops were damaged, as W.D. Rubinstein notes, after the first riot on 19 August, only four more Jewish shops were attacked, a fraction of the Gentile ones which were looted. In addition, eight of the towns where rioting took place on 22 August, such as Cwm, Victoria, and Waunllwyd, had no Jewish residents at all. As was pointed out at the time, no Jewish people were attacked nor was the synagogue in Tredegar. However, there was clearly a fear that anti-Semitic attacks would occur and it was reported that hundreds of Jewish, as well as other residents, left the area.[13]
As Colin Holmes states, it is often noted when looking at unrest that people act when they feel the rules of the ‘moral economy’ have been breached. The riots which wracked South Wales seemed to have stemmed from the fear that the strikes were allowing shopkeepers to push up prices at a time when real wages were declining. Rubinstein notes the hostility to plutocrats in Wales at the time, as had been the case during the Boer War ten years earlier. The riot is a way of demonstrating to traders the parameters of what customers will permit. The rioting partly came from greed, as Victor Bosanquet, the chief constable noted, even ‘respectable’ people stole ‘all they could lay their hand on’. The rioting in Tredegar and the surrounding towns inflicted £16,000 worth of damage [£883,000 at today’s values]. Unusually for Britain of the time, for a brief moment rioting appeared to be acceptable behaviour and racial tensions which had bubbled away previously now broke through to the surface. However, as Rubinstein notes, the actions of a few hundred individuals have to be set against the continuing support the Welsh gave to Jews.[14]
Though the racial elements of the rioting attracted attention, the Head Constable of Cardiff was more shocked at the hostility of the city’s middle classes to the Metropolitan police stationed there. Large numbers of spectators gathered wherever there were disturbances, this occurred at all the riots discussed in this article, but beyond that, imported police were liable to attack whenever they appeared in Cardiff. They were stoned from ‘respectable’ houses. The skating rink where they were billeted in Cardiff was surrounded by 3-4,000 rioters who forced the Metropolitan police officers out. Two closely avoided death when masonry was thrown at them from a roof.
Not only did the imported police have to contend with such attacks, there were a clutch of malicious complaints against them after they had been withdrawn from Cardiff. These included accusations of assaults on bystanders and that the Metropolitan policemen had been drunk. The Home Office investigated the complaints in detail but determined that they had no foundation in fact and felt that the police had been restrained in breaking up what were clearly serious riots. The reason for the hostility towards the police by those not directly involved in the strike can only be speculated upon. Like the Chinese, these offices were an easily identifiable target for the anger of the population of the city. The rioters came from across the social spectrum so the explanation cannot really be found in the ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality prevalent at the time, bar in the sense of the local community being angered at any outsiders disturbing their freedom to riot, a right that many in the country at the time felt was a legitimate one. As in most places in Britain, by the end of the summer, this sentiment had run its course, never to revive.[15]
It is clear from the violence in Cardiff, as elsewhere, that much of the unrest was only tangentially, or at least only initially related, to the strikes prevailing at the time. Less than a month after the Cardiff riots more violence was seen during and after the national railway strike which fitted this pattern. At Llanelly (known since 1963 as Llanelli) on 19 August 1911 two rioters, neither a railway man, were shot dead. Striking railway men had, in fact, tried to stop the mob, mainly of tinplate workers, from stoning the police and soldiers. None of the four looters, who died later that day in Llanelly, when a wagon containing detonators was set alight, were railway workers.[16] Observation of similar behaviour came from Lieutenant-Colonel Lee based in the South Midland Strike Area who noted the destruction of the Portishead Junction signal box, outside Bristol in the South-West England, was carried out by ‘hooligans’ rather than striking railwaymen.[17]
There seems no reason for the army officers to lie about the membership of the crowds. Studying the unrest between 1910-1913 it becomes clear that, though violence and vandalism were associated with the industrial unrest, and, in cases such as attacks on collieries and docks was carried out as part of the strike, much of the violence was unrelated and done by people not from the striking industry. This is reinforced by Geary who points out that the main target for strikers was preventing blackleg labour from getting to work and not in destroying property or machinery.[18] However, it is clear that there was some additional social trend afoot which led to such a range of people being involved in rioting. The temperature was 124.1°F (51.1°C) in the sunshine in Cardiff on 17 August 1911. The heat, though, cannot simply explain why usually law-abiding people turned to violence, vandalism and arson.[19]
Though farther West than Cardiff and Tonypandy, Llanelly also fell within the South Wales strike area. Dean Hopkin, in his study of the Llanelly incident, shows how the town was a peaceful one and only around half of the 535 local railway men were members of a union. However, pickets started at 1,000 people and rose to a peak of 5,000. Llanelly was an easy target. Unlike other major Welsh stations, it was not on a rise. There were level crossings both sides of the station which made picketing easy. In addition, the route from London to Fishguard, a main port for traffic to Ireland, which passed through Llanelly, was a busy, profitable one. The local police force had lent constables to both Tonypandy and Cardiff to deal with their unrest, leaving only eighteen police officers in the town.[20]
Pickets at the level crossings easily held up trains. Despite the return of all Llanelly police to the town they were clearly outnumbered. Police, and later 120 Loyal North Lancashires, brought from recent duty at Barry Docks, were unable to keep the line open. Macready sent in an additional 250 troops. The picketing fell away and services resumed. It was on the Saturday evening with the public houses having been closed early, that the violence escalated. A train was halted, disabled and its driver beaten, before 80 soldiers of the Worcester regiment were sent in. This force was probably too small to deal with the hundreds of rioters who were above the line which ran through a cutting at this point. The soldiers were stoned by 150-200 rioters.
In line with the 1908 select committee’s views, after the commanding officer had spoken with some of the rioters, a bugle was sounded and the Riot Act read. After a minute’s pause, five shots were fired, killing two men who had been taunting the soldiers and injuring two others. One shot was accidentally discharged. Only five shots were intentionally fired with fifteen seconds delay between each. The two men who were fatally shot were hit in the chest, the second whilst claiming that the round were blank. The use of blanks had been forbidden in riot situations. The third victim was shot through the neck and the fourth in the hand, but both men survived. The fact that five shots fired individually inflicted such casualties indicates the potential accuracy and impact of rifles of the time. As evidence given to the 1908 select committee noted, people could be killed 180 yards from firing and injured up to 400 yards away. The Llanelly incident shows how even a comparatively small number of troops could have decimated the rioters if they had fired volleys into the crowd. This was especially the case as the King’s Regulations advised shooting at the front of a crowd rather than over the heads. This approach was seen as reducing the potential to injure bystanders, but increased the likely casualties among rioters.[21]
One private among the Worcestershires at Llanelly deserted and fled across Wales until he was caught, hungry and exhausted 100 miles away. Rioting and looting continued throughout the night across town. Soldiers had to relieve the police station where the train driver had been taken, from siege by rioters. Warehouses as well as wagons were systematically looted. Ultimately damage totalling £3,742 [worth £205,000 today] was done. The rioters were persistent and were only broken in the early hours of the morning by repeated bayonet charges by Sussex Regiment troops.[22]
Dean Hopkin notes that the looting was blamed on outsiders from neighbouring villages, though, in fact, they were from all the poor districts in and around Llanelly. The ‘railwaymen maintained a low profile in the activities of the picket’, so, as in Cardiff, one sees rioting by a ‘much wider cross-section of the community than was directly involved in the strike.’ Women had been involved in the rioting, as had been the case in Tonypandy and in Cardiff. The parochial anger at being assaulted by the authorities is another similarity to Cardiff. People involved in rioting rather than looting, after the shootings, felt their cause legitimate and continued to call for the indictment of all the magistrates and senior police. As in Tonypandy the previous year, in some cases, looting was focused on particular individuals. Shops and property belonging to magistrates received particular attention as the people blamed them for the incidents, especially bringing troops into the towns. Hopkin writes that the population of the town were ashamed of what had happened. Interestingly, what happened there may have cooled the temper of rioters elsewhere, for example, as noticed by the chief constable of Hull.[23]
References
[1] Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain 1906-1926, (Oxford, 1991), pp. 44-5, 209; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), pp. 27-8.
[2] Weinberger, pp. 42-3; Anthony Mor O’ Brien, ‘Churchill and the Tonypandy Riots’, Welsh History Review, vol. 17 (1994), p. 74, David Smith, ‘Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of Community’, Past and Present, vol. 87 (1980), p. 159.
[3] Roger Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes, 1893 to 1985, (Cambridge, 1985), p. 118; O’Brien, p. 78; Smith, pp. 163-5, 168, 180.
[4] Who Was Who 1941-50, (London, 1967), p. 411.
[5] O’Brien, p. 92.
[6] National Archives, [henceforward NA], HO 45/10649/2120615, sub-file 134, Police reports to Head Constable, especially Superintendent George Durston’s, 29 July 1911; sub-file 107, Chief Constable [of Glamorgan, i.e. Captain Lionel Lindsay, rather than the head of the Cardiff Constabulary] to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 29 July 1911.
[7] NA, HO 45/10649/210615 sub-file 90, undated [26 July 1911?], Memorandum to Mr. Churchill; sub-file 81, ‘Diary of Cardiff Strike’, Major Freeth, 23 July 1911.
[8] South Wales Daily News, 9 July 1911, ‘Cardiff Laundry Raids’ [report of court cases against rioters]; Colin Holmes, ‘The Tredegar Riots of 1911: Anti-Jewish Disturbances in South Wales’, Welsh History Review, vol. 11, no. 2, (1982-3), p. 224 also briefly mentions other racial violence in South Wales aside from anti-Semitic attacks; NA, HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 77, ‘Minute’, undated [23 July 1911?], ‘Stations of Military in South Wales and Bristol Area’, undated [27 July 1911]; sub-file 137 Lew Yuk-lin, Chinese Legation to Sir Edward Grey [Foreign Secretary], 8 September 1911; sub-file 82, Ben Tillett to the Home Secretary and the President of the Board of Trade, ‘Manifesto. Transport Workers’ National Dispute’, 24 July 1911.
[9] The Times, 16 August 1911, ‘Negro Riot at Cardiff’.
[10] At this time, Monmouthshire was considered an English county though it is in what we could consider geographically to be Wales and laws, such as those on licensed premises were described as applying to ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’. Information provided by Association of British Counties.
[11] Geoffrey Alderman, ‘The Anti-Jewish Riots of August 1911 in South Wales’, Welsh History Review, vol. 6, no. 2, (1972-73), p. 191; Holmes, p. 215; NA, HO 144/1160/212987, ‘Diary of Events. South Wales Coal Strike. 21st August 1911’, Lt. Col. Freeth, 21 August 1911; sub-file 3a, ‘Statement of Mr. Joseph Cohen Regarding the Tredegar Riots’, A.S.W.
[12] NA 144/1160/212987, Freeth, ‘Diary. 21st August’; ‘Rioting at Tredegar’; A.S. Tallis (Presiding Magistrate) to W.S. Churchill, 21 August 1911; sub-file 3a, ‘Diary of Events, South Wales Strike Area 23rd August 1911’, 23 August 1911.
[13] NA, HO 144/1160/212987, Jewish Board of Deputies to Home Secretary August 22, 1911; Member of Jewish Board of Guardians to Home Office, 22 August 1911; Rubinstein, pp. 686-7, 692-3; The Times, 23 August 1911, ‘Renewed Riots in South Wales’.
[14] Holmes, p. 219; NA, HO 144/ 1160/212987/ sub-file 13, Victor Bosanquet to Home Secretary, October 25, 1911; Rubinstein pp. 667, 669, 673, 683.
[15] NA, HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 87, Chief Constable of Glamorgan [based in Cardiff] to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 23 July 1911; sub-file 86 Superintendent J. Olive to Metropolitan Police Commissioner [Sir E. Henry], 23 July 1911; sub-file 93, Complaint by Christopher W. Thompson, July 25, 1911; ‘Analysis of Complaint - Thompson’, 25 & 29 July 1911; sub-file 116, Analysis of Complaint’ [one for E. Cottle and one for J. Watt], 16 August 1911; Letter to James Parker, M.P., 30 August 1911.
[16] The Times, 30 August 1911, ‘The Llanelly Riots’; NA HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 206, ‘Diary of Events, South Wales Strike Area. 19th & 20th August 1911’, unsigned [Lieut.-Col. Freeth], 20 August 1911.
[17] NA, HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 243a, Lieutenant-Colonel Lee to Brigadier-General L.G. Drummond, 21 August 1911.
[18] Roger Geary, Policing Industrial Dispute, 1893 to 1985, (Cambridge, 1985), p.25.
[19] Dean R. Hopkin, ‘The Llanelli Riots’ in Welsh History Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (Dec. 1983), pp.491-2; NA, HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 171, ‘Diary of Events. South Wales Strike Area’, August 18, 1911; Chief Constable of Carmarthenshire to Home Secretary, 19 August, 1911.
[20] Hopkin, pp. 493-4.
[21] Hopkin, pp. 496-501; PRO, HO 45/10658/212470, sub-file 451, ‘Llanelly Riots. Copy Depositions Taken at Inquest’, undated; sub-file 474, McKenna to Llwellyn Williams, M.P., 5 August 1913. ‘Report of the Select Committee on Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbances”, 16 July 1908, Parliamentary Paper 236, collected in Reports from Committees. Session 29 January - 21 December 1908. Vol. 7 (2), p. 19; Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), pp. 125, 131, 135. Some in the crowd believed the soldiers were firing blanks, and others that they would not fire. This reinforces Major-General G.F. Browne’s concern of 1908 that it be clear that when a military unit arrived it was effectively saying ‘if we use our firearms it is to kill’ and Lord Haldane’s insistence that no blank rounds be issued.
[22]; The Times, August 25, 1911, ‘Soldier’s Refusal to Shoot a Rioter’; 30 August 1911, ‘The Llanelly Riots’ [which corrects the earlier article]. NA HO 45/10656/212470 sub-file 352, W.S.C. [Churchill] to Sir Edward Troup, 29 August 1911; NA HO 144/1022, ‘Extract from the King’s Regulations and Orders for the Army ...’, undated, especially paragraph 965.
[23] Hopkin, pp. 500, 502-4, 506-7, 510; Smith, p. 168; Babington, pp. 125, 131; NA HO 45/10658/212470 sub-file 294, ‘Hull’, Mr. Butterworth, 23 August 1911; NA, HO 45/10658/212470, sub-file 451, ‘Llanelly Riots. Copy Depositions Taken at Inquest’, undated; sub-file 474, McKenna to Llwellyn Williams, M.P., 5 August 1913; Select Committee, p. 19. Between 1869-1908 troops had fired 17 rounds at rioters killing 4 and wounding 11, the farthest being 400 yards away. In 1908 rounds were noted to be smaller, of higher velocity and more frangible if they hit masonry than had been the case in 1894.
Action and Reaction in South Wales
The incident which is seen as marking the beginning of the period of ‘Great Labour Unrest’ was the riots in Tonypandy, Glamorgan in November 1910. Barbara Weinberger and Anthony Mor O’Brien do highlight the government’s intervention in the Newport dock strike in May 1910. However, as the government was unwilling to intervene to protect blackleg labour, this strike did not see the rioting that subsequent disputes were to witness.
Industrial action erupted in September 1910 across the South Wales mining districts over pay for working awkward seams; the strike became official on 1 November 1910. The rank-and-file miners were militant and were angered by the use of blackleg labour and their perception of the local police as a strike-breaking force. As Weinberger shows, that this was a fair view, particularly as the chief constable of Glamorgan, Captain Lionel Lindsay, openly aligned himself with coal owners’ interests and saw any resistance to their policies as rebellion. In addition, in contrast to other strike locations where the council offered a different focus of power to that of the leading employers, the mine owners had a monopoly of economic and political power in the valleys.[1]
Following established policy, Lindsay imported 142 police from other forces to help face gangs trying to spread the strike. On 8 November, following police attempts to disperse a crowd, substantial rioting broke out in Tonypandy. One man was killed by police during the rioting. The rising tension had already provoked a local magistrate to requisition military force, as had happened during the 1893 and 1898 strikes in the area. O’Brien feels that Lindsay did not call on military forces in Brecon or Cardiff because they may have had local affiliations making them reluctant to oppose strikers. Furthermore, O’Brien believes Lindsay, acting on his own initiative rather than through a magistrate, would have angered the War Secretary, Lord Haldane. Though he adopted a very bullish approach, in fact, Lindsay followed the procedure that Haldane had approved when presenting to the 1908 select committee looking at these issues. Lindsay telegraphed army headquarters in Shrewsbury, Chester and Salisbury Plain, rather than approaching local units. It was up to Army Commands as to the nature of the troops sent.[2]
Possibly, given the way that troops and police had effectively come under the direct control of mine owners in previous disputes in this area and used to carry out provocative action, Winston Churchill, the Home Secretary, intervened and instead sent 270 Metropolitan police, 70 of whom were mounted. As O’Brien notes, Haldane, concurred with the Home Office action, and, being in ill-health, was happy to let Churchill take charge. Though there were no subsequent riots, unrest continued and the police faced up to 7-9000 demonstrators over subsequent weeks.[3] Sustained rioting did lead Churchill to subsequently despatch troops, but these were billeted away from turbulent areas. Fearing clashes between troops and strikers encouraged him to be cautious and to enlist help in finding a resolution.
Importantly, Tonypandy established the characteristics of the coming riots across Britain. An often overlooked precedent is the fact that the Rhondda Valley effectively became a military occupation zone under Major (brevet Lieutenant-Colonel from August 1911) George Freeth, initially under Major-General Sir Nevil Macready, but then in his own right.[4] His troops remained in South Wales until August 1911 and Freeth was well positioned to tackle the subsequent unrest such as the Cardiff dock strike and riots associated with the national rail strike. This model of a designated strike area with an officer able to dispatch forces where necessary, was applied across the country during the rail strike. O’Brien sees Churchill as having become convinced by the experiences of South Wales, to use the Army instead of police all in riot situations.[5] This is not borne out by subsequent events, especially in Hull. The continuing problem continued to be, the relative small number of police available and their expense when imported into a different area. In subsequent unrest, military units continued, as had been determined in 1908, to be the last resort, whatever local magistrates might demand.
It was the riots connected with the mining dispute in the Rhondda Valley of South Wales, which seemed to herald the period of great unrest. For almost a year a strike area, overseen by military forces was retained not only in the mining valleys. but also towns such as Cardiff and Newport. As events turned out, this was a sensible precaution as the region was convulsed by some of the worst rioting of this period. After the Tonypandy riots, the mining districts remained quiet but riots arose the following summer in Cardiff associated with the dock strike, at Llanelly during the railway strike and the apparent anti-Semitic riots at a number of towns following the railway strike.
In July 1911, with Askwith and Macready dealing with the situation in Salford, violence broke out during the Cardiff dock strike. The strike, which started on 14 June 1911, did not show any tendency towards violence until the afternoon of 18 July. Protests arose as non-union labour was being used to unload ships. At the docks, up to a thousand people began attacking warehouses and then the firemen sent to extinguish the blazes which were started. Local police, made up of the city constabulary, but also the separate dock and Cardiff railway company police, were able to clear rioters from around the docks. The local authorities followed procedure and enlisted what help they could with thirty police each coming from the Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire and Methyr Tydfil forces. Other neighbouring constabularies soon had their own problems with which to deal.
Large-scale meetings continued in the following days and 220 Metropolitan police were sent along with troops diverted from the mining districts. The police were being stretched thin, especially to cover areas such as the Barry Docks, away from the city. With Freeth commanding forces inland, he was able to dispatch two battalions of the Lancashire Fusiliers to Cardiff and Barry. However, as he did, rioting again flared up in the mining valleys and units of the Loyal North Lancashire and Somerset Light Infantry regiments were sent to black spots throughout the region.[6]
In the days after 18 July, rioting turned from the dockside to targeting the city’s Chinese community and then, in the most serious riots on 22 July, at the Metropolitan police themselves, now stationed in Cardiff. A Chinese crew was escorted through the town by police on July 19 which provoked attacks on Chinese properties the following day. The strike continued but Askwith could not intervene as no side had asked him to do so. He stood ready to go to Cardiff whilst the situation deteriorated and the city’s strike committee blocked the movement of flour in the city, thus hitting the bread supply.[7]
On 20 July, having attacked various Chinese in the streets, over a thousand rioters surrounded Chinese laundries in the city and stoned them until all the windows were broken. Despite the presence of 220 Metropolitan Police and a battalion of Lancashire Fusiliers in the city to supplement the city police, the rioters were just followed around without intervention as they attacked laundries and Chinese they encountered in the street.
In just a few hours of race riots over £83 worth [£5,000 at today’s values] of clothing was destroyed and insurance claims from Chinese properties attacked, both laundries and boarding houses, topped £710 [nowadays worth £40,000]. It is easy to see where such attitudes came from. Chinese sailors were the only ethnic group of sailors who did not go on strike. They tended to be isolated in their own community; easy to identify and locate for attack. Writing to the Home Secretary and the President of the Board of Trade, Ben Tillett, general secretary of the Dock, Wharf Riverside and General Workers Union, part of the National Transport Workers Federation demanded ‘Chinese and so called Free-labour must go’ and that there was a sound ‘reason for the public to turn the Liberals out of office seeing that they have brought the Chinaman to oust the British worker’. It would be difficult to argue that such attitudes held by a respected trade union leader did not stoke up the racial violence seen in Cardiff.[8] Tillett's racism is ironic given that the Cardiff Chinese population was well established and Chinese sailors had not been brought in to break the strike, they had simply not struck in the first place. Given the union leader's attitude it would have been no surprise that the Chinese sailors were not unionised.
Tensions remained high even after the dock strike had finished with a riot among black British seamen who had been laid off. Having gone for seven to eight weeks without work around 400 surrounded the Board of Trade offices in the city on 16 August. They claimed that, as British subjects, they had more right to be chosen for employment than their Greek, Spanish or Italian counterparts who ships’ officers had begun to favour since the strike. Police broke the demonstration with baton charges, hospitalising seven protestors.[9]
Rioting with a racial aspect was not confined to Cardiff. On Saturday 19 August 1911, the same night as rioting rocked Llanelly farther West in Carmarthenshire, towns across Monmouthshire[10], inland from Cardiff, were hit by rioting which, at least initially, targeted Jewish shops. The Jewish population of South Wales was small, only around 5,000 in 1914. In Tredegar, where the rioting started there were only 150 Jews in 1911, less than 1 percent of the town’s population. The Jews were primarily shopkeepers, though Joseph Cohen, who was blamed by police for provoking the riot through raising rents, was the owner of a mineral water factory as well as housing. Of the eighteen Jewish shops in the town, sixteen were wrecked and looted on the first night. Cohen claimed that police had ignored his warnings, but, in turn, he had refused military protection and had fled to London, where he was granted an interview at the Home Office and appears as a key source of information for the government. [11]
With over 200 rioters, the local police force of nine constables was overwhelmed. Tredegar fell within the broad reach of Lieutenant-Colonel Freeth’s area and so he sent 170 soldiers, a mix of troops from the Somerset Light Infantry and the Worcestershire regiments. As the days passed, rioting continued at Tredegar and spread to Ebbw Vale and to Rhymney which had only two policemen on duty at any one time. A squadron of the 4th Hussars and a further 180 more infantry of the Worcestershire Regiment were brought in. These saw action bayonet charging stone-throwing rioters. Rioters who were arrested had to be kept under military guard, as there were too few police. Despite the extent of the rioting and the involvement of around 500 soldiers, injuries were not severe. After nine months of dealing with sporadic unrest in South Wales, Freeth’s forces were pretty experienced at working in this anti-riot role.[12]
Though members of the Jewish Boards of Deputies and of Guardians in London warned the government that there would be further attacks on Jewish property and some Jewish shops were damaged, as W.D. Rubinstein notes, after the first riot on 19 August, only four more Jewish shops were attacked, a fraction of the Gentile ones which were looted. In addition, eight of the towns where rioting took place on 22 August, such as Cwm, Victoria, and Waunllwyd, had no Jewish residents at all. As was pointed out at the time, no Jewish people were attacked nor was the synagogue in Tredegar. However, there was clearly a fear that anti-Semitic attacks would occur and it was reported that hundreds of Jewish, as well as other residents, left the area.[13]
As Colin Holmes states, it is often noted when looking at unrest that people act when they feel the rules of the ‘moral economy’ have been breached. The riots which wracked South Wales seemed to have stemmed from the fear that the strikes were allowing shopkeepers to push up prices at a time when real wages were declining. Rubinstein notes the hostility to plutocrats in Wales at the time, as had been the case during the Boer War ten years earlier. The riot is a way of demonstrating to traders the parameters of what customers will permit. The rioting partly came from greed, as Victor Bosanquet, the chief constable noted, even ‘respectable’ people stole ‘all they could lay their hand on’. The rioting in Tredegar and the surrounding towns inflicted £16,000 worth of damage [£883,000 at today’s values]. Unusually for Britain of the time, for a brief moment rioting appeared to be acceptable behaviour and racial tensions which had bubbled away previously now broke through to the surface. However, as Rubinstein notes, the actions of a few hundred individuals have to be set against the continuing support the Welsh gave to Jews.[14]
Though the racial elements of the rioting attracted attention, the Head Constable of Cardiff was more shocked at the hostility of the city’s middle classes to the Metropolitan police stationed there. Large numbers of spectators gathered wherever there were disturbances, this occurred at all the riots discussed in this article, but beyond that, imported police were liable to attack whenever they appeared in Cardiff. They were stoned from ‘respectable’ houses. The skating rink where they were billeted in Cardiff was surrounded by 3-4,000 rioters who forced the Metropolitan police officers out. Two closely avoided death when masonry was thrown at them from a roof.
Not only did the imported police have to contend with such attacks, there were a clutch of malicious complaints against them after they had been withdrawn from Cardiff. These included accusations of assaults on bystanders and that the Metropolitan policemen had been drunk. The Home Office investigated the complaints in detail but determined that they had no foundation in fact and felt that the police had been restrained in breaking up what were clearly serious riots. The reason for the hostility towards the police by those not directly involved in the strike can only be speculated upon. Like the Chinese, these offices were an easily identifiable target for the anger of the population of the city. The rioters came from across the social spectrum so the explanation cannot really be found in the ‘them’ and ‘us’ mentality prevalent at the time, bar in the sense of the local community being angered at any outsiders disturbing their freedom to riot, a right that many in the country at the time felt was a legitimate one. As in most places in Britain, by the end of the summer, this sentiment had run its course, never to revive.[15]
It is clear from the violence in Cardiff, as elsewhere, that much of the unrest was only tangentially, or at least only initially related, to the strikes prevailing at the time. Less than a month after the Cardiff riots more violence was seen during and after the national railway strike which fitted this pattern. At Llanelly (known since 1963 as Llanelli) on 19 August 1911 two rioters, neither a railway man, were shot dead. Striking railway men had, in fact, tried to stop the mob, mainly of tinplate workers, from stoning the police and soldiers. None of the four looters, who died later that day in Llanelly, when a wagon containing detonators was set alight, were railway workers.[16] Observation of similar behaviour came from Lieutenant-Colonel Lee based in the South Midland Strike Area who noted the destruction of the Portishead Junction signal box, outside Bristol in the South-West England, was carried out by ‘hooligans’ rather than striking railwaymen.[17]
There seems no reason for the army officers to lie about the membership of the crowds. Studying the unrest between 1910-1913 it becomes clear that, though violence and vandalism were associated with the industrial unrest, and, in cases such as attacks on collieries and docks was carried out as part of the strike, much of the violence was unrelated and done by people not from the striking industry. This is reinforced by Geary who points out that the main target for strikers was preventing blackleg labour from getting to work and not in destroying property or machinery.[18] However, it is clear that there was some additional social trend afoot which led to such a range of people being involved in rioting. The temperature was 124.1°F (51.1°C) in the sunshine in Cardiff on 17 August 1911. The heat, though, cannot simply explain why usually law-abiding people turned to violence, vandalism and arson.[19]
Though farther West than Cardiff and Tonypandy, Llanelly also fell within the South Wales strike area. Dean Hopkin, in his study of the Llanelly incident, shows how the town was a peaceful one and only around half of the 535 local railway men were members of a union. However, pickets started at 1,000 people and rose to a peak of 5,000. Llanelly was an easy target. Unlike other major Welsh stations, it was not on a rise. There were level crossings both sides of the station which made picketing easy. In addition, the route from London to Fishguard, a main port for traffic to Ireland, which passed through Llanelly, was a busy, profitable one. The local police force had lent constables to both Tonypandy and Cardiff to deal with their unrest, leaving only eighteen police officers in the town.[20]
Pickets at the level crossings easily held up trains. Despite the return of all Llanelly police to the town they were clearly outnumbered. Police, and later 120 Loyal North Lancashires, brought from recent duty at Barry Docks, were unable to keep the line open. Macready sent in an additional 250 troops. The picketing fell away and services resumed. It was on the Saturday evening with the public houses having been closed early, that the violence escalated. A train was halted, disabled and its driver beaten, before 80 soldiers of the Worcester regiment were sent in. This force was probably too small to deal with the hundreds of rioters who were above the line which ran through a cutting at this point. The soldiers were stoned by 150-200 rioters.
In line with the 1908 select committee’s views, after the commanding officer had spoken with some of the rioters, a bugle was sounded and the Riot Act read. After a minute’s pause, five shots were fired, killing two men who had been taunting the soldiers and injuring two others. One shot was accidentally discharged. Only five shots were intentionally fired with fifteen seconds delay between each. The two men who were fatally shot were hit in the chest, the second whilst claiming that the round were blank. The use of blanks had been forbidden in riot situations. The third victim was shot through the neck and the fourth in the hand, but both men survived. The fact that five shots fired individually inflicted such casualties indicates the potential accuracy and impact of rifles of the time. As evidence given to the 1908 select committee noted, people could be killed 180 yards from firing and injured up to 400 yards away. The Llanelly incident shows how even a comparatively small number of troops could have decimated the rioters if they had fired volleys into the crowd. This was especially the case as the King’s Regulations advised shooting at the front of a crowd rather than over the heads. This approach was seen as reducing the potential to injure bystanders, but increased the likely casualties among rioters.[21]
One private among the Worcestershires at Llanelly deserted and fled across Wales until he was caught, hungry and exhausted 100 miles away. Rioting and looting continued throughout the night across town. Soldiers had to relieve the police station where the train driver had been taken, from siege by rioters. Warehouses as well as wagons were systematically looted. Ultimately damage totalling £3,742 [worth £205,000 today] was done. The rioters were persistent and were only broken in the early hours of the morning by repeated bayonet charges by Sussex Regiment troops.[22]
Dean Hopkin notes that the looting was blamed on outsiders from neighbouring villages, though, in fact, they were from all the poor districts in and around Llanelly. The ‘railwaymen maintained a low profile in the activities of the picket’, so, as in Cardiff, one sees rioting by a ‘much wider cross-section of the community than was directly involved in the strike.’ Women had been involved in the rioting, as had been the case in Tonypandy and in Cardiff. The parochial anger at being assaulted by the authorities is another similarity to Cardiff. People involved in rioting rather than looting, after the shootings, felt their cause legitimate and continued to call for the indictment of all the magistrates and senior police. As in Tonypandy the previous year, in some cases, looting was focused on particular individuals. Shops and property belonging to magistrates received particular attention as the people blamed them for the incidents, especially bringing troops into the towns. Hopkin writes that the population of the town were ashamed of what had happened. Interestingly, what happened there may have cooled the temper of rioters elsewhere, for example, as noticed by the chief constable of Hull.[23]
References
[1] Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain 1906-1926, (Oxford, 1991), pp. 44-5, 209; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), pp. 27-8.
[2] Weinberger, pp. 42-3; Anthony Mor O’ Brien, ‘Churchill and the Tonypandy Riots’, Welsh History Review, vol. 17 (1994), p. 74, David Smith, ‘Tonypandy 1910: Definitions of Community’, Past and Present, vol. 87 (1980), p. 159.
[3] Roger Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes, 1893 to 1985, (Cambridge, 1985), p. 118; O’Brien, p. 78; Smith, pp. 163-5, 168, 180.
[4] Who Was Who 1941-50, (London, 1967), p. 411.
[5] O’Brien, p. 92.
[6] National Archives, [henceforward NA], HO 45/10649/2120615, sub-file 134, Police reports to Head Constable, especially Superintendent George Durston’s, 29 July 1911; sub-file 107, Chief Constable [of Glamorgan, i.e. Captain Lionel Lindsay, rather than the head of the Cardiff Constabulary] to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 29 July 1911.
[7] NA, HO 45/10649/210615 sub-file 90, undated [26 July 1911?], Memorandum to Mr. Churchill; sub-file 81, ‘Diary of Cardiff Strike’, Major Freeth, 23 July 1911.
[8] South Wales Daily News, 9 July 1911, ‘Cardiff Laundry Raids’ [report of court cases against rioters]; Colin Holmes, ‘The Tredegar Riots of 1911: Anti-Jewish Disturbances in South Wales’, Welsh History Review, vol. 11, no. 2, (1982-3), p. 224 also briefly mentions other racial violence in South Wales aside from anti-Semitic attacks; NA, HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 77, ‘Minute’, undated [23 July 1911?], ‘Stations of Military in South Wales and Bristol Area’, undated [27 July 1911]; sub-file 137 Lew Yuk-lin, Chinese Legation to Sir Edward Grey [Foreign Secretary], 8 September 1911; sub-file 82, Ben Tillett to the Home Secretary and the President of the Board of Trade, ‘Manifesto. Transport Workers’ National Dispute’, 24 July 1911.
[9] The Times, 16 August 1911, ‘Negro Riot at Cardiff’.
[10] At this time, Monmouthshire was considered an English county though it is in what we could consider geographically to be Wales and laws, such as those on licensed premises were described as applying to ‘Wales and Monmouthshire’. Information provided by Association of British Counties.
[11] Geoffrey Alderman, ‘The Anti-Jewish Riots of August 1911 in South Wales’, Welsh History Review, vol. 6, no. 2, (1972-73), p. 191; Holmes, p. 215; NA, HO 144/1160/212987, ‘Diary of Events. South Wales Coal Strike. 21st August 1911’, Lt. Col. Freeth, 21 August 1911; sub-file 3a, ‘Statement of Mr. Joseph Cohen Regarding the Tredegar Riots’, A.S.W.
[12] NA 144/1160/212987, Freeth, ‘Diary. 21st August’; ‘Rioting at Tredegar’; A.S. Tallis (Presiding Magistrate) to W.S. Churchill, 21 August 1911; sub-file 3a, ‘Diary of Events, South Wales Strike Area 23rd August 1911’, 23 August 1911.
[13] NA, HO 144/1160/212987, Jewish Board of Deputies to Home Secretary August 22, 1911; Member of Jewish Board of Guardians to Home Office, 22 August 1911; Rubinstein, pp. 686-7, 692-3; The Times, 23 August 1911, ‘Renewed Riots in South Wales’.
[14] Holmes, p. 219; NA, HO 144/ 1160/212987/ sub-file 13, Victor Bosanquet to Home Secretary, October 25, 1911; Rubinstein pp. 667, 669, 673, 683.
[15] NA, HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 87, Chief Constable of Glamorgan [based in Cardiff] to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 23 July 1911; sub-file 86 Superintendent J. Olive to Metropolitan Police Commissioner [Sir E. Henry], 23 July 1911; sub-file 93, Complaint by Christopher W. Thompson, July 25, 1911; ‘Analysis of Complaint - Thompson’, 25 & 29 July 1911; sub-file 116, Analysis of Complaint’ [one for E. Cottle and one for J. Watt], 16 August 1911; Letter to James Parker, M.P., 30 August 1911.
[16] The Times, 30 August 1911, ‘The Llanelly Riots’; NA HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 206, ‘Diary of Events, South Wales Strike Area. 19th & 20th August 1911’, unsigned [Lieut.-Col. Freeth], 20 August 1911.
[17] NA, HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 243a, Lieutenant-Colonel Lee to Brigadier-General L.G. Drummond, 21 August 1911.
[18] Roger Geary, Policing Industrial Dispute, 1893 to 1985, (Cambridge, 1985), p.25.
[19] Dean R. Hopkin, ‘The Llanelli Riots’ in Welsh History Review, vol. 11, no. 4 (Dec. 1983), pp.491-2; NA, HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 171, ‘Diary of Events. South Wales Strike Area’, August 18, 1911; Chief Constable of Carmarthenshire to Home Secretary, 19 August, 1911.
[20] Hopkin, pp. 493-4.
[21] Hopkin, pp. 496-501; PRO, HO 45/10658/212470, sub-file 451, ‘Llanelly Riots. Copy Depositions Taken at Inquest’, undated; sub-file 474, McKenna to Llwellyn Williams, M.P., 5 August 1913. ‘Report of the Select Committee on Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbances”, 16 July 1908, Parliamentary Paper 236, collected in Reports from Committees. Session 29 January - 21 December 1908. Vol. 7 (2), p. 19; Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), pp. 125, 131, 135. Some in the crowd believed the soldiers were firing blanks, and others that they would not fire. This reinforces Major-General G.F. Browne’s concern of 1908 that it be clear that when a military unit arrived it was effectively saying ‘if we use our firearms it is to kill’ and Lord Haldane’s insistence that no blank rounds be issued.
[22]; The Times, August 25, 1911, ‘Soldier’s Refusal to Shoot a Rioter’; 30 August 1911, ‘The Llanelly Riots’ [which corrects the earlier article]. NA HO 45/10656/212470 sub-file 352, W.S.C. [Churchill] to Sir Edward Troup, 29 August 1911; NA HO 144/1022, ‘Extract from the King’s Regulations and Orders for the Army ...’, undated, especially paragraph 965.
[23] Hopkin, pp. 500, 502-4, 506-7, 510; Smith, p. 168; Babington, pp. 125, 131; NA HO 45/10658/212470 sub-file 294, ‘Hull’, Mr. Butterworth, 23 August 1911; NA, HO 45/10658/212470, sub-file 451, ‘Llanelly Riots. Copy Depositions Taken at Inquest’, undated; sub-file 474, McKenna to Llwellyn Williams, M.P., 5 August 1913; Select Committee, p. 19. Between 1869-1908 troops had fired 17 rounds at rioters killing 4 and wounding 11, the farthest being 400 yards away. In 1908 rounds were noted to be smaller, of higher velocity and more frangible if they hit masonry than had been the case in 1894.
The Great Unrest 1910-11. Part 3: Government Policy on Reacting to Strikes and Riots
This section looks at how before 1910 the government had established its policy on reacting to serious strikes and to riots. This policy was harsh and saw the use of military and naval forces as a natural response. Partly this was due to the very fragmented nature of the British police force at the time. Particular directions to the military about opening fire on the front row of crowds to disperse them could easily have led to massacres during large demonstrations. Fortunately this policy was put into effect on the ground by Major-General Nevil Macready who was given command over all military and (controversially) police forces in the areas of the country facing greatest unrest. His experience of policing in Egypt and South Africa meant he adopted a calm and measured approach which sought to stop riots and emphasise their illegality, whilst not causing casualties. If many other men had been appointed to this role, the UK would have seen far greater loss of life in this period.
In this section I particularly challenge historians like Anthony Mor O'Brien, Roger Geary and Jane Morgan who see a radical shift in government policy in 1911 towards actions they see at least trying to suppress 'peaceful' industrial protest and at worst as being illegal. I show how in fact the policy that had been set down in 1908 was carried out consistently right throughout this period. The government was not aiming to suppress the strikes, just to minimise the harm to individuals and property caused by the riots occurring at the same time. Owing to the lack of police at a local level the central government was compelled to intervene. Their actions were often supported by local strikers as a great deal of the unrest was actually caused by people unconnected to the particular strike. The anger Geary and Morgan felt at the Thatcher regime's real suppression of generally peaceful protest during the 1984-5 Miners' Strike led them to take a distorted view of the events of 1910-11. In fact their books show the difficulty in trying to sustain this story that there was an abrupt change in policy in 1911, something that has been picked up by subsequent historians, notably Barbara Weinberger and David Powell.
Government Policy: Establishing the Response to Disturbances
The continuity of governmental response over the preceding decades was emphasised by the Select Committee on Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbances reporting in July 1908, just two years before the Tonypandy riots which mark the start of the greatest unrest. It followed the shooting of two people, not strikers, during the 1907 Belfast dock strike. The committee considered civil authority powers in securing military aid and the responsibilities of military officers so engaged. The government was, in fact, in a potentially strong, but certainly unclear, position. Given the reluctance in the preceding decades to codify the government's powers, any action carried out to suppress unrest was ‘legal’ if it could be subsequently proven in court not to be inconsistent with civil law. Naturally, however, soldiers were apprehensive to act in such an uncertain environment, especially given the likely attitude of the community to certain actions.[1]
Policy had been established by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Riots in 1894 which followed the fatal shooting of two people during the 1893 Featherstone riot. The procedure was that a mayor or a magistrate, co-ordinating with the appropriate chief constable, applied to the nearest Army base for an appropriate force. Commanding officers reported to the War Office which could dispatch additional troops and involve the Admiralty, if required.[2]
The 1908 committee recommended little change. It re-emphasised that troops were the last resort. It did give greater weight to the discretion of chief and head constables, and commanding officers on the spot, in terms of what action should be taken, such as firing. During the unrest of the 1910s, chief constables resented the fact that, though the troops were supposed to be aiding local police, they remained under the control of their commanding officers. However, this was an important matter, as demonstrated during the St. George’s Plateau riot in Liverpool in 1911, when the officer on the spot refused demands that he oppose the rioters with his troops, knowing that such action could lead to a massacre. Though the committee advised that more alerts be given before firing than had happened previously, the approach of reading the Riot Act and firing soon after, continued. Following the report, a circular went to chief and head constables in April 1909, reminding them of the procedures.[3]
Troops had been used in strikes on a regular basis: 24 times in 39 years. However, firing had only occurred twice, both times resulting in deaths. Between 1895-1902 the Army had been used in incidents as diverse as the Cornish fishing riots, the Bridgwater bricklayers’ strike, the 1898 South Wales coal strike, the Taff Vale Railway strike, the Grimsby fishermen’s lock-out and the Penrhyn Quarry dispute. Naval gunboats were used in Cornwall and at Grimsby. During unrest in August 1911, a cruiser, H.M.S. ‘Attentive’ was stationed to guard the Hull dock gates; a couple of warships sat off Liverpool and torpedo boats patrolled the River Thames.[4]
The committee decried the fact that only 57 of England and Wales’s 197 police forces had mutual aid agreements, often with forces from similar areas to their own, so liable to be affected by the same strikes. The weakness of such agreements was revealed during unrest in Hull in 1911. The city had agreements with the neighbouring constabularies of Bradford, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Leeds, Scarborough and York. However, when called upon, only the East Riding and York were in a position to supply any police to Hull. Despite this difficulty, government policy stated that troops could ‘only act in support of an adequate Police force’.[5] Yet, as the incidents of 1911 proved, they often had to substitute for the inadequate numbers of police available. Cavalry were seen as most effective in a riot, able to break a crowd without recourse to weapons. Consequently the 1908 committee wanted more mounted police, but recognised the consequent financial burden.[6]
Government Policy: The Use of Macready and Askwith
The application of government policy towards industrial unrest was aided by its use of two clear-headed men able to minimise the potential unrest through counteracting the hot temperaments of employers, local authorities, strikers and the public. They achieved this through using the right of law and common sense.
In 1910, the well-decorated Nevil Macready became a major-general and Director of Personal Services at the War Office. He had experience with the military police in Egypt, and in occupying South Africa.[7] Free from a divisional command, Macready oversaw the assortment of forces sent to tackle unrest across the UK. As Jane Morgan notes, this gave him ‘[u]nity of command of civil and military forces’ under ‘the direct authority of the Home Office, as a supposedly impartial force in the dispute.’[8] Charles Townsend characterises such this approach as ‘the colonial technique’ putting control into the hands of a few chosen men.[9]
Macready was certainly more impartial than the local magistrates and police tied into parochial networks of employers and lacking any ‘idea of detachment’.[10] However, Anthony Mor O’Brien sees a ‘hidden agenda’ in the use of Macready, feeling he was sent to reduce the power of local magistrates. In fact, however, there were important practical reasons for Macready commanding ‘imported’ police, as seen in the Army’s 1912 pamphlet Duties in Aid of Civil Power. Soldiers arrived with their own tents, food supply and medical staff. The imported police even lacked their own blankets and were dependent on local provision.[11]
In addition to J.P. Moylan, who acted as Churchill’s confidential agent in the Welsh coal miners' strike and two Welsh-speaking detectives supplied by Scotland Yard, Macready arranged for his own officers to check rumours and supply accurate intelligence. Subsequently his approach was included in the Army’s guidance: ‘information received from the local police and civilian population is often very much exaggerated, and must be discounted accordingly.’. During the South Wales miners’ strike, in what we would now see as public relations work, Macready provided 'The Times' journalist Lionel James with official messages. Though this angered local journalists, James provided sober reporting that calmed tensions. Despite his competence, Macready was as biased as any British general of his time, later writing that he ‘never for a moment believed that the British working man would sink to the level of Irishmen or foreigners...’. However, he did believe in the right to strike.[12]
Macready had to emphasise that despite what local employers sought, he could not ‘flood the valleys with troops’ and that they would only intervene when all police efforts to maintain law and order failed. He refused social invitations from local employers and had officers of the same rank, attached both to the strikers and to the employers. He insisted on strict adherence to the law, thus limiting pickets to six strikers. On 21 November 1911, when his troops were involved in clearing stone throwers, Macready instructed them to jab offenders with bayonets only in their backsides to minimise casualties. As Captain Wyndham Childs, one of Macready's intelligence officers, noted accurately, ‘no rifle was ever used during any disturbance in which Sir Nevil was concerned.’, elsewhere it was different. It is likely that other British Army commanders would have adopted less measured approaches than Macready, resulting in further rioting and deaths. Macready was exasperated by the attempt to attack blacklegs on 21 November 1910, and Barbara Weinberger notes that as a result he subsequently adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards strikers. However, his emphasis on impartial policing meant that, by December 1910, rioting in South Wales had ceased and he moved on. Taking over, Lieutenant-Colonel George Freeth did not vary from the balanced approach Macready had established. Macready himself was used in Salford in July 1911 and oversaw the military response to the national rail and miners’ strikes.[13]
In the 1910s the United Kingdom lacked a ministry of labour and the Board of Trade dealt with industrial matters. Its key labour official was George Askwith, a former lawyer who, between 1911-19, was Chief Industrial Commissioner, effectively a roving arbitrator. Believing in the ‘futility of conciliation by a committee’ he acted in person bringing agreement by force of personality. His greatest success was in July 1911 in Manchester when he tackled representatives from twenty different professions on strike and their employers, whilst police and troops gathered in the area. Six days of solid negotiation engineered by Askwith ended the dispute.[14]
Like Macready, Askwith was ready to travel almost immediately to where he was needed. He saw economic motives behind most disputes and believed that many could be prevented through clarifying established agreements. He gained a deserved international reputation settling strikes in 1910-13 as diverse as among metal workers, dockers, coal miners, lightermen and confectionary workers. Ultimately, Askwith’s standing meant that just sending him to a locality could end a dispute. Neither Macready nor Askwith banished rioting or industrial disputes, but without them such situations would have lasted longer and been more damaging.[15]
Government Policy: A Change in 1911?
Anthony Mor O’Brien comments on the ‘remarkable change of policy’ which came in August 1911 in regard to handling the riots. He contrasts Churchill’s replacement of the troops requested by magistrates with police during the Tonypandy unrest with the policy adopted the following year when troops were used with ‘alacrity’.[16] Similarly Roger Geary contrasts the proactive approach to the national rail strike with the reactive one adopted in South Wales in 1910 and again during the national coal mining strike of 1912. In August 1911, troops were despatched to strategic locations across the country before the strike had started.[17] The national rail strike encompassed upheaval already underway in South Wales, Liverpool and Hull. Such widespread unrest threatened national paralysis at a time when tension with Germany was at a height over the Agadir Crisis.
The government felt obliged to aid railway companies in maintaining a service and though its response was swift and wide-reaching, it took a sober view of incoming reports. The action had two objectives: protecting railway property and rail workers who defied the call to strike. Whilst this can be seen as serving as a protection force for the interests of the companies, it also meant safeguarding the infrastructure of the country, at a time when most troop movements were by railway. The extent of the commitment was highlighted by Childs, now Macready’s staff officer, when he wrote ‘[w]e had got every soldier we could secure out on duty with the police. ... Literally there was not a man left in barracks.’[18] On 16 August 1911, Churchill removed the need for local authorities to requisition troops and sent them to twenty-seven locations himself. Whilst this shows the approach Geary, Morgan and O’Brien condemn, it was the only practical approach given the extent of the unrest and the difficulty of communication. Typically, a couple of battalions, usually including cavalry, were sent to thirty-five towns across the seven strike regions, with London retaining the largest force.[19]
As seen above, the strike’s origins were in Liverpool, already suffering a city-wide general strike. Railway workers resented that most railway companies had failed to recognise trade unions. Though the government intervened to promote negotiations, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s emphasis on not permitting a national paralysis angered workers sparking the national strike on 18 August 1911.[20] David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, citing Britain’s weak position dealing with Germany, was able to restart negotiations, meaning that the patchy strike ended on 21 August.
Despite the brevity of the strike there was widespread rioting and an extensive government reaction. Strike areas, under a senior military officer, were established in industrial central and northern England as well as London. Freeth’s area in South Wales was also retained. Searle argues that Churchill’s manner, of ‘childish delight’ and ‘Napoleonic moods and gestures’, with which he carried out the response to the unrest, almost as much as these actions, prejudiced the labour movement against him. One of Churchill’s under-secretaries, Charles Masterman, noted how ‘wildly excited’ he was, mapping the country and directing troops. Masterman felt Churchill ‘did it right’ but ‘in an amazingly wrong way’ by issuing ‘disastrous bulletins’.[21]
O’Brien feels that Churchill ‘shared the widespread conviction’ that ‘revolution was at hand, and therefore centralist tendencies were necessary’. In contrast, Barbara Weinberger notes that, in fact, the government faced criticism for not moving towards a centralised police force.[22] Whilst fears of revolution were widespread throughout the country, government circles retained a more sober attitude. Protecting railway property was harder than it is today. Different railway companies each had their own stations in the towns they served and often separate goods and passenger stations. In addition, there were numerous signal boxes, often in isolated locations. Churchill was angered by the companies’ concern for profitable passenger services and commanders were advised, instead, that each train carrying vital cargo like food and mail, and in Lancashire, raw cotton, should be accompanied by 6-10 soldiers. Further guidance encouraged commanders to select officers for ‘their tact and firmness in what may be difficult situations’. None of this suggests ministers who had lost their heads nor were seeking to bring down legitimate protest.[23] In fact, as Weinberger notes, the central intervention by Churchill was most designed to reduce local demands for a military response. Similarly, David Powell observes that Churchill’s reactions were more restraining than warlike.[24]
O’Brien, Geary and Morgan have also overlooked the different nature of the industries on strike in the period so requiring different types of response. Coal mining is restricted to specific areas and tight communities, whereas railway work, crucially, crosses constabulary boundaries. Railway company police of the 1910s, like transport police today, were not confined to a small geographical area, thus, the forces used by the government to assist them also had to be able to cover wherever railways went.[25] Hence, 1911 saw the location of forces at transport nodes across the country. It was often in comparatively small towns such as Chesterfield, Earlsdown, Lincoln and Tredegar, that there was the greatest unrest and military forces contributed the most to quelling the situation.[26] Coupled with this, unlike during other disputes of the time, in August 1911 the 20,000-strong Metropolitan Police force was too busy in London itself, to supply its officers to other cities. There was no way that a railway strike could be handled in the same way as miners’ strike, even a national one. It could only be handled centrally, and, given the fact that the very form of transport that the military used to reach riot areas, trains, was being affected, effective policing of the unrest could only be done by having the forces ready in place.
A key complaint that historians have against the government’s behaviour in August 1911 is this necessarily national, as opposed to local, control of forces which they see as being undemocratic. Geary, in fact, sees any use of soldiers in industrial action as a repressive governmental policy. Both Geary and Morgan perceive a ‘radical change’ and feel that because troops were dispatched on national government initiative there was a ‘resulting lack of local or national answerability’. Morgan argues this power should have remained with local authorities with their ‘inherent accountability’. This attitude ignores the fact that national government was accountable to the electorate, parliament and effectively the King. Her own evidence shows that, as Home Secretary, Churchill was regularly questioned in Parliament on the use of troops and imported police. O’Brien talks of the Home Office’s ‘mission’ to centralise the police force. Barbara Weinberger, strongly challenges this view of centralisation and comments on how the government always tended to give up its co-ordinating role once the crisis had passed. She says that anyway, any temporary centralisation tended to be restricted to Churchill’s period as Home Secretary.[27] This is unsurprising as it was during his term in the office that new levels of unrest, which threw local authorities into panic and calls for extreme responses, attained a peak. Whilst Weinberger counters the perspective of a centralising approach being part of an ongoing policy, she, like Geary, Morgan and O’Brien overlooks important practical reasons why soldiers had to be used in industrial action in the 1910s and, thus, why the responses to unrest had to be done by central rather than local government.
Morgan condemns the centralist approach, despite recognising how outnumbered local police were and how difficult it was to ‘import’ additional officers.[28] By 1908, the 197 police forces of England and Wales covered 60 counties and over a hundred boroughs. Lincolnshire had three forces under one chief constable and another for Lincoln city. Kent had a county force and six separate town forces.[29] Many of these forces were small. Weinberger notes the average was 1 officer per 500 citizens in cities and per 1000 citizens in rural areas, and of course, only a fraction were available on any one shift. In times of unrest this meant they were thinly stretched. In July 1911 Hull had only 6 mounted policemen to deal with thousands of strikers and Derby had 130 police compared to 15,000 rail workers.[30]
As Sires notes, a Home Secretary dealing with such unrest ‘... could hardly have escaped criticism’, from labour that the steps taken were repressive and from capital that they were insufficient. Generally the Home Office managed to tread the fine line between sending sufficient force to handle incidents without provoking unnecessary hostility. Churchill emphasised that peaceful picketing did not involve rioting and, whilst he did not countenance the kind of repression mine and ship owners were calling for, he did press for the prosecution of rioters.[31] He underlined that the police and military were there to guard public safety and protect property whilst maintaining an impartial stance in disputes. This differed from the attitude of many mine owners, who, as magistrates, had seen the local police as their private force. Despite the care taken by Churchill and Macready, they were unable to prevent the view that that police and military forces were suppressing legitimate protest.[32]
Whilst the response to the 1911 rioting attracts most attention, as Critchley notes, the government’s approach to serious unrest remained consistent. As Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna lacked Churchill’s talents; he felt himself isolated and historians note his antagonism with Haldane who remained War Secretary. Fletcher sees McKenna as being more cautious than Churchill and unwilling to give Haldane a ‘free hand’. Yet, McKenna did not alter the established policy, he simply did not face the same challenges as Churchill. Like Churchill he emphasised that the maintenance of the peace was the responsibility of local authorities and assistance would only be sent when serious disturbances were in progress. McKenna’s complaint about the despatch of soldiers to two mines in April 1912, only differs from Churchill’s initial response to the Tonypandy situation in the fact that McKenna did not intervene directly, and that may be explained by Haldane now being in better health.[33] Thus, policy remained consistent right through the period, though its application adjusted to particular circumstances.
Leaving the summoning of troops to local bodies was dangerous. As Morgan herself notes, ‘the local authorities were, naturally, preoccupied with their own areas’. Local magistrates and watch committees were often drawn from among local employers. Of the magistrates covering the Rhondda Valley, only one, the newest, Edmund Stonelake, came from a working class background, of the other five, two were lords and a third would later become a peer. It was only in 1911 that the power to appoint magistrates was removed from the county lord lieutenants and magistrates from a wider social background began to appear.
O’Brien believes that in such situations the local magistrates’ power should have been supreme. He portrays the Chief Constable of Glamorgan, Captain Lionel Lindsay as taking ‘autocratic powers’ in importing police to Tonypandy. He argues that the local magistrates’ and councillors’ reluctance to pay for the police used demonstrated their dislike of this approach.[34] However, nothing Lindsay did went against local magistrates’ wishes, nor did he vary from the established procedure highlighted above.
As Weinberger notes, local authorities, in contrast to central government, ‘tended to favour calling in the military since this cost them nothing in financial terms’, whereas overtime for their own police, and the wages of imported officers came from the rates. She shows that Newport council had preferred to risk damage claims from companies for loss of trade than pay for the importation of police to protect blackleg labour. After the Tonypandy riots, the local authority refused to pay the £33,800 [worth £2.1 million now] charged for the supply of Metropolitan police on the grounds they had requested the military, and the Treasury ultimately had to foot the bill. This bore out what local employers had noted earlier, that calling on the military rather than police was much cheaper. Consequently, in future disputes the Home Office ruled that it would not supply police until the council concerned had agreed to pay for them. Following the unrest in Hull, the council was praised for its adherence to procedure, but it was shocked at the bill for the Metropolitan police who had been imported. After four days’ service they had had to provide the officers' normal pay as well as special duty pay, a total of £1 5d [equivalent to £63 now] per constable per day. Though the total bill for Hull council was £1330 [£82,500 at present day values] it, in fact, had got off lightly. A Home Office minute of September 1911 noted that ultimately Hull council had not had to contribute to the ordinary pay and pensions of the imported police. For Salford council for which the ‘usual procedure’ was adopted, this element of the cost of importing police had alone been £442 [now equivalent to £27,400] for the use of 253 Metropolitan police officers and 49 horses.[35]
Magistrates’ views of the level of force required increased the pressure for soldiers to be sent. Local officials’ language could approach hysteria and their demands exceeded what experienced officers considered sufficient. The Mayor of Birkenhead’s telegrams to the Home Office in August 1911 sounded like war reports: ‘Please send more troops at once. It is urgent: I cannot see my way to preserve life and property...’.[36] As Morgan notes, even the experienced Lindsay requested 3500 infantry and 500 cavalry to deal with the 1912 miners’ strike in Glamorganshire. In fact, the 646 troops sent did not even face rioters. Weinberger observes that the coal owners were able to requisition the troops and police they felt they needed to intimidate strikers, not only at the time of the Tonypandy riot, but again in March, June and July 1911, because they, via Lindsay, had been so successful in portraying striking miners as dangerous. However, the Home Office tended to view such concerns from other parts of the country with much greater scepticism.[37] Whilst their fears may have been exaggerated it is unsurprising that local authorities readily sought central government assistance as the small local police forces were outnumbered. They presumably also welcomed the intimidating effect on strikers of soldiers appearing in a district.
Both local and central government saw an obligation to try to sustain normal life in the face of severe unrest. Geary argues, however, that for the government to insist that trains should run, as it did in 1911, involved them in disputes which were none of their concern. He feels such action encouraged brutality by the police and military. However, forces from outside riot areas were only introduced once violence had occurred. The only alternative to this approach was to stand by whilst the attacks and damage continued. At the time, the railway was the main way in which troops were moved and the production of coal and its transportation was a vital part of sustaining the British economy as well as its military and naval forces. Such a hands-off approach would be unsustainable for any democratic government, especially one without a majority.[38] As a result of the fact that there had been a reluctance among government law officers from the 1880s into the 1910s to codify the powers to maintain order, the government was unable to declare a national emergency as it could after 1920, but, given the grave reports it received, it could not have ignored the situation.[39]
Powell counters Geary’s attitude, instead portraying the government as ‘more concerned with maintenance of order’ than any attempt to ‘suppress industrial unrest’. Steve Peak sees the response as highlighting the inadequacy of the Liberal Government in attempting to maintain order in that it could not handle a limited rail strike without shooting people. His view is that the strikers showed they could defeat the government but needed to find a way of doing it without loss of life.[40]
Despite allegations of martial law, the government’s actions in the 1910s remained within the prevailing civil and criminal law. In addition, Morgan argues that troops could effectively be used as blackleg labour, but notes that they were not. It is true that in April 1912 the Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, told parliament that troops could be used to work as replacement labour. However, the government constantly refused requests for troops to do other people’s work. This attitude persisted until 1964 and troops did not act as replacement labour until the 1970s.[41] Demands from the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in August 1911 that the Admiralty take over the closed docks and that navy stokers be used to run the power station were refused, with Churchill replying that this would be ‘extremely objectionable’: Royal Navy sailors could protect workers, but not substitute for them. The Lord Mayor of Bristol received a similar response on requesting troops to replace cold store workers. The only time the military replaced strikers was unloading mailbags at Devonport in August 1911, as the Royal Mail had a different status to other kinds of work and this was the only occasion that the military came close to acting as replacement labour.[42]
Despite a number of historians seeing the government's response to the 1911 unrest as an aberration and stepping beyond established norms to impose and illegal, unwarranted, centralised and militarised approach, the evidence for this is missing. The approach adopted was in line with the established laws and government procedures. The particular nature of the strikes in 1911, especially the rail strike, meant that a purely localised response would have been inadequate. Central government did not seek to usurp local authorities, but it did seek to rein in assumptions that police and soldiers were there simply to protect the interests of particular employers, rather a wider-reaching role in safeguarding law and order was the objective. The reason why the government actions in 1911 appear exceptional stems from the fact that the industrial action and the riots which followed in its wake, was of a new level and one spread so far across the country. Having left dealing with these situations to local magistrates and small local police forces would have resulted in extensive damage and more deaths. This, more than anything, would have completely undermined the claim of the government to running the country.
References
[1] Charles Townsend, Making the Peace. Public Order and Public Security in Modern Britain, (Oxford, 1993, pp. 48-9.
[2] ‘Report of the Select Committee on Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbances”, 16 July 1908, Parliamentary Paper 236, collected in Reports from Committees. Session 29 January - 21 December 1908. Vol. 7 (2), , p. iv.
[3] Select Committee, pp. iii-iv; National Archives, [henceforward NA], WO 32/8466, ‘Employment of the Military in aid of the Police’, 15 April 1909.
[4] NA, HO 144/1022, ‘Military Aid to the Civil Power. Abstract of Home Office Papers since 1895’, undated [1902?]; HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 182, Mayor of Barrow-in-Furness to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 21 August 1911; sub-file 218, T. Holmes-Gore (Clerk to Justices, Avonmouth) to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 19 August 1911; Mr. Lake (Barry Railway Company) to Prime Minister, 19 August 1911; HO 45/10656/212470, Sir Edward Troup to Secretary, Admiralty, 24 August 1911; sub-file 365, ‘Warships on Special Duty in Connection with the Strike’, 5 September 1911; Townsend, p. 42.
[5] Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain 1906-1926, (Oxford, 1991), p. 72; Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p. 133. Babington notes that with the creation of the Territorial Army in 1907, the local militia and yeomanry units had been relieved of their policing role.
[6] Select Committee, pp. viii [reference to the number of occasions military had been called out was removed from the final version of the report], pp. ix, 4. NA, HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 130, Under Secretary of State, Home Office to Lord Mayor of Cardiff, 15 August 1911; HO 144/1022, [Sir] E.R. Henry to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 5 January 1909.
[7] Anthony Mor O’ Brien, ‘Churchill and the Tonypandy Riots’, Welsh History Review, vol. 17 (1994), p. 72. Captain Lionel Lindsay, Chief Constable of Glamorgan had also served in the Egyptian gendarmerie.
[8] Who Was Who 1941-50, (London, 1967), pp. 747-8; Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order. The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939, (Oxford, 1987), pp. 45-6.
[9] Townsend, p. 42.
[10] Roger Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes, 1893 to 1985, (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 35-7; Townsend, p. 43; Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, (London, 1924), p. 137.
[11] O’Brien, p. 80; NA, WO 279/467, War Office, Duties in Aid of the Civil Power, [February 1912?], Appendix II. This even details how many red and blue pencils a unit should take.
[12] Weinberger, pp. 51, 66; Wyndham Childs, Episodes and Reflections, (London, 1930), pp. 82-4, 96.
[13] Macready, pp. 138, 144, 146, 149-50, 152, 160, 163, 165; Weinberger, pp. 59-61.
[14] Who Was Who 1941-50, (London, 1967), p. 37; Askwith, pp. 152, 210.
[15] Childs, p. 96; Lord George Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes, (London, 1920), pp. 172, 191, 219-220, 236-7, 244, 252.
[16] O’ Brien, p.67.
[17] Geary, pp. 25, 38.
[18] Childs, p. 98.
[19] NA, HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 164a, ‘Strike Areas’, 19 August 1911, ‘Dispositions of Troops’, War Office, 19 August 1911; Peak, p. 30.
[20] George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (New York, 1961), pp. 217-219; Philip Bagwell, ‘The New Unionism in Britain: the Railway Industry’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen & Hans-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880-1914, (Boston, 1985), p. 197; Askwith, p. 166.
[21] Lucy Masterman, C.F.G. Masterman, (London, 1968), pp.205-6.
[22] O’ Brien, p. 97; Weinberger, p. 114.
[23] Masterman, p. 207; NA, HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 162, ‘Circular Memorandum’, 19 August 1911; sub-file 165, ‘Birmingham’, A.S.W., 19 August 1911; telegram to Officers Commanding Strike Areas, 19 August 1911; HO 45/10658, ‘No. 10 War Office Memorandum - Army Recruiting During the Strike’, 23 October 1911. Fascinatingly, recruitment into the Army during August 1911 was a third higher than normal for an August.
[24] Weinberger, p. 113; David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 126.
[25] NA, HO 45/10657/212479, sub-file 381, W.P. Byrne (Home Office) to G.R. Shepherd, 9 September 1911, this point was noted at the time.
[26] NA, HO 45/10658/212470 ‘No. 9 Memorandum on the Effect of the Presence of Troops on Rioters’.
[27] O’Brien, p. 75; Weinberger, p. 112-113.
[28] Geary, p. 36; Morgan, pp. 41-43.
[29] NA, HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 152, ‘List of Separate Police Forces’, 1 October 1905.
[30] Weinberger, p. 4; NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 5, Letter to Mr. Blackwell, 28 June 1911; HO 45/10657 Chief Constable of Derby to Home Office, 16 August 1911.
[31] Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England 1910-1914’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. XV, no. 3 (1955), p.260; O‘Brien, p. 91.
[32] Sires, pp. 258-9; Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, UK, CHAR 12/6/34-35, W.S. Churchill to D. Lloyd George, 13 November 1910.
[33] Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914, (London, 1996), p. 336; T.A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence. Order and Liberty in Britain, (London, 1970), pp. 169, 172; Ian Christopher Fletcher, ‘”Prosecutions ... are Always Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals and the 1912 “Don’t Shoot” Prosecutions’, Albion, vol. 28, pp. 259, 266.
[34] O’Brien, pp. 72-3; Gregory D. Phillips, The Diehards. Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England, (London, 1979), p. 65.
[35] Weinberger, pp. 4, 25, 46, 62; NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 137a, Minute, 26 September 1911; sub-file 21, Letter to Mayor of Hull, undated [July 1911]; Mayor of Hull to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1 July 1911; sub-file 14, Home Secretary to Mayor of Hull, 30 June 1911; Parliamentary Debates. Commons. 5th Series, 1911, vol. 37, June 19 - July 7, 3 July 1911, cols. 791-2.
[36] NA, HO 45/10657/212470, A.W. Willmer, Mayor of Birkenhead to Home Office, 19 August 1911.
[37] Morgan, pp. 60-1, 63-4; Weinberger, p. 66.
[38] Morgan, p.64; Geary pp. 46.
[39] Sires, p. 264; Babington, p. 142; Townsend, pp. 45-9.
[40] David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 126; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), p. 31.
[41] Parliamentary Debates. Commons. 5th Series, 1911, vol. 36, Mar. 25 - Apr. 12, 10 April 1912, cols. 1326-1333; Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency, (London, 1983), pp. 242-3.
[42] NA, HO 45/10658/212470, Lord Mayor of Liverpool to Home Office, 17 August 1911, 12.50pm; Lord Mayor of Liverpool to Home Secretary, 17 August 1911, 1.05pm; Home Secretary to Lord Mayor of Liverpool, 17 August 1911, 2.40pm; Home Secretary to Lord Mayor of Liverpool, 17 August 1911, 5pm; Lord Mayor of Liverpool to Home Secretary, 17 August 1911, 6pm; sub-file 156, telegram to General Officer Commanding Coast Defences, Devonport, 19 August 1911; HO 45/10657/212470, ‘Diary of Events as Reported at the War Office’, 23 August 1911. In 1955 the Army were again used to move mail, but barred from any other labour - Daily Telegraph, 30 May 1955, ‘Army Lorries and Planes To Carry Mail’.
In this section I particularly challenge historians like Anthony Mor O'Brien, Roger Geary and Jane Morgan who see a radical shift in government policy in 1911 towards actions they see at least trying to suppress 'peaceful' industrial protest and at worst as being illegal. I show how in fact the policy that had been set down in 1908 was carried out consistently right throughout this period. The government was not aiming to suppress the strikes, just to minimise the harm to individuals and property caused by the riots occurring at the same time. Owing to the lack of police at a local level the central government was compelled to intervene. Their actions were often supported by local strikers as a great deal of the unrest was actually caused by people unconnected to the particular strike. The anger Geary and Morgan felt at the Thatcher regime's real suppression of generally peaceful protest during the 1984-5 Miners' Strike led them to take a distorted view of the events of 1910-11. In fact their books show the difficulty in trying to sustain this story that there was an abrupt change in policy in 1911, something that has been picked up by subsequent historians, notably Barbara Weinberger and David Powell.
Government Policy: Establishing the Response to Disturbances
The continuity of governmental response over the preceding decades was emphasised by the Select Committee on Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbances reporting in July 1908, just two years before the Tonypandy riots which mark the start of the greatest unrest. It followed the shooting of two people, not strikers, during the 1907 Belfast dock strike. The committee considered civil authority powers in securing military aid and the responsibilities of military officers so engaged. The government was, in fact, in a potentially strong, but certainly unclear, position. Given the reluctance in the preceding decades to codify the government's powers, any action carried out to suppress unrest was ‘legal’ if it could be subsequently proven in court not to be inconsistent with civil law. Naturally, however, soldiers were apprehensive to act in such an uncertain environment, especially given the likely attitude of the community to certain actions.[1]
Policy had been established by the Inter-Departmental Committee on Riots in 1894 which followed the fatal shooting of two people during the 1893 Featherstone riot. The procedure was that a mayor or a magistrate, co-ordinating with the appropriate chief constable, applied to the nearest Army base for an appropriate force. Commanding officers reported to the War Office which could dispatch additional troops and involve the Admiralty, if required.[2]
The 1908 committee recommended little change. It re-emphasised that troops were the last resort. It did give greater weight to the discretion of chief and head constables, and commanding officers on the spot, in terms of what action should be taken, such as firing. During the unrest of the 1910s, chief constables resented the fact that, though the troops were supposed to be aiding local police, they remained under the control of their commanding officers. However, this was an important matter, as demonstrated during the St. George’s Plateau riot in Liverpool in 1911, when the officer on the spot refused demands that he oppose the rioters with his troops, knowing that such action could lead to a massacre. Though the committee advised that more alerts be given before firing than had happened previously, the approach of reading the Riot Act and firing soon after, continued. Following the report, a circular went to chief and head constables in April 1909, reminding them of the procedures.[3]
Troops had been used in strikes on a regular basis: 24 times in 39 years. However, firing had only occurred twice, both times resulting in deaths. Between 1895-1902 the Army had been used in incidents as diverse as the Cornish fishing riots, the Bridgwater bricklayers’ strike, the 1898 South Wales coal strike, the Taff Vale Railway strike, the Grimsby fishermen’s lock-out and the Penrhyn Quarry dispute. Naval gunboats were used in Cornwall and at Grimsby. During unrest in August 1911, a cruiser, H.M.S. ‘Attentive’ was stationed to guard the Hull dock gates; a couple of warships sat off Liverpool and torpedo boats patrolled the River Thames.[4]
The committee decried the fact that only 57 of England and Wales’s 197 police forces had mutual aid agreements, often with forces from similar areas to their own, so liable to be affected by the same strikes. The weakness of such agreements was revealed during unrest in Hull in 1911. The city had agreements with the neighbouring constabularies of Bradford, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Leeds, Scarborough and York. However, when called upon, only the East Riding and York were in a position to supply any police to Hull. Despite this difficulty, government policy stated that troops could ‘only act in support of an adequate Police force’.[5] Yet, as the incidents of 1911 proved, they often had to substitute for the inadequate numbers of police available. Cavalry were seen as most effective in a riot, able to break a crowd without recourse to weapons. Consequently the 1908 committee wanted more mounted police, but recognised the consequent financial burden.[6]
Government Policy: The Use of Macready and Askwith
The application of government policy towards industrial unrest was aided by its use of two clear-headed men able to minimise the potential unrest through counteracting the hot temperaments of employers, local authorities, strikers and the public. They achieved this through using the right of law and common sense.
In 1910, the well-decorated Nevil Macready became a major-general and Director of Personal Services at the War Office. He had experience with the military police in Egypt, and in occupying South Africa.[7] Free from a divisional command, Macready oversaw the assortment of forces sent to tackle unrest across the UK. As Jane Morgan notes, this gave him ‘[u]nity of command of civil and military forces’ under ‘the direct authority of the Home Office, as a supposedly impartial force in the dispute.’[8] Charles Townsend characterises such this approach as ‘the colonial technique’ putting control into the hands of a few chosen men.[9]
Macready was certainly more impartial than the local magistrates and police tied into parochial networks of employers and lacking any ‘idea of detachment’.[10] However, Anthony Mor O’Brien sees a ‘hidden agenda’ in the use of Macready, feeling he was sent to reduce the power of local magistrates. In fact, however, there were important practical reasons for Macready commanding ‘imported’ police, as seen in the Army’s 1912 pamphlet Duties in Aid of Civil Power. Soldiers arrived with their own tents, food supply and medical staff. The imported police even lacked their own blankets and were dependent on local provision.[11]
In addition to J.P. Moylan, who acted as Churchill’s confidential agent in the Welsh coal miners' strike and two Welsh-speaking detectives supplied by Scotland Yard, Macready arranged for his own officers to check rumours and supply accurate intelligence. Subsequently his approach was included in the Army’s guidance: ‘information received from the local police and civilian population is often very much exaggerated, and must be discounted accordingly.’. During the South Wales miners’ strike, in what we would now see as public relations work, Macready provided 'The Times' journalist Lionel James with official messages. Though this angered local journalists, James provided sober reporting that calmed tensions. Despite his competence, Macready was as biased as any British general of his time, later writing that he ‘never for a moment believed that the British working man would sink to the level of Irishmen or foreigners...’. However, he did believe in the right to strike.[12]
Macready had to emphasise that despite what local employers sought, he could not ‘flood the valleys with troops’ and that they would only intervene when all police efforts to maintain law and order failed. He refused social invitations from local employers and had officers of the same rank, attached both to the strikers and to the employers. He insisted on strict adherence to the law, thus limiting pickets to six strikers. On 21 November 1911, when his troops were involved in clearing stone throwers, Macready instructed them to jab offenders with bayonets only in their backsides to minimise casualties. As Captain Wyndham Childs, one of Macready's intelligence officers, noted accurately, ‘no rifle was ever used during any disturbance in which Sir Nevil was concerned.’, elsewhere it was different. It is likely that other British Army commanders would have adopted less measured approaches than Macready, resulting in further rioting and deaths. Macready was exasperated by the attempt to attack blacklegs on 21 November 1910, and Barbara Weinberger notes that as a result he subsequently adopted a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards strikers. However, his emphasis on impartial policing meant that, by December 1910, rioting in South Wales had ceased and he moved on. Taking over, Lieutenant-Colonel George Freeth did not vary from the balanced approach Macready had established. Macready himself was used in Salford in July 1911 and oversaw the military response to the national rail and miners’ strikes.[13]
In the 1910s the United Kingdom lacked a ministry of labour and the Board of Trade dealt with industrial matters. Its key labour official was George Askwith, a former lawyer who, between 1911-19, was Chief Industrial Commissioner, effectively a roving arbitrator. Believing in the ‘futility of conciliation by a committee’ he acted in person bringing agreement by force of personality. His greatest success was in July 1911 in Manchester when he tackled representatives from twenty different professions on strike and their employers, whilst police and troops gathered in the area. Six days of solid negotiation engineered by Askwith ended the dispute.[14]
Like Macready, Askwith was ready to travel almost immediately to where he was needed. He saw economic motives behind most disputes and believed that many could be prevented through clarifying established agreements. He gained a deserved international reputation settling strikes in 1910-13 as diverse as among metal workers, dockers, coal miners, lightermen and confectionary workers. Ultimately, Askwith’s standing meant that just sending him to a locality could end a dispute. Neither Macready nor Askwith banished rioting or industrial disputes, but without them such situations would have lasted longer and been more damaging.[15]
Government Policy: A Change in 1911?
Anthony Mor O’Brien comments on the ‘remarkable change of policy’ which came in August 1911 in regard to handling the riots. He contrasts Churchill’s replacement of the troops requested by magistrates with police during the Tonypandy unrest with the policy adopted the following year when troops were used with ‘alacrity’.[16] Similarly Roger Geary contrasts the proactive approach to the national rail strike with the reactive one adopted in South Wales in 1910 and again during the national coal mining strike of 1912. In August 1911, troops were despatched to strategic locations across the country before the strike had started.[17] The national rail strike encompassed upheaval already underway in South Wales, Liverpool and Hull. Such widespread unrest threatened national paralysis at a time when tension with Germany was at a height over the Agadir Crisis.
The government felt obliged to aid railway companies in maintaining a service and though its response was swift and wide-reaching, it took a sober view of incoming reports. The action had two objectives: protecting railway property and rail workers who defied the call to strike. Whilst this can be seen as serving as a protection force for the interests of the companies, it also meant safeguarding the infrastructure of the country, at a time when most troop movements were by railway. The extent of the commitment was highlighted by Childs, now Macready’s staff officer, when he wrote ‘[w]e had got every soldier we could secure out on duty with the police. ... Literally there was not a man left in barracks.’[18] On 16 August 1911, Churchill removed the need for local authorities to requisition troops and sent them to twenty-seven locations himself. Whilst this shows the approach Geary, Morgan and O’Brien condemn, it was the only practical approach given the extent of the unrest and the difficulty of communication. Typically, a couple of battalions, usually including cavalry, were sent to thirty-five towns across the seven strike regions, with London retaining the largest force.[19]
As seen above, the strike’s origins were in Liverpool, already suffering a city-wide general strike. Railway workers resented that most railway companies had failed to recognise trade unions. Though the government intervened to promote negotiations, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s emphasis on not permitting a national paralysis angered workers sparking the national strike on 18 August 1911.[20] David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, citing Britain’s weak position dealing with Germany, was able to restart negotiations, meaning that the patchy strike ended on 21 August.
Despite the brevity of the strike there was widespread rioting and an extensive government reaction. Strike areas, under a senior military officer, were established in industrial central and northern England as well as London. Freeth’s area in South Wales was also retained. Searle argues that Churchill’s manner, of ‘childish delight’ and ‘Napoleonic moods and gestures’, with which he carried out the response to the unrest, almost as much as these actions, prejudiced the labour movement against him. One of Churchill’s under-secretaries, Charles Masterman, noted how ‘wildly excited’ he was, mapping the country and directing troops. Masterman felt Churchill ‘did it right’ but ‘in an amazingly wrong way’ by issuing ‘disastrous bulletins’.[21]
O’Brien feels that Churchill ‘shared the widespread conviction’ that ‘revolution was at hand, and therefore centralist tendencies were necessary’. In contrast, Barbara Weinberger notes that, in fact, the government faced criticism for not moving towards a centralised police force.[22] Whilst fears of revolution were widespread throughout the country, government circles retained a more sober attitude. Protecting railway property was harder than it is today. Different railway companies each had their own stations in the towns they served and often separate goods and passenger stations. In addition, there were numerous signal boxes, often in isolated locations. Churchill was angered by the companies’ concern for profitable passenger services and commanders were advised, instead, that each train carrying vital cargo like food and mail, and in Lancashire, raw cotton, should be accompanied by 6-10 soldiers. Further guidance encouraged commanders to select officers for ‘their tact and firmness in what may be difficult situations’. None of this suggests ministers who had lost their heads nor were seeking to bring down legitimate protest.[23] In fact, as Weinberger notes, the central intervention by Churchill was most designed to reduce local demands for a military response. Similarly, David Powell observes that Churchill’s reactions were more restraining than warlike.[24]
O’Brien, Geary and Morgan have also overlooked the different nature of the industries on strike in the period so requiring different types of response. Coal mining is restricted to specific areas and tight communities, whereas railway work, crucially, crosses constabulary boundaries. Railway company police of the 1910s, like transport police today, were not confined to a small geographical area, thus, the forces used by the government to assist them also had to be able to cover wherever railways went.[25] Hence, 1911 saw the location of forces at transport nodes across the country. It was often in comparatively small towns such as Chesterfield, Earlsdown, Lincoln and Tredegar, that there was the greatest unrest and military forces contributed the most to quelling the situation.[26] Coupled with this, unlike during other disputes of the time, in August 1911 the 20,000-strong Metropolitan Police force was too busy in London itself, to supply its officers to other cities. There was no way that a railway strike could be handled in the same way as miners’ strike, even a national one. It could only be handled centrally, and, given the fact that the very form of transport that the military used to reach riot areas, trains, was being affected, effective policing of the unrest could only be done by having the forces ready in place.
A key complaint that historians have against the government’s behaviour in August 1911 is this necessarily national, as opposed to local, control of forces which they see as being undemocratic. Geary, in fact, sees any use of soldiers in industrial action as a repressive governmental policy. Both Geary and Morgan perceive a ‘radical change’ and feel that because troops were dispatched on national government initiative there was a ‘resulting lack of local or national answerability’. Morgan argues this power should have remained with local authorities with their ‘inherent accountability’. This attitude ignores the fact that national government was accountable to the electorate, parliament and effectively the King. Her own evidence shows that, as Home Secretary, Churchill was regularly questioned in Parliament on the use of troops and imported police. O’Brien talks of the Home Office’s ‘mission’ to centralise the police force. Barbara Weinberger, strongly challenges this view of centralisation and comments on how the government always tended to give up its co-ordinating role once the crisis had passed. She says that anyway, any temporary centralisation tended to be restricted to Churchill’s period as Home Secretary.[27] This is unsurprising as it was during his term in the office that new levels of unrest, which threw local authorities into panic and calls for extreme responses, attained a peak. Whilst Weinberger counters the perspective of a centralising approach being part of an ongoing policy, she, like Geary, Morgan and O’Brien overlooks important practical reasons why soldiers had to be used in industrial action in the 1910s and, thus, why the responses to unrest had to be done by central rather than local government.
Morgan condemns the centralist approach, despite recognising how outnumbered local police were and how difficult it was to ‘import’ additional officers.[28] By 1908, the 197 police forces of England and Wales covered 60 counties and over a hundred boroughs. Lincolnshire had three forces under one chief constable and another for Lincoln city. Kent had a county force and six separate town forces.[29] Many of these forces were small. Weinberger notes the average was 1 officer per 500 citizens in cities and per 1000 citizens in rural areas, and of course, only a fraction were available on any one shift. In times of unrest this meant they were thinly stretched. In July 1911 Hull had only 6 mounted policemen to deal with thousands of strikers and Derby had 130 police compared to 15,000 rail workers.[30]
As Sires notes, a Home Secretary dealing with such unrest ‘... could hardly have escaped criticism’, from labour that the steps taken were repressive and from capital that they were insufficient. Generally the Home Office managed to tread the fine line between sending sufficient force to handle incidents without provoking unnecessary hostility. Churchill emphasised that peaceful picketing did not involve rioting and, whilst he did not countenance the kind of repression mine and ship owners were calling for, he did press for the prosecution of rioters.[31] He underlined that the police and military were there to guard public safety and protect property whilst maintaining an impartial stance in disputes. This differed from the attitude of many mine owners, who, as magistrates, had seen the local police as their private force. Despite the care taken by Churchill and Macready, they were unable to prevent the view that that police and military forces were suppressing legitimate protest.[32]
Whilst the response to the 1911 rioting attracts most attention, as Critchley notes, the government’s approach to serious unrest remained consistent. As Home Secretary, Reginald McKenna lacked Churchill’s talents; he felt himself isolated and historians note his antagonism with Haldane who remained War Secretary. Fletcher sees McKenna as being more cautious than Churchill and unwilling to give Haldane a ‘free hand’. Yet, McKenna did not alter the established policy, he simply did not face the same challenges as Churchill. Like Churchill he emphasised that the maintenance of the peace was the responsibility of local authorities and assistance would only be sent when serious disturbances were in progress. McKenna’s complaint about the despatch of soldiers to two mines in April 1912, only differs from Churchill’s initial response to the Tonypandy situation in the fact that McKenna did not intervene directly, and that may be explained by Haldane now being in better health.[33] Thus, policy remained consistent right through the period, though its application adjusted to particular circumstances.
Leaving the summoning of troops to local bodies was dangerous. As Morgan herself notes, ‘the local authorities were, naturally, preoccupied with their own areas’. Local magistrates and watch committees were often drawn from among local employers. Of the magistrates covering the Rhondda Valley, only one, the newest, Edmund Stonelake, came from a working class background, of the other five, two were lords and a third would later become a peer. It was only in 1911 that the power to appoint magistrates was removed from the county lord lieutenants and magistrates from a wider social background began to appear.
O’Brien believes that in such situations the local magistrates’ power should have been supreme. He portrays the Chief Constable of Glamorgan, Captain Lionel Lindsay as taking ‘autocratic powers’ in importing police to Tonypandy. He argues that the local magistrates’ and councillors’ reluctance to pay for the police used demonstrated their dislike of this approach.[34] However, nothing Lindsay did went against local magistrates’ wishes, nor did he vary from the established procedure highlighted above.
As Weinberger notes, local authorities, in contrast to central government, ‘tended to favour calling in the military since this cost them nothing in financial terms’, whereas overtime for their own police, and the wages of imported officers came from the rates. She shows that Newport council had preferred to risk damage claims from companies for loss of trade than pay for the importation of police to protect blackleg labour. After the Tonypandy riots, the local authority refused to pay the £33,800 [worth £2.1 million now] charged for the supply of Metropolitan police on the grounds they had requested the military, and the Treasury ultimately had to foot the bill. This bore out what local employers had noted earlier, that calling on the military rather than police was much cheaper. Consequently, in future disputes the Home Office ruled that it would not supply police until the council concerned had agreed to pay for them. Following the unrest in Hull, the council was praised for its adherence to procedure, but it was shocked at the bill for the Metropolitan police who had been imported. After four days’ service they had had to provide the officers' normal pay as well as special duty pay, a total of £1 5d [equivalent to £63 now] per constable per day. Though the total bill for Hull council was £1330 [£82,500 at present day values] it, in fact, had got off lightly. A Home Office minute of September 1911 noted that ultimately Hull council had not had to contribute to the ordinary pay and pensions of the imported police. For Salford council for which the ‘usual procedure’ was adopted, this element of the cost of importing police had alone been £442 [now equivalent to £27,400] for the use of 253 Metropolitan police officers and 49 horses.[35]
Magistrates’ views of the level of force required increased the pressure for soldiers to be sent. Local officials’ language could approach hysteria and their demands exceeded what experienced officers considered sufficient. The Mayor of Birkenhead’s telegrams to the Home Office in August 1911 sounded like war reports: ‘Please send more troops at once. It is urgent: I cannot see my way to preserve life and property...’.[36] As Morgan notes, even the experienced Lindsay requested 3500 infantry and 500 cavalry to deal with the 1912 miners’ strike in Glamorganshire. In fact, the 646 troops sent did not even face rioters. Weinberger observes that the coal owners were able to requisition the troops and police they felt they needed to intimidate strikers, not only at the time of the Tonypandy riot, but again in March, June and July 1911, because they, via Lindsay, had been so successful in portraying striking miners as dangerous. However, the Home Office tended to view such concerns from other parts of the country with much greater scepticism.[37] Whilst their fears may have been exaggerated it is unsurprising that local authorities readily sought central government assistance as the small local police forces were outnumbered. They presumably also welcomed the intimidating effect on strikers of soldiers appearing in a district.
Both local and central government saw an obligation to try to sustain normal life in the face of severe unrest. Geary argues, however, that for the government to insist that trains should run, as it did in 1911, involved them in disputes which were none of their concern. He feels such action encouraged brutality by the police and military. However, forces from outside riot areas were only introduced once violence had occurred. The only alternative to this approach was to stand by whilst the attacks and damage continued. At the time, the railway was the main way in which troops were moved and the production of coal and its transportation was a vital part of sustaining the British economy as well as its military and naval forces. Such a hands-off approach would be unsustainable for any democratic government, especially one without a majority.[38] As a result of the fact that there had been a reluctance among government law officers from the 1880s into the 1910s to codify the powers to maintain order, the government was unable to declare a national emergency as it could after 1920, but, given the grave reports it received, it could not have ignored the situation.[39]
Powell counters Geary’s attitude, instead portraying the government as ‘more concerned with maintenance of order’ than any attempt to ‘suppress industrial unrest’. Steve Peak sees the response as highlighting the inadequacy of the Liberal Government in attempting to maintain order in that it could not handle a limited rail strike without shooting people. His view is that the strikers showed they could defeat the government but needed to find a way of doing it without loss of life.[40]
Despite allegations of martial law, the government’s actions in the 1910s remained within the prevailing civil and criminal law. In addition, Morgan argues that troops could effectively be used as blackleg labour, but notes that they were not. It is true that in April 1912 the Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, told parliament that troops could be used to work as replacement labour. However, the government constantly refused requests for troops to do other people’s work. This attitude persisted until 1964 and troops did not act as replacement labour until the 1970s.[41] Demands from the Lord Mayor of Liverpool in August 1911 that the Admiralty take over the closed docks and that navy stokers be used to run the power station were refused, with Churchill replying that this would be ‘extremely objectionable’: Royal Navy sailors could protect workers, but not substitute for them. The Lord Mayor of Bristol received a similar response on requesting troops to replace cold store workers. The only time the military replaced strikers was unloading mailbags at Devonport in August 1911, as the Royal Mail had a different status to other kinds of work and this was the only occasion that the military came close to acting as replacement labour.[42]
Despite a number of historians seeing the government's response to the 1911 unrest as an aberration and stepping beyond established norms to impose and illegal, unwarranted, centralised and militarised approach, the evidence for this is missing. The approach adopted was in line with the established laws and government procedures. The particular nature of the strikes in 1911, especially the rail strike, meant that a purely localised response would have been inadequate. Central government did not seek to usurp local authorities, but it did seek to rein in assumptions that police and soldiers were there simply to protect the interests of particular employers, rather a wider-reaching role in safeguarding law and order was the objective. The reason why the government actions in 1911 appear exceptional stems from the fact that the industrial action and the riots which followed in its wake, was of a new level and one spread so far across the country. Having left dealing with these situations to local magistrates and small local police forces would have resulted in extensive damage and more deaths. This, more than anything, would have completely undermined the claim of the government to running the country.
References
[1] Charles Townsend, Making the Peace. Public Order and Public Security in Modern Britain, (Oxford, 1993, pp. 48-9.
[2] ‘Report of the Select Committee on Employment of Military in Cases of Disturbances”, 16 July 1908, Parliamentary Paper 236, collected in Reports from Committees. Session 29 January - 21 December 1908. Vol. 7 (2), , p. iv.
[3] Select Committee, pp. iii-iv; National Archives, [henceforward NA], WO 32/8466, ‘Employment of the Military in aid of the Police’, 15 April 1909.
[4] NA, HO 144/1022, ‘Military Aid to the Civil Power. Abstract of Home Office Papers since 1895’, undated [1902?]; HO 45/10655/212470, sub-file 182, Mayor of Barrow-in-Furness to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 21 August 1911; sub-file 218, T. Holmes-Gore (Clerk to Justices, Avonmouth) to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 19 August 1911; Mr. Lake (Barry Railway Company) to Prime Minister, 19 August 1911; HO 45/10656/212470, Sir Edward Troup to Secretary, Admiralty, 24 August 1911; sub-file 365, ‘Warships on Special Duty in Connection with the Strike’, 5 September 1911; Townsend, p. 42.
[5] Barbara Weinberger, Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes in Britain 1906-1926, (Oxford, 1991), p. 72; Anthony Babington, Military Intervention in Britain from the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident, (London, 1990), p. 133. Babington notes that with the creation of the Territorial Army in 1907, the local militia and yeomanry units had been relieved of their policing role.
[6] Select Committee, pp. viii [reference to the number of occasions military had been called out was removed from the final version of the report], pp. ix, 4. NA, HO 45/10649/210615, sub-file 130, Under Secretary of State, Home Office to Lord Mayor of Cardiff, 15 August 1911; HO 144/1022, [Sir] E.R. Henry to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 5 January 1909.
[7] Anthony Mor O’ Brien, ‘Churchill and the Tonypandy Riots’, Welsh History Review, vol. 17 (1994), p. 72. Captain Lionel Lindsay, Chief Constable of Glamorgan had also served in the Egyptian gendarmerie.
[8] Who Was Who 1941-50, (London, 1967), pp. 747-8; Jane Morgan, Conflict and Order. The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900-1939, (Oxford, 1987), pp. 45-6.
[9] Townsend, p. 42.
[10] Roger Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes, 1893 to 1985, (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 35-7; Townsend, p. 43; Sir Nevil Macready, Annals of an Active Life, (London, 1924), p. 137.
[11] O’Brien, p. 80; NA, WO 279/467, War Office, Duties in Aid of the Civil Power, [February 1912?], Appendix II. This even details how many red and blue pencils a unit should take.
[12] Weinberger, pp. 51, 66; Wyndham Childs, Episodes and Reflections, (London, 1930), pp. 82-4, 96.
[13] Macready, pp. 138, 144, 146, 149-50, 152, 160, 163, 165; Weinberger, pp. 59-61.
[14] Who Was Who 1941-50, (London, 1967), p. 37; Askwith, pp. 152, 210.
[15] Childs, p. 96; Lord George Askwith, Industrial Problems and Disputes, (London, 1920), pp. 172, 191, 219-220, 236-7, 244, 252.
[16] O’ Brien, p.67.
[17] Geary, pp. 25, 38.
[18] Childs, p. 98.
[19] NA, HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 164a, ‘Strike Areas’, 19 August 1911, ‘Dispositions of Troops’, War Office, 19 August 1911; Peak, p. 30.
[20] George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, (New York, 1961), pp. 217-219; Philip Bagwell, ‘The New Unionism in Britain: the Railway Industry’ in Wolfgang J. Mommsen & Hans-Gerhard Husung, ed., The Development of Trade Unionism in Great Britain and Germany, 1880-1914, (Boston, 1985), p. 197; Askwith, p. 166.
[21] Lucy Masterman, C.F.G. Masterman, (London, 1968), pp.205-6.
[22] O’ Brien, p. 97; Weinberger, p. 114.
[23] Masterman, p. 207; NA, HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 162, ‘Circular Memorandum’, 19 August 1911; sub-file 165, ‘Birmingham’, A.S.W., 19 August 1911; telegram to Officers Commanding Strike Areas, 19 August 1911; HO 45/10658, ‘No. 10 War Office Memorandum - Army Recruiting During the Strike’, 23 October 1911. Fascinatingly, recruitment into the Army during August 1911 was a third higher than normal for an August.
[24] Weinberger, p. 113; David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 126.
[25] NA, HO 45/10657/212479, sub-file 381, W.P. Byrne (Home Office) to G.R. Shepherd, 9 September 1911, this point was noted at the time.
[26] NA, HO 45/10658/212470 ‘No. 9 Memorandum on the Effect of the Presence of Troops on Rioters’.
[27] O’Brien, p. 75; Weinberger, p. 112-113.
[28] Geary, p. 36; Morgan, pp. 41-43.
[29] NA, HO 45/10655/212470 sub-file 152, ‘List of Separate Police Forces’, 1 October 1905.
[30] Weinberger, p. 4; NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 5, Letter to Mr. Blackwell, 28 June 1911; HO 45/10657 Chief Constable of Derby to Home Office, 16 August 1911.
[31] Ronald V. Sires, ‘Labour Unrest in England 1910-1914’, in Journal of Economic History, vol. XV, no. 3 (1955), p.260; O‘Brien, p. 91.
[32] Sires, pp. 258-9; Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, UK, CHAR 12/6/34-35, W.S. Churchill to D. Lloyd George, 13 November 1910.
[33] Michael Bentley, Politics without Democracy, 1815-1914, (London, 1996), p. 336; T.A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence. Order and Liberty in Britain, (London, 1970), pp. 169, 172; Ian Christopher Fletcher, ‘”Prosecutions ... are Always Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals and the 1912 “Don’t Shoot” Prosecutions’, Albion, vol. 28, pp. 259, 266.
[34] O’Brien, pp. 72-3; Gregory D. Phillips, The Diehards. Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England, (London, 1979), p. 65.
[35] Weinberger, pp. 4, 25, 46, 62; NA, HO 45/10648/210615 sub-file 137a, Minute, 26 September 1911; sub-file 21, Letter to Mayor of Hull, undated [July 1911]; Mayor of Hull to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1 July 1911; sub-file 14, Home Secretary to Mayor of Hull, 30 June 1911; Parliamentary Debates. Commons. 5th Series, 1911, vol. 37, June 19 - July 7, 3 July 1911, cols. 791-2.
[36] NA, HO 45/10657/212470, A.W. Willmer, Mayor of Birkenhead to Home Office, 19 August 1911.
[37] Morgan, pp. 60-1, 63-4; Weinberger, p. 66.
[38] Morgan, p.64; Geary pp. 46.
[39] Sires, p. 264; Babington, p. 142; Townsend, pp. 45-9.
[40] David Powell, The Edwardian Crisis: Britain 1901-1914, (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 126; Steve Peak, Troops in Strikes. Military Intervention in Industrial Disputes, (London, 1984), p. 31.
[41] Parliamentary Debates. Commons. 5th Series, 1911, vol. 36, Mar. 25 - Apr. 12, 10 April 1912, cols. 1326-1333; Keith Jeffery and Peter Hennessy, States of Emergency, (London, 1983), pp. 242-3.
[42] NA, HO 45/10658/212470, Lord Mayor of Liverpool to Home Office, 17 August 1911, 12.50pm; Lord Mayor of Liverpool to Home Secretary, 17 August 1911, 1.05pm; Home Secretary to Lord Mayor of Liverpool, 17 August 1911, 2.40pm; Home Secretary to Lord Mayor of Liverpool, 17 August 1911, 5pm; Lord Mayor of Liverpool to Home Secretary, 17 August 1911, 6pm; sub-file 156, telegram to General Officer Commanding Coast Defences, Devonport, 19 August 1911; HO 45/10657/212470, ‘Diary of Events as Reported at the War Office’, 23 August 1911. In 1955 the Army were again used to move mail, but barred from any other labour - Daily Telegraph, 30 May 1955, ‘Army Lorries and Planes To Carry Mail’.
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