Chapter 11. THE MOVEMENT IN DECLINE

It may seem peculiar to open this section with an account of the active campaign for the release of the Walsall anarchists. Yet it is right that it should come under the heading of the decline of the movement. It was a campaign which was sparked off by information printed in a reformist newspaper and carried on by means of lobbying and ‘influencing public opinion’. Despite the fact that its major organizer, David Nicoll, was an anarchist, the campaign was not — and under the conditions of the time could not be — carried out by the anarchist methods of direct action. Strikes, riots or even kidnapping and organized jail-breaks, which have all been used to force the release of political prisoners, were not seriously considered. For by April 1895 when Reynold’s News printed the memoirs of ex-Detective Sergeant Mclntyre concerning the arrest and trial of the Walsall anarchists a head of steam seemed to be missing in the movement. The ‘revelations’ of McIntyre, who had been forced out of the police for being more or less “soft on anarchists,”[323] were quite important. They made it clear that Coulon had been a paid police agent — something that could only previously be inferred from hearsay and circumstantial evidence. This clearly gave great credibility to the anarchist contention that Coulon had a financial interest in instigating and then denouncing the conspiracy. McIntyre wrote:

Some time previous to what was known at the Walsall bomb conspiracy, Coulon wrote a letter to Scotland Yard offering his services to the police. Now, the police generally take advantage of any offer of this kind, in view of the necessity of keeping secret political agitators under surveillance.

I have myself employed informers, and paid them reasonable sums for their information. But, in doing so, I took particular trouble to satisfy myself that they never acted the part of agents-provocateurs.

There is in my possession a letter from a member of the Autonomie Club stating that he could commence making dynamite with some others, that he could then give me information, and that thus I should be able to make an important capture. I had employed this man to go to the club in question, but after this letter I got rid of the unscrupulous scoundrel as quickly as possible.

Coulon’s offer was accepted, and he forthwith got to work. … Without the slightest doubt, there was an attempt at Walsall to obtain the manufacture of a bomb. According to my information, Coulon represented to the men that one was wanted for use in Russia, and, like all Anarchists, they were in sympathy with the victims of despotic government in that country. Thus they probably thought that they were acting in the interests of humanity in lending their aid to the instigator of this formidable plot.

McIntyre also made it clear that Coulon was Inspector Melville’s ‘property’, and no evidence is offered that Melville authorized Coulon to instigate the Walsall plot. Yet the implication is that Melville did not take particular care to satisfy himself that Coulon never acted the part of agent provocateur. McIntyre points out that Coulon certainly had a financial interest in the affair:

The last time I heard of him [Coulon] he was living in the neighborhood of Brixton in a style that favorably contrasted with his humble circumstances when I first knew him. Anyhow, the Walsall business appears to have enabled him to migrate to a semi-fashionable district.[324]

Clearly, such allegations received greater attention when they came from ex-policemen rather than from friends of the accused. Shortly after they were published Nicoll announced in the Anarchist: “An Amnesty Committee of men of all shades of opinion is forming in Sheffield. Our first work will be to issue a leaflet containing extracts from McIntyre’s revelation with a short history of the case. We shall scatter these broadcast among the people and this will be followed by vigorous action and agitation. Our friends in Norwich, Aberdeen, Leicester and Canning Town are working actively.”[325] And the agitation did go ahead. Committees were formed in various towns. The anarchists held meetings and collections. Resolutions were passed at the S.D.F., I.L.P. and union branches. Justice threw open its columns for letters on the case. The Labor Leader printed an article by Carpenter. A deputation of anarchists in Aberdeen met with the local M.P. and held a joint demonstration with the S.D.F. Keir Hardie was sympathetic and persuaded Asquith to receive a statement of facts and a petition on the case, though the 1895 election run-up interrupted any action that he might have taken. The statement of facts was printed and circulated among Members of Parliament “and other people of influence.”[326]

By April 1896 the new Home Secretary (Sir William White Ridley) had rejected appeals for amnesty for the Walsall prisoners. Nicoll had addressed seven ‘large meetings’ in February and March in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Derby. In fact the energy that Nicoll put into this agitation was phenomenal when we consider that he was singlehandedly bringing out a monthly paper and having to make a precarious living by penny-a-line journalism. Difficult enough for a man of his revolutionary reputation in London, this was to prove well nigh impossible in the provinces. His activity was not limited to places within fairly easy reach of Sheffield. Three large meetings were held in London with anarchist, trades union and socialist speakers. A resolution was moved by Ben Tillett, G.N. Barnes and W. Parnell at the T.U.C. and passed by an overwhelming majority calling for the release of the Walsall men. All this was largely due to Nicoll’s activity. Despite the fact that funds had run out by early 1897 Nicoll was again preparing for a further provincial tour of protest meetings.[327]

But it was all in vain. Resolutions passed at socialist or union meetings — no matter how large — were unlikely to move the Home Secretary of a victorious and reactionary Conservative government. Moreover the government was most unlikely to release prisoners when it would mean such a retrospective slap in the eye for the police. Despite a number of scandals to do with blatant police perjury and corruption in this period the Conservatives were distinctly unwilling to undermine confidence in the forces of law and order by admitting that the police could make mistakes — whether by accident or design.[328] Coercion of the government by more direct means was not in the power of the anarchists or any other of the socialist groupings. The amnesty agitation faded away.

The movement as a whole was clearly in difficulties by 1896. Indications of numbers are extremely difficult to come by. There seems to have been no particular drop in the number of people who called themselves anarchists — there were perhaps even increases in their ranks. Yet most, of these people did not seem to be particularly active nor did they appear to enthusiastically support their papers to the extent even of distributing them or funding them sufficiently to keep them afloat. There is no particular contradiction here. It took consistent effort and organizational enthusiasm to keep outdoor speaking pitches open. These tended to be given up or become sporadic when morale slumped. Most of the papers were sold at open-air meetings, not through subscriptions, so that it was quite possible for anarchists to retreat into friendship networks which were not necessarily efficient channels for distributing literature but which would keep the movement together — although in a fragmented and apathetic form. C.T. Quinn described the anarchist movement as “very dull and sluggish” in January 1896.[329] He clearly saw symptoms of fragmentation around him, attributing it to “the ordinary anarchist policy of always separating whenever a difficulty occurs.” He could only mean by this, disagreements which had led to the existence of several different groups and their papers out of the Socialist League anarchists. It is worth saying that these had in more ebullient moments been pointed to as signs of strength and decentralized self-activity. His proposal to form the ‘Associated Anarchists’, a group with a “non-compulsory” (!) agreement to be a condition of membership, missed the point — what precisely was this new group to do? In the event they published a few issues of yet another paper — the Alarm — and fell apart within a year. They had at least managed to produce a little more than the Anarchist-Communist Alliance, which existed only as the imprint on a manifesto issued in 1895. They too had nothing but ‘mere abstractions’ to sustain them and no situation to speak to.

Papers began to close. The last number of Liberty edited by Tochatti appeared in December 1896. The immediate reason was the ill-health of Tochatti, but it is significant that no one could step in to take his place. It is evident that the paper was difficult to keep going, financially speaking. Excellently produced and devoted to maintaining a dialogue between anarchists, anti-parliamentary socialists and libertarians of more statist inclinations in the I.L.P. and elsewhere, it was a great loss. It was the only anarchist paper that William Morris was prepared to “talk to.” Closely in touch with many facets of the socialist movement, it actually managed to have discussions rather than battles in its columns. It is a tribute to its more tranquil spirit that ill-health was all that surrounded its passing.

The Torch had temporarily halted its production in June 1896, briefly come back to life in October of that year and then finally collapsed in January 1897. This paper died with considerably more acrimony than Liberty. The halt in its production in 1896 was caused by the aftermath of the departure of the Rossetti sisters, Olivia and Helen, from the English anarchist movement. According to the autobiographical novel written by Olivia Rossetti under the pen name of Isobel Meredith (called A Girl Among the Anarchists) the reason for their departure was a sudden feeling of pointlessness in their propaganda activity. Other sources seem to indicate that this feeling might have been encouraged by some of the people they had to work with. Particularly, we should point to Tom Cantwell and Ernest Young. Geoffrey Byrne, another member of the Torch group, wrote of them, “With such a pair of despicable, lying, cowardly humbugs I have nothing in common. How could I? I have never lived out of the movement or sponged on Comrades as Cantwell and Young are doing. I was never kept by two girls (whose youthful inexperience prevented them from seeing through the wiles of a lying scab) for nearly two years … and then repaid them by laziness, lying and mischief-making and finally by filth, lice and trouble-making driving them disgusted and heartsick out of the English movement.”[330] Principles do not seem to have been Young’s and Cantwell’s strong point. On several occasions they persuaded some Italian anarchists in the name of the cause to do the donkey work printing their commercial work for nothing. The Italians could not understand English, and it was some time before they discovered that they had been conned.[331] Whatever the reason for the departure of the Rossetti sisters, the real trouble started once they had left. Byrne and F.S. Paul remained in the group, together with Young and Cantwell, to carry on the Torch. (Young and Cantwell seemed to have stayed due to some sense of customary right and because their assistance was needed to produce the paper.) Olivia Rossetti was happy enough for Paul and Byrne to continue the paper but, understandably enough, wished to dispose of the financial obligation to rent the office at 127 Ossulston Street. She also offered to sell Paul the printing plant. Paul had not the means to buy it and asked Max Nettlau for financial help.

Now Paul had come under some suspicion as a brash upstart of heterodox opinions. He had rather pushed himself forward as the secretary of the meeting in September 1895 which had been called to discuss the International Socialist Congress scheduled for 1896, which, it was announced, would exclude anarchists. For this presumption he was rather snottily admonished in Liberty.[332] Paul had also announced it as his opinion that anarchy would evolve from state socialism and, to the irritation of other comrades, had suggested that participation in elections should not, therefore, be ruled out. Since he also coupled his request for cash with a demand for editorial and managerial autonomy and the right to exclude such undesirables as the Associated Anarchists from the office, his request was rather coolly regarded by Nettlau. Instead the latter approached Olivia Rossetti and bought the plant and took over the office from her. The plant was placed in the hands of a group of trustees largely drawn from the Freedom Group. There were conditions laid down by Olivia Rossetti, however. The plant was to be used in the first place for the Torch then for the movement generally and only thereafter for the assorted jobbing printing with which Young supplemented his income. Further, two homeless Italians who were sleeping in the office were to remain at their convenience. The trustees decided to have Cantwell move in the Freedom printing plant and to print Freedom in Ossulston Street. The result was that despite Nettlau’s good intentions and his desire that the printing plant should be at the disposal of the movement as a whole — including F.S. Paul — the office was, to all practical purposes in the hands of Young and Cantwell. The result was that Paul, Byrne and on one occasion Olivia Rossetti were refused entry to the office. The two Italians were summarily evicted from the office by Cantwell at gunpoint. The whole affair left a sour taste in the mouth and did not do the reputation of the Freedom Group any good at all since it was widely assumed that the whole thing was a forcible takeover. Byrne and Paul got their paper printed elsewhere but, as we have seen, it died a natural death in January 1897.[333]

The Associated Anarchists and their paper Alarm collapsed in similarly acrimonious circumstances. Will Banham and Tom Reece ‘seceded’ from the group, taking with them the type and office necessaries. Carl Quinn wrote to Freedom as secretary of the Alarm group asking that no further money should be sent in “at any rate for the present.” They asked subscribers to write in as “during the course of recent events their addresses have been mislaid” — in all probability Banham and Reece had taken the list with them. They promised to continue the paper.[334] Banham and Reece also wrote to Freedom asking for all money to be sent to them since “No other people are authorized to collect monies or transact business on behalf of the Alarm.” They also promised that the Alarm would “reappear at an early date from a new office.”[335] The Alarm did not reappear from either source. According to Hart[336] some of the twelve or so Associated Anarchists left with Quinn, then burgled the new office that Banham and Reece set up. The latter two then most un-anarchistically called in the police. The result of this minor fracas was a temporary reconciliation which came to a sudden end when Banham and Reece sold the assets, pocketed the proceeds and disappeared.

The extent of the sense of collapse in the movement is indicated by a letter from Marsh (the editor of Freedom) to Nettlau in October 1897: “… Freedom, financially is in terribly low water and writing round to the groups has produced no effect. I feel it would be disastrous for the paper to cease, even temporarily. Liberty, Torch, Alarm are all dead and if Freedom goes our enemies and the reactionary socialists will have it all to themselves.”[337] Marsh’s depressed mood seemed partly to do with a crisis with the difficult Cantwell who finally left Freedom — at least temporarily — the following month. As Marsh remarked: “…you cannot imagine what a time I had. 2½ years with Cantwell is enough to kill anyone …”[338] Freedom pamphlets were selling well, but Freedom was now totally responsible for the rent of the Ossulston Street premises, and the paper was in some financial difficulties. Freedom did survive through the 1890s and the reaction of the Boer War period but only with a considerable amount of help from its friends. It survived because its friends were able to help it — they tended to be the more middle-class (i.e. better off) anarchists; though tribute should be paid to the self-sacrificing efforts of Marsh himself. He had come to the editorship of Freedom in 1895 when the paper was suspended for three months when Charlotte Wilson retired. The reason cited for Mrs Wilson’s retirement (‘domestic affairs’) seems to have been real enough: her correspondence indicates that her mother was ill at the time. Yet the rapidity with which any deep connections with the movement were severed also revealed in the same correspondence seems to indicate that it was a welcome relief to give up the responsibility for the paper after her eight-and-a-half-year stint as editor.

Marsh had been a member of the Freedom Group from some time in 1887, following his friend John Turner from the Socialist League. The son of an old Radical, he had met Turner while still a member of the S.D.F. in 1886. He spoke in the discussion meetings from time to time, yet seems to have been a modest and retiring comrade. For this reason he does not seem to have been a ‘prominent’ member of the Freedom Group. Correspondence indicates that it was not until 1894 that he was invited to meet Kropotkin at his home in Bromley for one of the regular Sunday soirées, though without doubt he had met Kropotkin ‘professionally’ many times in previous years. This was probably the point at which he was being groomed to take over the editorship. The character of Freedom did not change with the change of editor. It seems quite consistent with Marsh’s character that the paper should remain largely theoretical in content and comment on events rather than see itself as an agitational instrument making events. There is little doubt that Marsh’s preferences matched those of Kropotkin whose policy was completely dominant within the Freedom Group. The Nettlau Collection in Amsterdam has many postcards and letters from Kropotkin to Marsh which are friendly in tone yet which are composed of suggestions, exhortations and opinions on the paper. Marsh’s letters to Kropotkin are, on the other hand, letters of explanation and occasionally of excuse. They are a clear enough expression of the relationship between the two men.

The group which produced Freedom from 1895 under Marsh’s editorship had changed somewhat. Its active membership in 1897 was composed of Turner, Wess, Presburg and Nettlau, with Cantwell as printer (at least until October). All these people had at one point been connected with the Socialist League and the Commonweal when it was an anarchist paper. Yet, if Nicoll is to be believed, much of the Commonweal Group had been involved to some extent in the Freedom Group. Certainly Turner and Marsh had long been members. Presburg had written the London reports for Freedom. Wess had also contributed to Freedom, and Nettlau was a sort of ‘man about the movement’, anyway. So in reality there was little change in the paper either in form or behind the scenes. Yet the paper now existed in a different environment. It was no longer produced in parallel with other sympathetic publications. The last anarchist paper in Britain to collapse in 1897 was Nicoll’s Anarchist, which had changed its name to the Commonweal in May 1896. At least, after 1897 it only came out sporadically and was no longer influential to any degree. Its almost complete demise was due to a conflict between Nicoll and the Freedom Group. The paper had been in difficulties as evidenced by the necessity to change its format from folio to pamphlet form in mid-1895. And by this time the paper was completely written by Nicoll — presumably in the gaps left to him by the Walsall prisoners’ agitation. By 1897 Nicoll had found it impossible to stay in Sheffield since he could not earn a living there by journalism. However, in early 1897 he had published his pamphlet The Greenwich Mystery, which has been used as a source for the section on the Bourdin affair in this book. Nicoll had not forgotten his feud with Samuels in the years after Christmas 1893 and his resentment was probably fanned by isolation, poverty and the failure of the Walsall prisoners’ campaign. In this pamphlet he made it quite clear that he thought H.B. Samuels had been a police spy and gave strong hints that he considered ‘D—’ to have been his willing accomplice. ‘D—’, though unidentified, was quite obviously Dr Fauset Macdonald, who had been on good terms with the Freedom Group. Nicoll went much further in his accusations in this pamphlet than his hints in the Anarchist in 1894. Nettlau wrote an agitated letter very soon after its publication:

I am sorry that you publish such things as the Greenwich Pamphlet. It does the prisoners no good and brings our cause into ridicule and contempt and it might not be too late to withdraw it from sale altogether. For as to H.B.S. it proves very little. It is all in your way of telling things and a careful reader is soon able to keep both the things, proofs and insinuations, wide asunder. But this is nothing compared to the vile slanders on … D—. This is the worst libel I have seen in print for a long time and it decidedly rivals with Coulon’s exploits.[339]

Nicoll’s response was anything but conciliatory. In a private note to Nettlau, Nicoll accused Nettlau of cowardice — presumably because in 1894 Nettlau had been prepared to countenance Nicoll’s accusations of H.B. Samuels in private letters but not now apparently in public.[340] In print, however, Nicoll went a great deal further. He reprinted the letter from Nettlau in the last issue of the paper published in Sheffield in June 1897 and followed it up with a barrage of mud against Nettlau. It as good as asserted that he had been expelled as a police spy from the Autonomie Club in 1890, accused him of complicity with Coulon and suggested that his private means came from the police. Nicoll also named Macdonald as the ‘D—’ in the Greenwich pamphlet. It was extraordinarily stupid of Nicoll, even if his irritation over the movement’s refusal to take his accusations of Samuels seriously is understandable. In June 1897 Nicoll also moved from Sheffield to London, intending to continue publication there, and was arrested — though quickly released — for a mocking speech at Canning Town around the subject of the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. Meanwhile there was a flurry of activity over Nicoll’s accusations. John Turner went to see Nicoll to ask him to retract but reported him as “quite crazy” and said it was useless to appeal to him.[341] H.B. Samuels, who was now, it appeared, a member of both the I.L.P. and the S.D.F., went (unsuccessfully) to court to try and have Nicoll stopped from continuing to publish the Greenwich pamphlet. He issued a leaflet entitled ‘Is D.J. Nicoll Insane?’ which used a lot of the material that Coulon had circulated in 1894, and he advertised a meeting in the Atheneum Hall on ‘The History of Greenwich Mystery’ to explain his side of it.[342] H.B. Samuels’s efforts were greeted with quiet mockery by papers like Reynold’s News, but Nicoll was under attack from more heavyweight quarters. Kropotkin wrote a protest and sent it to Marsh, but he also wrote a retraction which Nicoll was to sign, and which he sent together with a covering note to Nettlau: “Dear Friend, I read with indignation Nicoll’s accusations. I am persuaded that, by different sophisms, he — a man to whom … I never trusted has been brought this campaign. … Nicoll must be compelled to sign a retraction and beaten if he does not.”[343] So much for the ‘gentle anarchist prince’ image.

Kropotkin’s influence was great. The protest, cleaned up grammatically, had been circulated by Marsh to various quarters and was thereby in addition to Kropotkin signed by Marsh, Turner, Presburg, Wess, the Hydes and Mrs Dryhurst of the Freedom Group, Charlotte Wilson and, among others, Sam Mainwaring and James Tochatti. It was published in Freedom’s June/July issue. In addition to protesting about Nicoll’s insinuations about Macdonald and Nettlau (H.B. Samuels was significantly not mentioned) and laying the blame on “intellectual and moral faculties” which had been “sadly affected by solitary confinement,” it also declared a boycott: “Whatever the cause may be, one can only say that Nicoll’s wicked insinuations are the worst of libels. Under the circumstances we feel compelled to dissociate ourselves entirely from Nicoll until he has withdrawn — without reserve and as publicly as he has published — these shameful slurs upon the honor of our two friends. We leave it to comrades elsewhere to act as they think such conduct deserves.” Nicoll would neither sign Kropotkin’s retraction nor publish one of his own. His clearly developing paranoia could find in this response to his ‘revelations’ a major confirmation of their truth. The complexity of his response was increased by the fact that his remarks on the Jubilee in this particular issue of the paper also resulted in the police seizing 200 copies. His bitterness towards the Freedom Group, which he rightly saw as the origin of the boycott, was as deep as the effect of the boycott seems to have been. He wrote later:

I had with me my little boy. The struggle would have been hard enough for us under any circumstances, but it was made ten times harder by this ‘Protest’ and by the lies and calamnies that were diligently circulated by Mr Joseph Perry (Presburg) who appears to be employed for this purpose. Soon we found ourselves without a home, and were compelled to seek the shelter of the common lodging house. One night even this miserable shelter was denied us; it was raining and we paced the streets of Soho, till weary and tired, we rested in doorways till driven onward. I cannot forget this, nor the long days of hunger and misery … and if I attack these people bitterly, let those men who have children remember the reason why.[344]

The personal consequences for Nicoll of the boycott were severe, and this point probably marks the beginning of his irreversible slide into paranoid breakdown.[345] A movement at a low level of vigor can be rent apart by conflicts which are personal and political and most disastrously by a combination of both. (This is not to say that there is no element of the personal in ‘objectively’ political disputes or no element of the political in ‘objectively’ personal disputes in political movements.) In vigorous times energy can be devoted to more pleasurable constructive pursuits, and the amount left over for destructive wrangling is reduced. Further the movement itself if sufficiently elastic to contain such disputes so that their resolution is encouraged. Without the opportunities for constructive action and without conditions which make for resolution, bitter disputes have both more psychic fuel and more shattering effects. Both the unreasonableness of Nicoll and the intransigence of the Freedom Group and its allies illustrate this well.

As we have seen there were a number of such destructive disputes in the movement in 1896 and 1897 resulting in the collapse of anarchist periodicals. By Christmas 1897 Freedom stood alone. While it had been the medium of one tendency among many it had been accepted as such. When it became the anarchist periodical it became the focus of criticisms, disappointments and hopes which more properly belonged to the movement as a whole. At a conference which took place at that time (having been postponed first from Easter to Whitsun, then from Whitsun to Christmas 1897) a long discussion took place, ostensibly on the need for a popular anarchist weekly paper. This initially centered

…on the merits and demerits of Freedom … many hot assertions and bitter personal remarks made at the first meeting will not be recorded here. The summary of the criticism of Stockton, Percy, Kitz, W.B. Parker, O’Shea, O’Malley, Banham, Quinn and others is that Freedom was described as a philosophical, middle-class organ, not intelligible to the working classes, not up to date in late information and in O’Shea’s eyes less revolutionary than Comic Cuts, Alley Sloper and Sam Weller. It was edited and managed by an inaccessible group of arrogant persons worse than the Pope and his seventy cardinals and written by fossilized old quilldrivers.

The Freedom report continues in a hurt tone: “The serious arguments underlying this often grotesque criticism were that there is, and has always been, a necessity for a weekly popular anarchist paper and Freedom being monthly … never pretended to fill this want … but the great majority of the meeting was hostile to Freedom because it was not what it never claimed to be … the illogical character of this position was pointed out and now the right idea prevailed to publish a weekly paper themselves and to let the bickering about Freedom alone.”[346] The Freedom Group replied to the accusations made against it saying that they had appealed for help (without success) from their critics who were really the inaccessible ones. The columns of Freedom were open for criticism but none had been sent. They were indignant that they should be so abused when they published “the only paper that has managed to struggle through these trying times.” They declared themselves ready to wish every success to a weekly paper, should one appear. Yet they did not seem properly able to understand the situation. Attempts had been made to reorganize the movement at the conference but since the emphasis in the movement was so much on propaganda, the sole remaining anarchist paper had assumptions thrust upon it which it was not only designed to disappoint but which it hardly seemed to recognize. To be sure, Freedom had its own troubles and was struggling to keep going but it could have been a little more helpful.

It had been agreed at the conference that Freedom should be approached and inquiries made as to excess type and the possibility of other help. The reply was to be sent to a ‘West London Anarchist Group’ which was formed at the conference. The nature of the reply to perhaps rather ambitious suggestions from the meeting can be seen in the letter Kropotkin sent to Marsh:

Dear Friend, I just received a letter from Gumplowicz, telling me that at the last Conference there was a bitter opposition to Freedom, that the comrades wanted to stop it and so on.

I don’t know how it came that Gumplowicz consider himself of the Freedom Group; How can he when his ideas are ultra-individualist, bitterly opposed to our Communist lines, and altogether — what has he to do in Freedom.

At any rate, Freedom being the paper of a small group which lives from voluntary work and contributions of a small group — no one has any right ‘to stop’ Freedom, so long as that group wishes to publish it.

As to a new paper, you know that I am always delighted at the appearance of every new paper and the more would I be delighted to see a weekly published in England.

But Gumplowicz writes they have decided (who has that right, except you and the Freedom Group) that the new paper will be printed in Freedom’s office.

Are you agreed with that? Is it really your idea.

I think that the best way to keep kindly relations between the two papers — if a new one appears — is not to print them in the same office.

That is the rule deduced from long practice in France … it must end in petty quarrels about petty things — to say nothing of the difficulties of printing the two papers — the same week at the end of the month — to keep the composition for pamphlets and so on.

Of course I can give no definite opinion upon this subject (!JMQ) but it seems to me that the printing of the two papers in our small office would only lead to create bad relations.

It is a very serious question and I should earnestly advise the Freedom comrades — I mean you, Wess, Nettlau, Presburg — to take no hasty steps.[347]

So much for Nettlau’s intention to purchase the Torch plant and take over their office for the benefit of the movement as a whole. So much, too, for the proposed weekly paper. The project foundered in frustration and apathy. Nothing further was mentioned until an appeal appeared in the June 1898 issue of Freedom for funds to start a weekly paper. The following month they acknowledged £2–£3 which, they said, was “not sufficient.”

They also said “…we appealed to you who are interested to communicate with us, and for reasons unknown to us, have so far received no response …” Nothing further was said and no new weekly paper appeared.

The decline of anarchist morale in 1896 and 1897, represented concretely by the collapse of systematic open-air or written propaganda, could be laid at the door of apathy and the sense of defeat both in the working class in general and the anarchists in particular. In 1898 there were clear signs that a real period of reaction was under way. The ruling-class strategy of judiciously balanced quantities of force and fraud (in Morris’s terms) was becoming weighted in the direction of force. In industrial terms this manifested itself in a very determined opposition to trades unions by the employers. They improved their national communications and organization and with the aid of blacklegs organized by themselves or by the Free Labor Association were able to defeat the engineering workers in a lockout in 1897–1898. Similarly, dock strikes were defeated in 1899–1900. There were also increasing attacks in more ‘political’ areas. Instead of containing manifestations of ‘subversive’ or popular activity the authorities were now harassing groups and individuals whose activities were not particularly public or ‘disruptive’. A foretaste had been given in July 1897 when a “vile and unfair attack [was] made by the whole press — with few exceptions — against asylum” when Spanish refugees arrived in Liverpool.[348] These people had fled from Spain in the face of the brutal repression of every possible kind of opponent to the government and the Church. Some 400 prisoners had been packed into Montjuich prison, Barcelona, and many had died as a result of appalling tortures. The Freedom Group had conducted a modestly successful campaign on behalf of the refugees.

The reaction began to get under way when two Russians, Burtzev and Wierzbicki, were arrested and charged in London in early 1898 with “having persuaded or endeavored to persuade divers persons unknown to murder the Czar of Russia.”[349] In a Russian-language magazine for which the two men were responsible, an article had appeared urging revolutionary action in Russia and praising those revolutionaries who had made attempts on the life of the Czar. This prosecution seems to have been instigated at the request of the Russian government, and it resulted in the imprisonment of Burtzev for eighteen months. In actual fact there was probably more to the prosecution than the article in question. At a later date Burtzev is mentioned as running a one-man counter-espionage operation against the activity of Czarist spies among Russian émigrés in Paris.[350] This kind of activity, more than any revolutionary sentiments in a magazine, was likely to have aroused the vindictive anger of the Russian government. There was no great outcry against this prosecution, which could be compared to — say — the agitation around the trial of Johann Most. As Freedom put it: “The danger at the moment is the indifference of the British people.”

Another prosecution that could conceivably have roused ‘the people’ from their indifference was the prosecution of George Bedborough, secretary of the Legitimation League and editor of its magazine, the Adult. He was prosecuted on a number of charges which centered on his having sold copies of Havelock Ellis’s book Sexual Inversion. The fascinating details of the case involving the activities of a brilliant international confidence trickster, ‘de Villiers’, and the craven cowardice of Ellis, the bold sexologist, can be found elsewhere.[351] The result was a rather inglorious partial plea of guilty by Bedborough who was pressed on the one hand by the defense committee to become a martyr and on the other by the police, who (quite rightly) pointed out that neither Ellis nor de Villiers were supporting him. Bedborough was effectively bound over and renounced any connection with the Legitimation League or the Adult. As a result they both collapsed. And in the face of this withdrawal little passion was aroused by the case. What is most relevant to us is the motivation of the police in prosecuting Bedborough.

The Legitimation League, founded in 1895, had been originally set up to press for equal legal rights for illegitimate children. Its discussions, however, expanded to most matters sexual, and it included in its ranks those who were fighting for sexual liberation as well as cranks and, in the case of de Villiers, a more or less genteel pornographer. It had conducted a successful agitation in its first year to have Miss Edith Lanchester, a sympathizer, released from a lunatic asylum where she had been confined by her family and the family doctor when she had announced her intention of living with a man to whom she was not married. This had brought the League into prominence. The interest of the police had increased when they found that anarchists were regularly attending the meetings of the League and propagandizing there. Sweeny, the detective in charge of this investigation, regularly attended meetings of the League and reported that the anarchists were rounding out the Legitimation League’s call for an abolition of the marriage laws with a call for the abolition of all laws. Lilian Harman, an American anarchist, coeditor with her father of the magazine Lucifer, who had been imprisoned for living with the father of her child when unmarried to him, visited Britain and gave a number of successful lectures. She was also elected honorary President of the League. Thus, when an opportunity arose in the shape of Ellis’ book Sexual Inversion, for which Bedborough had become an unofficial agent, the police arrested him. In Sweeny’s words they were “convinced that we should at one blow kill a growing evil in the shape of a vigorous campaign for free love and anarchism and at the same time, discover the means by which the country was being flooded with books of the ‘Psychology’ type.”[352] The campaign in defense of Bedborough over the summer of 1898 involved Henry Seymour and two previous ‘martyrs’ in the cause of free speech, Holyoake and Foote. However it did not involve Ellis, who decided he was a scholar not a fighter. Neither did it involve de Villiers, who was concerned, sensibly in view of his previous assorted identities, to avoid contact with the police. Finally with Bedborough’s plea of guilty to a number of his charges the case was indefinitely adjourned. From Sweeny’s memoirs it is quite clear that the police had every intention of smashing the Legitimation League and closing down the Adult and only needed an excuse which would not get them into the choppy waters of accusations of repression of free speech. It is interesting that the political police should so readily jump into questions of morality. We have grown used to psychological-political analyzes which relate authority to moral authoritarianism with the result that although self-appointed guardians of sexual morality still plague us they are faced with a pointed counter-attack. In 1898 sexual repression was respectable and attacks on ‘free love’ propaganda could be conducted with equanimity and self-satisfaction. Yet it is a surprise that it should be so readily assumed that the police should treat it as a political matter.

The prosecutions of Burtzev and Bedborough were specific instances of a more intensive general harassment. This harassment could not be related to a particular wave of anarchist activity comparable to the bombings in Paris in the early 1890s. At that time, however, a measure of international police cooperation had developed and had continued. It was to be given a more definite political form by the international conference, popularly known as the Anti-Anarchist Conference, called by the Italian government in late 1898. The specific basis for the conference was the assassination of the Empress of Austria by the Italian anarchist Lucheni earlier that same year. It was proposed that all participants should ban all anarchist publications, send all anarchists back to their own countries and ban publication of details of anarchist trials and actions. And while in England these proposals never took the form of laws and the public stance of the British government remained ‘liberal’, in practice the police without hindrance from above seem to have acted in sympathy with the intentions of the conference. In March 1899, Freedom was writing “Italian comrades are being systematically coerced and terrorized by Scotland Yard …” Letters of English and foreign anarchists were being tampered with and the number of people being followed by the police increased. This seems to have been an advance on the situation in mid-1898, which was already pretty tight. According to David Nicoll, the Fitzroy Square area swarmed “with vermin in the shape of spies … you can’t speak to an acquaintance without a gentleman of suspicious appearance walking up to you to listen to the conversation.” People were again being followed to work and their employers told of their employee’s dangerous political ideas — resulting all too often in the sack. On one occasion, someone who was being followed by Detective Sweeny willfully misunderstood the situation and deciding that he must be a beggar offered the detective a piece of bread. He was arrested on some trumped-up charge but later acquitted at his trial.[353] Kropotkin, at a Chicago Commemoration meeting in November 1898, spoke of the implications of the Anti-Anarchist Conference: “Take it as a law of history. The so-called scientific people may ignore it but it has had not one single exception in the past. Never has an advanced party been prosecuted, without all more or less advanced parties and even mere reform parties being included in the prosecution and a screw being put on their activities. Only those who become the tools of reaction are spared in such times.” He linked the attacks of reactionaries with the passivity of the masses. “Who would have dared to foretell 20 years ago,” he said, “…nay ten years only when Morris wrote in Tables Turned that the revolution was, not ‘coming’ but had already begun — who would have dared to foretell the sudden revival of militarism, of ritualism and of Catholicism which we now witness in Europe.”[354] In England the wave of popular reaction centered on the war fever surrounding the Boer War (1899–1902). With few exceptions the anarchists were in no position to run a coherent campaign against the war. The S.D.F., poisoned at source by the jingoism of Hyndman and others, was not particularly disposed to oppose the war. Initial opposition came from the Liberals and the I.L.P. The anarchists seemed to be largely sunk in apathy. There were few communications in Freedom from old London activists and what few there were consisted of commentary and generalization rather than reports of activity. Only the groups in Liverpool, Leeds and Glasgow rose at all to the situation. These were the only towns in which outdoor speakers had been active and other propaganda had been steadily carried on for a length of time before the war started. For the rest, the mood seems to be expressed by a report from a visitor to Aberdeen which was, he said, “five or six years ago … practically, as far as numbers and enthusiasm go, the stronghold of Anarchism in Great Britain … I called on Harry Duncan, and found him rather despondent about the future of the movement. … He finding himself unsupported has gone into Trade Union work; where he thinks, if the returns are not so great, they are at least quicker. His ideas have undergone a change, he has perhaps less hope in the future.”[355]

Further indications of apathy come from the reception given to three of the Walsall anarchists on their release after serving seven and a half years of their ten-year sentences. A rather sedate tea and social evening was held and Charles, Cailes and Battola were presented with about £20 from a fund collected mainly, it would appear, among Jewish and other foreign anarchists. There were no riotous receptions like those that greeted Nicoll on his release, nor do provincial anarchists seem to have invited them to do speaking tours round the country. Charles went quietly back to Norwich where he married, Cailes remained in the Soho area and Battola seems to have disappeared. Meanwhile the first anti-war demonstration had been broken up in Trafalgar Square by jingo crowds. The only anarchist group to take up the cry in any exceptional way was in Leeds. They organized an anti-war demonstration for 1^st October 1899 at which there were nine anarchist speakers. They reported that it was “the most successful and orderly meeting held in this part of the country on that matter.” Liberal meetings had been a fiasco “but our meeting with the Anarchist as opposed to the Capitalist and Imperialist spirit put plainly, enthused the workers for there was a concrete exposition of a social state based upon their interests compared with a condition of things based upon their misery and degradation. … Out of a crowd of 2,000 only 16 voted against the resolution. This meeting has done us a lot of good in the town and since then our meetings have been well attended and enthusiastic.”[356]

The matter was not allowed to rest there, however. The Leeds group continued its activities with a series of meetings, working through the local branch of the ‘South African Conciliation Committee’. “To wind up these meetings,” reported Billy MacQueen, “we had a monster demonstration which, unfortunately for the health of some of the comrades, turned out to be a jingo demonstration. It was a day! All the scum of the pubs of Leeds were turned out — being called up by means of placards inviting them to give us a ‘Scarborough Welcome’. And they did.”[357] In fact Billy MacQueen was nearly lynched and many people were badly beaten about. The following week Matt Sollitt, a veteran Socialist League anarchist, went to the place where the “monster demonstration” had been held and repeated almost word for word Billy MacQueen’s speech.[358] It was a brave thing to do, and he remained unmolested. Yet the suppression of anti-war activity intended by the ‘Scarborough Welcome’ and incited, it was assumed, by Conservative agents seems to have been successful. Leeds anarchists, it was reported, had had to give up outdoor meetings “owing to the lack of speakers.”[359] The same team of anarchist speakers existed as before the riot and the reason given rings hollow. It was too dangerous for further outside meetings to be held and it might have been better to admit it. Shortly afterwards, Billy MacQueen, who had largely been responsible for the exceptional activity of the Leeds anarchists, was forced by unemployment to emigrate to America. In Liverpool and Glasgow the regular outdoor meetings were kept up, though, particularly in Liverpool, it was a continual battle against jingoist opposition.

The London anarchists did contribute their mite to the anti-war movement. In early 1900 an anti-war meeting was held with speakers which included Tom Mann and Emma Goldman, the American anarchist, together with Sam Mainwaring and Harry Kelly. There was some jingoist opposition but nothing particularly violent. However, the tide was rising, and although anti-war meetings usually instigated by non-anarchist bodies continued to take place the opposition they encountered increased. After a large meeting at the Queens Hall in mid-1901 where quite a battle took place, the hall was closed to ‘controversial’ meetings. And it seemed that other halls would be closed, too. Freedom commented with some accuracy and considerable gloomy satisfaction:

Here is the situation and we as Anarchists have a right to say a word on the moral of it. Seven years ago [i.e. 1894] when the May Day demonstration held by Anarchists was brutally attacked and broken up by Scotland Yard, with the help of some unofficial roughs, there was no outcry by Liberals, Radicals or Democrats. Later on when Anarchist Clubs were raided, when halls were closed against us, when extraditions went on apace, when Bourtzeff was sentenced, contemptible indeed was the attitude of these parties. Today it is you … who are the ‘Anarchists’ in the eyes of the Government. … He who will not fight for the liberties of others will surely endanger his own.[360]

In fact by November 1901 the closure of halls to anti-war meetings seemed to have been systematic — even routine.

The practical work of abolishing free speech has been going on for the last two years. Some newspapers, politically and morally corrupt, especially the Daily Chronicle, the Globe and the Pall Mall Gazette announce the day before the meeting that a ‘pro-Boer’ meeting will be held. Immediately the police authorities with the paper in hand approach the owner of the hall threatening that disorder will take place and that they — the police — will not be able to protect the hall against the aggressors. The frightened hall proprietor mostly refuses the hall and the meeting is put off.

This hypocritical and (in reality) despotic suppression was done with Miss Hobhouse in her humanitarian crusade against the war atrocities. The same trick was repeated twice with our meetings; twice the halls were refused the last day before the meeting — organized and advertised long before in papers by posters and handbills. Our Government stained with the blood of innocent children, is capable of any violation of popular rights. Are they not attempting to crush our trade unions and the right of combination? … Did they not impose new burdens on the working classes?[361]

The suppression was not only hypocritical and despotic, it was successful and it needs to be stressed that the anarchist movement emerged from the Boer War period almost completely destroyed. There was no sense of losing a battle to go on to greater things; the movement felt more or less completely defeated by the reactionary war fever that had gripped the population.

The mood of the movement was despondent and apathetic in the extreme. In one of a number of (unsuccessful) morale-building attempts, Harry Kelly wrote a piece for Freedom which took as its starting point the arrest of Most and MacQueen in New York under the ‘Criminal Anarchy’ Laws. “Small in numbers as we are,” he wrote, “it is safe to say that 19 out of every 20 Anarchists in the country would have known absolutely nothing about this … were it not for Barton’s note in Reynold’s newspaper …” Anarchists, he went on to say, had no means of communication except Freedom “and as it is only published monthly, that method is very slow, and alas I don’t believe half the comrades read Freedom.”

There were not more than three active groups in the whole of Great Britain, and they were not in regular contact with one another. Compared to the position seven years before the situation was catastrophic. Though he could well see reasons for this in the war and general apathy he was of the opinion that an organizing effort would overcome the difficulties. Whatever the truth of this he shows clearly the effect of the war and its concomitant apathy. He also shows the effect on groups of a stance that left no activity open but general propaganda:

Groups have stood alone and the half dozen or dozen comrades in each group have discussed and split hairs until there were no more hairs to split and nothing to discuss and then died a natural death. Take Canning Town for example. It is a place where splendid meetings used to be held, plenty of literature sold and any amount of interest and enthusiasm created for our ideas. An active group existed there for years. The comrades were all working men who tired out from a hard day’s work were unable to read very much. They derived almost all of their knowledge of anarchism from lectures and open air meetings.

But fewer and fewer comrades visited them, leading to less interchange of ideas “and the group fell a prey to mysticism and spiritualism and the comrades lost all their old time spirit and activity.” Freedom discussion meetings had been ‘suspended indefinitely’. “We got down to an average attendance of six comrades — two of whom were Tolstoyans … generally we seem to be becoming weaker instead of stronger … the time is ripe for someone to write a book on ‘Modern Society and Moribund Anarchy’.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are becoming back numbers. … Shall we organize this movement or shall some historian write opposite our names a few years hence: Interesting — but died through lack of energy.”[362]

Freedom itself came out sporadically during the war, often missing a month. Over the whole period Marsh, the editor, was sending out private appeals and publishing others in the paper for cash to support the paper.

The public sale of Freedom as advertised in the paper itself was restricted to outlets in the north Soho area and Aldgate, both of them areas with a high concentration of foreign exiles (presumably where native jingoism could not affect open sales). It is likely that the circulation of the paper declined to as low as 500 copies per issue during this period. The paper really did seem on the edge of collapse. It was announced in January 1902: “The condition of our finances not permitting us to promise a regular issue of Freedom, we shall issue the paper as often as circumstances will allow and hope that all comrades will make an effort to resume and continue the monthly publication.”

Attempts were made to reorganize the paper, though in rather a confused way. Kropotkin wrote to Marsh, 15^th October 1902: “…It was my idea to propose the revival of the editing meetings of Freedom, once a month … before the appearance of the number as I think that all these talks about Freedom being not well managed from the business point of view are of no avail, so long as we have not tried everything we can to render the paper more interesting. It was awfully dull lately and neglected by the contributors, including myself. Let us try and give more life to the contents of the paper first …” Good intentions alone did not suffice and Kropotkin was writing an agitated letter a month later “…no Freedom yet! What is the reason? Want of ms [manuscripts]? Want of money? Or Cantwell’s contrariness? What is the reason and what has to be done? The first thing for a paper is to be published on certain dates. Can we obtain that? Write me dear friend, all you think about. What is to be done? Wait? But that will not help. Whatever paper may appear — a paper dealing with the theory of Anarchism … will always be required.”[363] Freedom did survive; but it was several years before it did anything but limp along.

This eventual revival was the result of circumstances outside Freedom, based in the development of a new wave of working-class militancy leading up to the period known as the Syndicalist Revolt. Freedom remained the paper it had been from the beginning, largely separate from events, unaware of small-scale developments until it was informed of them by activists, commenting on major conflagrations from a distance. The new militancy infused Freedom rather than the other way round. This period brought with it a new wave of activists and encouraged many old anarchists to emerge from ‘retirement’. Yet there were organic connections between the movement of the 1890s and the Syndicalist period. Outside the discussions of anarchist theory, outside the publication of anarchist newspapers and a systematic propaganda of anarchist ideas, individuals and groups of militants had had no option but to fight and struggle for existence. This had been their situation when anarchism had first appealed to them. When the formal movement had more or less collapsed the conditions which had inspired their great hopes survived the temporary collapse of those hopes. Their struggles continued. Anarchism survived in holes and corners, in partial, even dispirited battles. Sporadic attempts at revivals were made to subside again. Yet hidden influences were at work which were to make such revivals more successful. It is proper that we should show these false starts and hidden beginnings so that they can take their place as a modest contribution to one of the great periods of working-class self-activity in our history. But first let us look at one response to the collapse of anarchist hopes for a revolution in Britain. These were the anarchist colonies which it was hoped could provide on a small scale the free social relations which the world did not seem prepared to provide on a large one.