Chapter 14. THE INSURGENT VIRUS

The period 1910 to 1914 and the subsequent period during World War One and its aftermath are among the most interesting in British history for the historian of working-class movements. They are also the most difficult to write about, the very scale of events requiring a great deal of detailed original research organized by the skills of an epic novelist. Such a book, though badly needed, has not yet been written. Certainly the present work is not intended to fill that gap. It is, however, preparative to such a work in that it restores to notice the almost completely ignored anarchist contribution. This is not done in the spirit of what has been called the Jewish Chronicle style of history writing: that journal without apparent selection, hierarchy or relevance lists every passing achievement of Jews because they are Jews. It is not the intention here to list every activity of anarchists in the period, without reference to significance or context, because they are anarchists.

The anarchists are important because they represent the only left-wing tendency to precede the period of the Syndicalist Revolt with an ideology that harmonized with it and which grew as a result of those events. Anarchists were increasingly active up to 1914. In a very real way the Syndicalist Revolt in this earlier period was nourishing to, and a testing ground for, anarchism. The successes of the working-class movement were the successes of an anarchist movement anywhere and its failings were (and are) the most worrying ones for anarchists.

Yet would it not have been surprising if there had been no anarchist dimension to the Syndicalist Revolt? The strikes of the period (not to mention related events) were marked by spontaneity and solidarity at a quite extraordinary level which culminated in what amounted to a series of local if not quite national general strikes. The working-class militants at the storm centers were hostile to or ignored the representative political system at local or national level. They impatiently swept aside their union leaders when their demands were not met in negotiations. They showed great readiness for conflict with the forces of law and order, and a perceptive minority paid some attention to their subversion. It would indeed have been remarkable if nonpolitical direct action did not become generalized into self-conscious anarchism to a significant extent.

Men and women can be driven to desperate acts by deprivation, yet deprivation does not necessarily lead to desperate action. It is not surprising that people revolt in varying ways — what is surprising is that they put up with as much as they do. The first barrier that has to be overcome is the debilitating sense of impotence. Most people, faced with a situation they do not like, ask in despair, ‘What can you do about it?’ — and do nothing no matter what the answer may be. Yet sometimes a spark is struck and a struggle is fought and won. There is an astonishing sense of collective power when people find themselves — both literally and metaphorically — in mass struggle. Others can take up the example offered. Yet though people have had plenty of practice at accepting things as they are, they are for the most part short of practice at changing them. An isolated action, whether it results in success or failure, can surprisingly soon sink back into apathy and acceptance. A sustained period of unrest, however, provides people with the practice they need to change their world and a context in which to place ideologies of change. In such a period the sense of collective power is mutually reinforcing and spills out from particular to general grievances. Industrial upheaval generalizes into social upheaval, social upheaval glimpses dual power and revolution.

The period of unrest 1910–1914 was rooted in economic deprivation and the power given by relatively full employment to the working class which enabled them to fight it. If one examines only the bald facts of the industrial revolt itself, the sense of the period is lost. Yet the bald facts are striking enough. The average number of ‘man’ days lost through strikes in a normal year between 1900 and 1909 was 2½ to 3 million. In 1910, 1912, 1913 and 1914 there were about 10 million man days lost. In 1912 the figure was nearly 41 million.[420] Had the war not intervened in the summer of 1914, the autumn of that year would have witnessed, according to one observer, “one of the greatest industrial revolts the world would ever have seen.”[421]

This burst of militancy did not keep a static form throughout. It developed in practice and in theory. The needs of the struggle forced people to find organizational forms for that struggle and these forms became generalized as more functions were packed into them. This will become clearer as events are related. Further, while it is convenient to concentrate on major conflagrations as markers along the way, it should be pointed out that militancy spread in many directions and took many different forms. There cannot have been one area of life which was not affected by the new movement, as contemporary newspapers make plain. The first shots in the battle were fired in the north-east. From November 1909 until July 1910 there was a series of spontaneous strikes culminating in a lockout by the employers among the boilermakers of the shipyards. In January 1910 there started a three-month strike by the traditionally moderate Durham miners against an agreement already signed by their union. The north-eastern railwaymen struck for three days in mid-1910, which was sufficient to gain them victory — despite the fact that they were covered by a five-year agreement in force at that time. Though undoubtedly geographical proximity had something to do with it, each of these strikes, albeit without official sanction, took a traditional ‘sectional’ character. Sympathy there might be between these sections of workers, yet this sympathy found no mutual action.

The lockout in the cotton industry as a reprisal against militant tactics which took place in the autumn of 1910 was similarly ‘sectional’ in character, though it was marked by a high degree of solidarity among the locked-out workers. But by this time the signs were obvious, as Freedom put it, of the “stupendous struggle which is growing on all sides between capital and labor.”[422] The full-throated roar of revolt made itself heard from November 1910 in the Cambrian Combine dispute in the South Wales coalfield. A dispute involving seventy men in a seam in one pit spread like wildfire through the whole Combine, involving 12,000 miners. However, the engine men below and winding men on the surface (in unions separate from the South Wales Miners Federation) stayed at work and the employers as a result attempted to continue to run the mines: “…and the direct outcome of that was the police being sent there, later the military — result, riots, trouble of a considerable character, the fight still on because of the incompleteness of the fight on the men’s side, consequent upon sectional unionism” — so said Tom Mann at the time.[423] Miners were fired on at Tonypandy by the troops and many clashes took place. It was not until August 1911 that the men were starved into submission. Yet many lessons had been learned and were to be acted on in 1912 — for the miners had not had their spirit broken.

The solidarity of the men in the Cambrian dispute had spread through one industry — taking on the character of a general strike by virtue of the fact that in the Welsh valleys it was the only industry. In 1911 disputes were to spread from industry to industry in different places in a number of what amounted to local general strikes. From January to April 1911 a national printers’ strike for a reduction of hours took place. Relatively peaceful and largely successful, it gave no particular foretaste of the storms of the summer. It was remarkable, however, in that the printers produced a daily strike newspaper — the Daily Herald — which first concerned itself exclusively with the strike. On 8^th February, however, they announced that they were going to introduce new features so as to make the paper “of interest as a General Labor Daily Newspaper.” When the paper ceased publication at the conclusion of the strike at the end of April, they were selling shares to finance this venture. The paper was to reappear in April 1912 and was to play an important part in spreading syndicalist ideas. In June 1911 the seamen’s strike gave the signal for a massive burst of activity. Starting in Southampton, much to the fury of the almost feudal shipowners, the strike spread to every major port in Britain. The dockers then came out in support of the seamen and over demands of their own.

In Hull the situation reached fever pitch. First every worker on the waterfront struck. The initiative was taken by the unorganized, i.e. nonunionised, workers who struck almost immediately the seamen did. The union members were instructed to stay at work by their leaders and did as they were told until they were dragged out by the force of events.[424] Then the dispute spread to the mills, at first spontaneously and then by means of mass pickets, which clashed seriously with the police. The strikes spread and cement workers and factory girls came out. More police were drafted in from Leeds, Birmingham and London. Conflicts increased. The chief government industrial conciliator, Askwith, arrived to try and sort out the situation, which was unlike anything he had seen before. The military brought in as a reserve force could not be trusted, while in the town fires were started and there was riotous looting. After negotiations a settlement was reached with the strikers’ ‘leaders’. But when the terms were announced to a crowd of 15,000, relates Askwith, “an angry roar of ‘No!’ rang out; and ‘Let’s fire the docks’ from the outskirts where men ran off. … I heard a town councilor remark that he had been in Paris during the Commune and had never seen anything like this … he had not known there were such people in Hull — women with hair streaming and half nude, reeling through the streets, smashing and destroying.”[425] By July the situation had calmed somewhat, only to burst out again with renewed force in August.

This time the storm center was Liverpool. The seamen’s strike had spread to the docks. This in turn led to a transport workers’ strike. At first local, it involved a total stoppage of the docks, railway porters and the tramway men. “Even the road sweepers declined to work.”[426] Troops were moved into the town and two gunboats were moored in the Mersey with guns trained on the working-class quarters. Emboldened by this support, the police made a sudden attack on a massive peaceful strike meeting of 80,000 on 13^th August. Though sections of the crowd fought back as best they could, panic had seized it and it was batoned from the Plateau. “Those who tended the wounded were struck; those who were already wounded were struck; and the children were not forgotten in the mad charge,” wrote a Freedom correspondent. The result was naturally enough an escalation of violence. “Every worker is now talking of revolution and redress.”[427] Fires were lit in the street as barricades to stop the movement of police and soldiers. Fierce clashes took place continuously between strikers and police and at least five police horses had to be destroyed as a result of their injuries. Martial law was proclaimed. The troops, however, “increased disorder because they were stoned by the strikers. … They had to retreat under showers of kidney stones with which the mob armed themselves.”[428] The troops were being leafleted by the anarchists and others, and meetings of soldiers were addressed by a local anarchist, S.H. Muston, who reported that “There were many instances of disaffection among the troops during the strike” which had been hushed up.[429] During clashes two men were shot dead and others injured by troops.

The transport strike spread to other places. Nationally the railwaymen’s leaders were forced to call a strike in order to stay in control. By mid-August 150,000 railwaymen were out. A strike in the London docks had started at the same time as that in Liverpool. Here too it was the nonunion workers who initiated the fight. According to one source, “…the men who declared war and afterwards sustained the fight with revolutionary vigor were the nonunionists. The union leaders waited until they saw the strike would succeed before they identified with it. They merely climbed into notoriety on the backs of the suffering strikers.”[430] The power in the hands of the strikers was unprecedented. The anarchist leaflet ‘Anarchy and the Labor War’ issued in August 1911 rightly stressed the novelty of the situation in the “Lord Mayor of Manchester … obtaining passports from the strikers for necessities to pass through the streets. … Who would have suggested that the London provision traffic would have been maintained by permission of the strikers only?” In Dundee the strikers forced blacklegs to leave the town, the troops could not be trusted and the strikers “only allowed household coal and flour through the cordons.”[431] Contemporary observers were impressed by the solidarity of different sections of workers, the rapidity with which disputes spread and the violence of the confrontations involved. Violence there certainly was: at the end of the successful strike on the London docks the returning workers poured into the docks to find blacklegs still there. The result was a battle which lasted on and off for two days where the weapons used seem to have been revolvers and stevedores’ hooks.[432] Yet the most impressive thing was the level of autonomous self-organization of the workers. The strikers of 1889–1890 had called in ‘outside’ organizers. The strikes of 1910–1911 were progressively managed out of the ranks of the strikers themselves, managed, be it said, in opposition not only to the employers but overwhelmingly to their supposed leaders in the unions.

The tensions within the working class were expressed in the literature and the organizations arising from the labor war. The new sense of solidarity between different groups of workers gave rise to urgent demands from the rank and file for the sweeping away of ‘sectional’ boundaries between these groups. Here industrial unionism became relevant. Yet the experience of the first years of massive confrontation had also led to great distrust of the leaderships of unions large and small. And the sense of being able to organize separately from these leaderships had become a manifest fact. But in what way was organization on a larger scale designed to transcend sectional barriers to do this without involving the very leaderships they had grown to distrust? The industrial unionist’s dream of revolutionary industrial unions organized separately from the reformist unions was a nonstarter in Britain: the unions were established well enough and were flexible enough in practice to make this impossible. Yet the dream persisted. Another possibility was to change the leadership of the unions or to bring them more firmly under rank-and-file control: this was constitutionally, at least, a long-term project. The trades union hierarchies, then as now, were well protected against their rank and file. A more immediately practical possibility was to organize at the base in such a way as to maximize solidarity and to minimize official interference. In practice attempts were made with varying emphasis and success on all these levels, and inevitably there were ambiguities which represented both confusion and conflict and the richness of solutions being worked out in practice. A central figure both from the point of rich ambiguity and his involvement in the events of the time was Tom Mann. From the time of the London dock strike of 1889 and before he had revealed himself as an astonishingly able union organizer. Unlike so many of his contemporaries he never seemed to hanker after a quiet niche in trades union office or politics. His political ideas followed from his organizing efforts rather than the other way round. As one result his political contacts were wide and heterogeneous. When he was, from 1898 to 1901, the landlord of the Enterprise pub in Long Acer in London’s Covent Garden his establishment was used for meetings by the Young Ireland Society, the Central Branch of the S.D.F., the Friends of Russian Freedom (which included Kropotkin) and a club called the Cosmopolitans which included among its guests Malatesta, Louise Michel and Morrison Davidson. This was typical of the man. Probably the only reason the I.L.P. is not in the list is that their tendency towards teetotalism would not allow them to have meetings in a pub!

When he returned to England in 1910 after a spell of organizing in Australia he was a convinced industrial unionist, in the sense that he was hostile to sectional unionism and believed that direct action was the means whereby workers won their demands. His convictions had grown out of his Australian experiences. During the Broken Hill dispute in 1909, railwaymen, good union men all, had transported troops 1,500 miles from the eastern seaboard to break the strike of another section of workers. The Arbitration Bills, passed to stop strikes occurring by putting conflicts between capital and labor before an ‘impartial’ body, had proved to be heavily biased against the workers. Men who advocated or led strikes were put in jail, yet employers could ignore the rulings of arbitration with impunity. It seemed clear to Tom Mann that solidarity had to transcend sectional boundaries and the workers had to rely on their own direct action rather than on the efforts of legislators. The long-term project was the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

On his return to England he cooperated with a Walthamstow journalist, Guy Bowman, in bringing out a small periodical, the Industrial Syndicalist. This amounted to a series of eleven monthly pamphlets issued from June 1910 to May 1911 which developed these ideas in the context of the situation in Britain. They represented a combination of industrial unionism and continental syndicalism — thus the title. Tom Mann saw the task he had set himself clearly: “It is a big order we are here for: nothing less than an endeavor to revolutionize the trade unions, to make Unionism, from a movement of two millions, mostly of skilled workers whose interests are regarded as different from the laborers who join with them in their industry, into a movement that will take in every worker.”[433] Thus he saw his job involving a vast extension and amalgamation of existing trades unions. He knew what the alternatives were:

I hold they are wrong who suppose that we have not genuine class conscious proletarians in the Unionist movement. I am quite sure that there are many thousands who understand the Class War, and wish to take their rightful share in the fighting; but as yet they can find no satisfactory outlet. Sooner or later these leading turbulent spirits will find a method — and it would be wise on the part of those occupying responsible positions to endeavor to make it easy for such reorganizations as may be necessary, so that those who are determined to fight may not be compelled to find other agencies.

Personally, I would very much prefer to see the existing machinery made equal to the whole than be driven to the conclusion that new agencies must be brought into existence.[434]

He goes on to ask “…what will have to be the essential conditions for the success of such a movement?”

That will be avowedly and clearly Revolutionary in aim and method. Revolutionary in aim, because it will be out for the abolition of the wages system and for securing to the workers the full fruits of their labor, thereby seeking to change the system of Society from Capitalist to Socialist.

Revolutionary in method, because it will refuse to enter into any long agreements with the masters, whether with legal or State backing, or merely voluntarily; and because it will seize every chance of fighting for the general betterment — gaining ground and never losing any.[435]

He rather fudged the issue of control in the trades unions in his analysis. There was no doubt that his huge activity in the years before World War One played its part in helping along the general unrest. There was no doubt that it was his call to direct action, his denunciation of cautious and sectional leadership which made him such a popular speaker, capable of filling the largest halls. This was certainly the reason why some anarchists, notably those in Liverpool, actively sold the Industrial Syndicalist. Yet his policy of amalgamation found him working with “those occupying responsible positions” in the sectional unions who were so mistrusted by “the leading turbulent spirits.” He worked with Havelock Wilson during the seamen’s strike. He worked with Tillett of the dockers for the formation of the National Transport Workers Federation in 1910 and with the leaders of three competing unions on the railways for the formation of the National Union of Railwaymen in 1912. He was responsible, as much as anyone was responsible, for the channeling of the unskilled strikers of these years into the unions.

Criticisms from orthodox industrial unionists which condemned the ‘Federation Fake’ and Mann’s failure to form ‘real’ industrial unions missed the point. They seemed to be too interested in the label. Libertarians were much closer to the mark. In an excellent piece in Freedom in November 1910, John Paton, a Glasgow anarchist, wrote on ‘Tom Mann and the Industrial Union Movement’. He first criticized Tom Mann for his ambivalence over Parliament, which he saw as an unwillingness to tread on the toes of trades union leaders over their proclivities towards political careers. More importantly, he went on to say:

In deciding for the retention of the present organizations, Mann has quite evidently failed to get to grips with the root of the problem he is facing. The curse of Trade Unionism in this country is the centralization of executive power with its resultant multiplication of officials. The corresponding stagnation and death of local life and spirit is the inevitable consequence. This centralization would be enormously extended and developed by Mann’s scheme. … We must decentralize and as far as possible destroy executive power. Let the workers themselves bear the burden and responsibility of decisive action.

As we have seen, in 1911 the workers themselves were to seize the “burden and responsibility of decisive action.” Yet for the most part the workers did not look beyond the existing organizations and the growth and amalgamation of the unions was accepted and encouraged as a means of destroying sectionalism. At the same time they were taking steps to decentralize (if not destroy) executive power. The consequence was that leaders and led were bound together often uncomfortably and occasionally in a state of open war.

At the base this was represented by the growth of bodies of militants at rank-and-file level. In the South Wales coalfield in 1911, there emerged the ‘Unofficial Reform Committee’. This was composed of activists from the Cambrian Combine strike and other pits, and included rebel students from the Ruskin strike of 1909. The Unofficial Reform Committee acted as a coordinating body for the militant workers in the coalfield and provided a means of communication unmediated by the officials. As a result of ideas put forward and amended, changed and rearranged by several delegate conferences a remarkable document, The Miners’ Next Step, was issued in 1912.[436] This proposed a new constitution for the organization of the miners on three principles: firstly, that the lodges (branches) should have supreme control. Secondly, ‘officials or leaders’ were to be excluded from the executive, which was to be a purely administrative body composed of men directly elected by the men for that purpose. Thirdly, agents or organizers were to be directly under the control of the executive. Though some changes were made (or forced) in the union these proposals expressed an ideal which was to be frustrated but persistent. The situation was complicated by the election of four militants to the South Wales Miners’ Federation executive in 1911 — an executive which their program was committed to more or less abolish.

In the engineering industry comparable unofficial developments took place in the shape of the amalgamation committee movement. This took its name because of the vast number of unions (there were well over 200) involved in the industry apart from the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and the desire of the militants to draw these bodies together. Here they were obviously influenced by syndicalist propaganda of the Tom Mann variety. A committee of engineers in Manchester had been set up in 1910 to push the principles of direct action, solidarity and amalgamation.[437] This seems to have been the first early example. Such propaganda activity merged with the already existing workshop organization. By 1909 shop stewards “were being elected, at least in some shops, in most of the major centers, and their number and function continued to grow.”[438] The shop stewards had appeared because of the necessity of workshop negotiations — particularly over piecework prices. As such they were the workshop representative of their union. It was inevitable that the need for mutual support would draw the representatives of the different unions together — although craft jealousies would often drive them apart.

From this point it was a logical step to make the stewards a basis of amalgamation. In Sheffield, for example, a shop steward suggested in 1914 “that all the trade unionists in any shop should have shop stewards who should form themselves into a committee to represent the workers in that shop regardless of the trade unions they belonged to and thus make the first step towards uniting the unions.”[439] This development was by no means restricted to Sheffield — the same idea occurred in many places at about the same time. Thus the amalgamation committee in the workshop both formed what we should now call a joint shop stewards’ committee and provided an inter-union basis of coordination and communication separate from the officials. The opposition to the officials was clearly expressed. A pamphlet issued by the Metal Engineering and Shipbuilding Amalgamation Committee described its functions as twofold. Firstly, it was to encourage amalgamation and to eventually seize control of the industry. Secondly, in the meantime it was “to act as a Vigilance Committee, watching and actively criticizing the officials of the various sectional Unions and in every way possible stimulating and giving expression to militant thought throughout the Trade Union movement.”[440]

There were more than propaganda attacks on officialdom: in the London Amalgamated Society of Engineers, a delegate meeting ordered the Trustees to stop paying the salaries of officials after 1^st January 1913, and appointed a lay ‘provisional committee’ to take charge. The officials refused to leave the union headquarters and barricaded themselves in. The provisional committee and its supporters, however, with the help of the general secretary of the union were able to get into the building and throw out the occupiers, though it was not done entirely peacefully.[441]

Thus as the wave of strikes continued from 1911 through to the outbreak of war a qualitative shift took place in the spirit of the rank and file which found its formal expressions in these rank-and-file movements. In political terms this shift expressed itself in the development of a different kind of socialist milieu. Yet before we see the way in which the anarchists related to this milieu some remarks are in order as to the way in which anarchists were perceived by the socialist movement at this time. In the early 1890s they had been seen as “fools, madmen and rogues,” to quote John Burns.

They had been regarded for the most part as bombers and assassins and their doings were related with fascinated horror. It is hard to place exactly where the change came. Political assassinations and bombings by anarchists continued sporadically in Europe. Yet, in England, by 1909, anarchists had ceased to be bogey men. That year saw massive demonstrations over the arrest and execution of Francisco Ferrer in Barcelona. This had followed on from an attempted rising in Barcelona in the last week of July 1909, known as the ‘Bloody Week’. Ferrer was a positivist rather than an anarchist but had become widely identified with the anarchists through his Modern School movement. The Modern Schools were libertarian in their methods and trenchantly secular. Through this Ferrer and the schools he founded had earned the undying hatred of the Roman Catholic hierarchy. After the defeated uprising Ferrer was arrested for complicity in the events — though there was no evidence to show that he had either organized, instigated or taken part in them. He was tried before a military court and shot. (A little-known part in all this was taken by an English C.I.D. detective Charles Arrow, ‘on loan’ to the Spanish authorities. His role was more or less head of intelligence to the military. His memoirs indicate that he enjoyed the organization of the repression immensely.)[442]

The socialist movement in England participated readily in the protests organized by anarchists and others. They were uncowed by the connections drawn between Ferrer and the attempted revolution and apparently not at all bothered by his anarchist apologists. Rather the reverse: the execution of Ferrer seems to have started some socialists on the path towards anarchism.[443] This unhorrified acceptance of anarchists and anarchism remained unflustered through the events known as the Tottenham Outrage and the Siege of Sidney Street. The first, in January 1909, was an armed robbery followed by a wild chase through north-east London in which a boy of ten and the two robbers were killed and a number of people were injured. The second followed on from a disturbed robbery at a jeweler’s shop in the East End in December 1910. Of the five policemen who went to investigate, three were shot dead and the other two badly wounded. Two of the robbers were traced to 100 Sidney Street in Whitechapel, and after a gunfight that lasted much of 3^rd January 1911 and involved Churchill, the Home Secretary and the Scots Guards, the house was mysteriously set on fire and the two gunmen inside killed. In both cases the gun-play was blamed on anarchists, though the men involved were either unpolitical or connected with the Lettish Social Democrat combat groups. One of the Sidney Street gang who managed to escape, named Peter the Painter, and others of them had used the Jewish Anarchist Club in Jubilee Street and this seemed to be enough to link them together in the press. Though both events received wide publicity, as did the alleged involvement of the anarchists, the reaction in the socialist movement was not dissimilar to that of the Industrial Syndicalist. Under the heading ‘The Battle of Stepney’ Bowman or Mann wrote: “Problem: if two men can keep 2,000 men employed and hold them at bay in one street, how many men would be required to defeat two or three million men spread over the area of Great Britain?” They promised a £2 2s reward for the best answer.[444]

Such panic as there was seemed to be restricted to the better-off classes. The police began to take an increased interest in the movement. Following on from a report that Peter the Painter had been seen in Glasgow the police visited the Glasgow group’s meetings. As a result they went to the employers of some of the members and managed to have at least one of them — George Barrett — sacked and blacklisted. There seemed to be a general increase of surveillance of anarchists and some concern on the part of the authorities to put into action the 1905 Aliens Act which allowed the deportation of undesirable aliens on the strength of, among other things, a magistrate’s recommendation. One attempt to use this legislation, however, met with massive opposition and showed just how little notice the working-class movement had taken of the scare stories.

In May 1912, a criminal libel action was brought against Malatesta by a fellow Italian named Bellelli who supported the Italian government’s imperialist ventures in Tripoli. Bellelli had circulated information to the effect that Malatesta’s opposition to the action of the Italian government was due to the fact that Malatesta was a Turkish spy. Malatesta had circulated a leaflet among the Italians in London declaring his readiness to appear before a court of honor to clear himself of this charge and making slighting references to Bellelli “who used to call himself an Anarchist … but many look upon him as an Italian police spy.”[445] In the court action that followed much play was made of the fact that Malatesta had supplied a bottle of gas to one of the Sidney Street gang. This had been known to the police, who had satisfied themselves that nothing more than an ordinary business transaction had taken place — Malatesta had a one-man business as an electrical engineer. The result of the character assassination in court, however, was that the judge sentenced Malatesta to three months in prison and recommended that he be deported. On appeal both sentence and deportation were upheld. The short term of imprisonment could not be reckoned to affect Malatesta overmuch — he had been to jail before. But the deportation was serious: on the Continent it could be safely assumed that the least he could expect was life imprisonment.

An anarchist campaign to have the deportation stopped rapidly spread to the socialist movement as a whole. The Daily Herald gave the case much publicity and published reams of protests from trades unions and meetings up and down the country. Malatesta had many friends in these quarters, having spoken under the egis of Mann’s Industrial Syndicalist Education League on a number of occasions. In fact one letter in the Daily Herald referred to Malatesta as “an international Tom Mann.” The campaign culminated in a massive meeting in Trafalgar Square organized by Guy Aldred. It had originally been intended to use mainly anarchist speakers (and some ex-anarchists, surprisingly enough, including W.B. Parker, now a Poor Law guardian, and Agnes Henry). In the event, however, the main speakers were drawn from more respectable quarters, including Wedgwood and Cunninghame Graham, M.P.s, and James MacDonald of the London Trades Council. Also speaking were Mrs Tom Mann and Guy Bowman (Bowman had just been released and Mann was still in jail over a ‘Don’t Shoot!’ leaflet). The campaign was successful. On Monday, 17^th June, the deportation order was lifted by the Home Secretary.

The most important thing to emerge from these events was that the anarchists were an accepted part of the socialist movement, which rejected political action as a priority and which espoused direct action. The Daily Telegraph was right in its facts if wrong in its conclusions when it wrote in March 1912: “The authorities have now, we understand, received evidence establishing the fact that sections of the Communists, the Syndicalists and the Anarchists share common aims and are working together for one common object, and, in fact, it may be said that the present Labor unrest is almost entirely due to a great conspiracy on the part of those agitators to promote dissatisfaction and resentment among the working classes.”[446]

The way in which various sections of the movement worked informally together is not particularly clear. Yet we can find certain typical situations and incidents which are clues and illustrations. Let us take Walthamstow in north-east London. Guy Bowman lived in the area and published the Industrial Syndicalist, the Syndicalist Railwayman and the Syndicalist in succession from his home. The secretary of the Walthamstow Trades Council, A.G. Tufton of the Carpenters and Joiners, was an enthusiastic exponent of Tom Mann’s version of syndicalism. In 1910–1911 the anarchists of Walthamstow were holding three or more weekly outdoor meetings. All this could have been mutually exclusive, each activity distinct from the other. Yet outside Walthamstow Guy Bowman had been in fairly regular contact with anarchists, speaking with them at meetings, visiting Kropotkin, etc. The local Walthamstow anarchists were great debaters and visited local branches of the S.D.F. and I.L.P. They were present at the first meeting of the Socialist Society in neighboring Leyton formed out of a branch of the S.D.F. expelled for taking up anti-parliamentary ideas. One of the anarchists active in this area was W.D. Ponder who, as we have seen, had been active in the Industrialist League until his expulsion. He was later to take an active part in the North London Herald League. This is an indication of how little the formal separations of groups meant on a local level. The anarchists of Walthamstow worked with the local ‘parliamentary socialists’ in a free-speech fight at Epping Forest. After the arrest of Tom Mann, Guy Bowman and the Buck brothers in 1912 for advocating, publishing and printing a ‘Don’t Shoot!’ leaflet for soldiers entitled ‘An open letter to British Soldiers’, a couple of demonstrations took place involving socialists from north-east London whose speaking base was Victoria Park. The second, an anarchist-initiated demonstration with many other groups involved, marched from Victoria Park round Bethnal Green with placards saying ‘Don’t Shoot!’ and “a large number of the proscribed leaflet … were distributed.”[447]

Anarchists were also involved in purely syndicalist activity as the following letter between two local Socialist League veterans, Joseph Lane and Ambrose Barker shows. (Barker lived in Walthamstow.) Lane wrote “…I believe tonight you have your Syndicalist group meeting. I hope you will have a good rally of numbers. Have you seen this month’s Syndicalist, somehow I like their fighting policy and the endeavor to get the Trade Unions to throw over parliament and their leaders and become a rank and file fighting force and while Freedom Groups and pure Anarchists are doing good work as educationalists the Syndicalists will do good work among the Trade Unions in the same direction without frightening them with that terrible word Anarchy.”[448] These kinds of loose contact and mutual cooperation were to be found all over the country and are probably of more importance historically than has been recognized. It has been far too readily assumed that the formal separations within the socialist movement into specific groups represents a formal separation at all levels. At grass-roots level this is not the case. From formal cooperation and formal switches of allegiance down to the most casual contacts in places like Henderson’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road (known to generations as ‘the bomb shop’) and Charles Lahr’s bookshop in Holborn the socialist movement was more a series of overlapping networks than a collection of parties. This milieu was the one in which the anarchists operated in the years just prior to World War One, and further examples will present themselves as we consider the more formally anarchist activities during this time.

In 1912 there was a possibility that the S.D.F. could absorb and co-opt some of the new energy thrown up by the Syndicalist Revolt. In that year the S.D.F. made the greatest leap forward in its history and, uniting with sections of the I.L.P. who were itching for a more revolutionary policy, formed the British Socialist Party (B.S.P.). This claimed 40,000 members in 370 branches on its formation. Yet even before this time the S.D.F. was suffering from internal dissension over the question of direct action. Tom Mann had resigned his membership (taken up on his return to England) in May 1911, unable any longer to reconcile the purely electoral policy of the S.D.F. with his commitment to extra-political struggle. He was not alone as the ‘official’ history of the S.D.F./R.S.P. says: “Already, Syndicalist influences were at war with the recognized methods and objectives within the B.S.P.”[449] The trouble got worse in the larger organization: “The insidious preaching of Syndicalism, Direct Action and similar forms of anti-political anarchism, although the advocates were few in number worked a tremendous mischief within the British Socialist Party, as it was bound to do in any organization that had been thus fastened-upon.”[450] The extent of the ‘tremendous mischief’ can be gauged when we see that within two years the membership of the B.S.P. had dropped by half. “In 1914 the membership of the B.S.P. was no more than that of the S.D.F. six years before.”[451]

The I.L.P. was also suffering from a similar malaise. Between 1909 and 1911, forty-six I.L.P. branches collapsed and the sale of pamphlets dropped by half. In 1909 there were 28,650 members in 887 branches; in 1914 there were 20,793 in 672 branches.[452] Some of this drop can be accounted for by the secessions to the B.S.P. but this was unstable as the fall in membership of the latter organization indicated. The other part can be readily assumed to have been due to discontent with a purely electoral policy. The I.L.P. in any case had a minority of old anarchists as members who had presumably joined when their original faith in the imminent revolution had faded — men like Thomas Barclay in Leicester and Alf Barton in Sheffield. It is not suggested that they were leading the I.L.P., but rather that they represented a tradition which younger members could relate to. A member of the I.L.P. at that time remembered an I.L.P. branch in Glasgow: “…its membership represented an extraordinary diversity of ideas. Atheists, Marxists and anarchists rubbed shoulders with Christian socialists like Hardie himself.”[453] It is not suggested that to take part in or advocate direct action or to denigrate electoral activity automatically made anarchists. Anarchism was nevertheless to grow in the increasingly numerous political fringe which had fallen out with the B.S.P. and I.L.P.

At this time Freedom was looking more healthy than it had for years. Marsh was on the point of retiring in 1912 and wrote to Keell “…I feel the worst troubles of Freedom are over. With a circulation rapidly increasing, with literary help coming in so well it only needs steady work and some monetary help to reach a paying point.”[454] The circulation of Freedom was at that time about 3,000. The imprisonment of Malatesta and the protest meetings at his ordered deportation had increased interest in his writings published by the Freedom Press, which had been given free advertisements in the Daily Herald. Reports of anarchist activity around the country showed a healthy movement. The first national conference of anarchists for years took place in Leeds in February 1912. This was originally called to discuss a program put forward by a local group, the Beeston Brotherhood, which had achieved a certain local notoriety through its communistic lifestyle and its refusal to accept state registration of personal relationships. Their program proposed: “The abolition of all law; the disbanding of the Army, Navy and police; the suppression of parliament; the abolition of the coinage system.” This was undoubtedly acceptable to most of the delegates, but there would have been little point in having a conference to discuss it since there would be nothing to discuss! In the event the forty-five delegates from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales at the conference discussed more immediate matters. The first was the question of the organization of propaganda and groups. It was agreed to form three federations, one in Scotland, one for Lancashire and Yorkshire and one for the south of England. These were to make their own arrangements for exchanging speakers, etc. The conference also discussed a projected weekly paper to be called the Anarchist. This we shall discuss a little later on. The conference created a great deal of interest in Leeds and one newspaper reported that “a curious crowd in Boar Lane … kept a keen look out for furtive-looking strangers who might reasonably be supposed to be Anarchists.”[455] A meeting held on the night of the conference brought 2,000 people to Victoria Square. The conference seems to have been enthusiastic, and one delegate was reported as saying, “We are going to revive the Anarchist propaganda of a quarter of a century ago.”[456]

The mood of the conference represented a new vitality in the anarchist movement. One sign of this was the way in which the old Socialist League anarchists started popping up again. We have seen that Lane and Barker were taking an active interest in the new movement. Others included Kitz, who emerged from a long period of inactivity around 1909 and became increasingly involved. His activities were enough to have him boycotted by the employers in early 1910, and from that point he was forced to eke out a precarious living in street markets. He wrote a set of ‘Recollections and Reflections’ in Freedom from January to July 1912. These are important for the information he gives on the Socialist League and other activities of that time, and the present book draws heavily on them. Yet the most important point is that he felt confident enough of an audience for these memoirs. He described himself as “an old man at one time somewhat despondent of the success of the revolutionary cause.”[457] He was no longer despondent. Another old militant to emerge from ‘retirement’ was James Tochatti, who became an active speaker again. His “book-lined cellar under his shop … in which no daylight ever came” became something of a center in Hammersmith for “young workmen disillusioned by the timid programs of other parties” and for his old friends among the exiles.[458] F. Goulding had come back into the movement around 1907 and continued to work with Aldred and his paper the Herald of Revolt for some years. Ted Leggatt, now the Carmen’s Union organizer, was, in addition to his union activities, for which he was roundly condemned as a labor fakir in the Herald of Revolt, active among the Jewish anarchists of the East End. Other people who were active enough again to be noticeable were Carl Quinn and W.B. Parker (who seemed to have a slight hankering after anarchy again).

The fact that a weekly paper was being prepared was also significant, pointing to a new spirit in the movement. It also represented how rapidly the movement could grow in a locality when active organizers and speakers were available. In this case the locality was Glasgow, and the man chiefly responsible for the rapid growth of the anarchist movement there was George Barrett. Born George Ballard in 1888 in Herefordshire (Barrett was his adopted name for propaganda purposes), he first became active in the Bristol Socialist Society. This was an electoral organization and Barrett seems to have become rapidly opposed to political action, for by February 1908 Freedom is reporting him disturbing “the otherwise peaceful routine” of this body by advocating anarchism. He later apparently resigned from the Bristol Socialist Society. By mid-1909 he had moved to London and was taking an active part in the movement. Based in Walthamstow, he spoke at meetings the length and breadth of London. Mat Kavanagh wrote of him at this time: “Barrett’s energy was tremendous. He spoke almost every night of the week and would often cycle 20 miles each way to address a meeting, and that after a day’s work.”[459] By April 1910 Barrett had moved to Glasgow. Here he began a solitary campaign of street-speaking with occasional assistance from John McAra from Edinburgh. It was not long, however, before he began to attract a following. In May 1910 John Paton, already an anarchist and recently expelled from the I.L.P., describes his first meeting with Barrett as follows:

…one evening I saw an unfamiliar figure mounted on a box at one of the speaking pitches. I made one of the half dozen people listening to him. He was engaged in a familiar denunciation of capitalism and a glance at the pamphlets spread on the street told me he was an anarchist.

I studied him with a new interest. There had been no anarchist propaganda in Glasgow for many years, although at one time there had been an active group. The speaker was a tall, good-looking Englishman, extremely eloquent and able, whose speech betrayed his middle-class origin. The passionate conviction with which he spoke was extraordinarily impressive; he was undoubtedly an unusual personality; the crowd about him swelled in numbers. As the speech developed, my interest quickened with excitement; he progressed from the usual attack on capitalism to a scathing indictment of politicians and particularly the leaders of the Labor Party: here was, at last, being shouted at the street corner, all the criticisms which had become common in the ‘left-wing’ of the I.L.P., but which we’d keep discreetly for party discussion. My heart rejoiced. But it was much more than a mere attack on personalities; it was a powerful analysis of the causes that produced them.[460]

After the meeting Paton introduced himself to Barrett and his “solitary henchman, a quiet young railway clerk, Dominic. Before we parted that night we three had constituted ourselves the Glasgow Anarchist Group.” They began an energetic campaign of propaganda and started to attract members. At their first business meeting called later in the year they had a membership of twenty. By 1^st May 1911 they had fifty members. (One of them was Willy Gallagher, later a founder member of the Communist Party and a Communist M.P. He was still a member of S.D.F. at this point but was to more firmly identify himself with the anarchists later in 1912.) The group took an active part in the events round the seamen’s strike of that year and began to expand their activities outside Glasgow to Govan and Paisley; and their numbers increased. By June 1912, with the new paper already started, the Glasgow group were holding meetings at two places in Glasgow, and at Paisley, Clydebank, Maryhill and Parkhead. The weekly paper was being prepared from mid-1911. Barrett first approached the Freedom Group, who felt unable to handle the project. It was then decided to produce it from Glasgow. Over the winter of 1911–1912 Barrett went on tour to drum up financial support and to arrange for distributors in the movement. In Scotland and London his tour met with some success and the movement seemed in good shape. In Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, however, the response was very disappointing and demonstrated that the anarchist revival was, as yet, only patchy. By the time of the 1912 conference at Leeds some £90 had been pledged, but it is unlikely that the paper could have appeared on 1^st May and continued for as long as it did without the support of George Davison.[461] This is not to say that sacrifices were not made, and in fact Barrett seems to have hidden the extent of the struggle to keep the Anarchist going from Davison.

George was working at very high pressure, writing articles and doing all the work of editing and often in addition doing many odd jobs — getting the paper rolled off, folding and packing and even rushing to the post, for one or two members of the group got tired, so for weeks the strain was tremendous. … Fortunately, a sense of humor pulled us through many a time, even when things went into pawn to pay the ‘comps’ wages.[462]

The paper came out for thirty-four issues between May 1912 and early 1913. It is the opinion of the present author that the paper produced was not what the movement needed at that time. Its tendency was too much to the philosophical and general. George Barrett was a powerful speaker, as the memoirs of his contemporaries attest, yet his writing and the reports of his speeches show him to have been somewhat prolix and rhetorical. Despite some notable contributions — one from A.J. Cook (later secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain) under a pen name — the paper failed through ‘lack of support’. The strains set up by the running of the paper also adversely affected the anarchist group that had so rapidly grown up under Barrett’s influence. There had already been a tendency towards oligarchy in the group, as Paton’s remarks show: “It had been so obvious to me that the bulk of the new members our propaganda had attracted,” he says, “had only the most rudimentary conception of what we were after. They were attracted in part by their hatred of their conditions but more by the glamour of George’s personality. Indeed, anarchist-communism in its scientific basis was no easy doctrine for untrained and ill-equipped minds to grasp.” Early attempts to run the meetings of the group on a Quaker pattern had proved a failure. The result was, as Paton says, that “George and I, in consultation in advance, determined all the activities of the free commune in efficient bureaucratic style.”[463]

This oligarchic tendency began to be complicated by ideological disagreements. Barrett shared something of the attitudes of Turner and other members of the Freedom Group who supported a militant trades unionism which left the hierarchical structure of the unions more or less intact. In August, Guy Aldred was also speaking in the area and was roundly condemning trades union officials and all their works and seems to have found a responsive audience. It was reported in October 1912 that at a recent conference of Scottish anarchists: “We had a fairly hot discussion on the differences that have sprung up among us.”[464] The nature of these ‘differences’ is not spelled out, but reading between the lines it would seem to have been a mixture of the dissatisfactions with the organization of the group and dissatisfactions over the line taken over trades unions. In the issue of the Herald of Revolt (Aldred’s paper) for May 1913, after the demise of the Anarchist, Angus MacKay wrote an account of the Glasgow movement which shows how the movement there had felt excluded by the group round the weekly paper. The effort required for the paper seems to have disorganized the group. Certainly after the collapse of the Anarchist the movement in Glasgow suffered something of a relapse. Barrett caught a chill in May 1913 while speaking which rapidly developed into tuberculosis, and he was thereby largely prevented from taking an active role in the movement. He continued to write for the anarchist press and speak at meetings, but his illess was virulent and deadly and he died in January 1917. Nevertheless, at the national conference in March 1913, Barrett, for all his disappointment at the failure of the Anarchist was able to be moderately enthusiastic about the movement as a whole:

A general view of the country today certainly gives more satisfaction than it did at the time of the earlier gathering, but much still remains to be done before it can be said that the Anarchists have responded to the actual demand for Anarchism which the workers are making in all parts …

With the possible exception of Scotland — and it cannot remain an exception for long — progress has been made in almost every part. The Newcastle district is doing good work and will soon be doing much better. Leeds, of course, is — Leeds, and the Manchester people are still wondering why no one does anything always forgetting that they are the people who should do it; but apart from these two towns, there seems to be some hope of a revival in Lancashire and Yorkshire. Birmingham is not doing so well as it might, although the one or two that do anything seem to do all that can be done. South Wales and Bristol are the most active of all perhaps, although there is certainly not the huge possibilities here that there are in the Lancashire, Yorkshire or Scottish districts.

At the conference there were forty delegates from Abertillery, Birmingham, Bristol, Durham, Gateshead, Glasgow, Halifax, Hanley, Harlech, Huddersfield, Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle-on-Tyne, South Shields and Swansea. There were apologies for nonattendance from six other towns. By far the most impressive report was from South Wales. The anti-leader agitation in the Swansea valley particularly, but generally throughout the mining valleys, “has taken hold of the most earnest section of the mining industry,” reported Freedom. Small propaganda groups which called themselves ‘Workers’ Freedom Groups’ were being formed — there were already eight of them in the Swansea valley alone. They had published a declaration of principles and a program “that may be the envy of every Anarchist.” This movement is most interesting. It seems to have grown without prominent personalities like George Barrett and to have been an outgrowth of the movement among the miners which had produced the Miners’ Next Step. At the time of the 1913 conference these groups were reported as “spreading out more and more.” At a meeting later in 1913 with 120 people present, the opening of a communist clubhouse at Ammonford was celebrated. They reported: “The Constitution and program of the Workers Freedom Groups have been shaped upon the model of future society at which they aim, namely Anarchist-communism. Rooms are provided and set apart for library, study circles and discussion circles. No chairman, secretary, treasurer or any other official can play any part in such an organization.”[465] There is very little documentation on this movement in the ‘official’ anarchist press and local work is necessary before much more can be said. However, it is worth referring to a short description of the miners’ movement in South Wales in the 1920s:

When I was a lad, I would creep surreptitiously past the careless stewards into the miners’ conferences which were traditionally held in Cardiff’s seedy temperance hall. There I would listen to the bright little alert men as they elevated some local issue on the coalfield to the status of a glorious philosophical dialogue — and all of them were anarchists … the essential sense of locality, the comparatively small pit where all worked (when work was available), the isolation of the valley village or township — all these were similar to the environmental conditions which created the anarcho-syndicalist movement of Spain.[466]

By May 1913 a Workers’ Freedom Group had been established at Chopwell in Durham by Will Lawther and others. (Chopwell had long been a militant miners’ lodge and continued to be so — Dave Douglass describes it as one of two villages in Durham which were called ‘little Moscow’ in the 1920s.)[467] The Chopwell anarchists were spreading the propaganda in neighboring pit villages. In London too the scale of the propaganda was growing. In 1913 and 1914, before the war, there were groups in East and West London, Forest Hill, Marylebone, Notting Hill, Fulham, Harlesden, Deptford and Greenwich. These groups varied in size, but at East London, West London and Deptford between three and five speaking pitches a week were being maintained by each group. Freelance meetings in the parks and other places continued. In May 1913 a large anti-militarist demonstration was organized by the anarchists on the initiative of W.D. Ponder and a group of French anarchists who met at 9 Manette Street, Charing Cross Road. (It is interesting to note that Manette Street was the new name for Rose Street — the same street that had held the Rose Street club at number 6, in 1879.) Two committees were set up, a central one and an independent one in Hackney, East London, which seems to have involved members of the North London Herald League. Seventy thousand leaflets were distributed and there was much cooperation from branches of the railwaymen, carmen, shop assistants and tailoring unions. Branches of the I.L.P. and B.S.P. also cooperated, and the demonstration attracted thousands of people who marched in five processions from Mile End Waste, Highbury Corner, St Pancras Arches, Paddington Green and the Grove, Hammersmith, to Trafalgar Square. In other areas the movement was advancing. At Hazel Grove, Stockport, a communist club was opened in February 1914 with anarchists from Cheadle, Stockport, Reddish, Oldham and New Mills. The Oldham anarchists were organized in a Workers Freedom Group, which, like the South Wales groups, was run without officials. In May 1914 a new weekly anarchist paper was started from Freedom’s Ossulston Street office, named the Voice of Labor and edited by Ferd Dunn. This emerged from a monthly paper named the Torch, which he issued in January and February of that year. Such a weekly paper had been intended earlier, but Barrett, who had been expected to take the editorship, had been incapacitated for a while by illness. Thus the movement had grown to a significant extent while electoral groups had been suffering a decline. Yet we have concentrated thus far on the ‘official’ anarchist movement — the movement that sent its reports to Freedom, that participated in the conferences publicized in its columns. There were other groups and individuals outside this sphere or only partly involved in it. These were for the most part people who had been involved with the more firmly industrial unionist tendencies that looked askance at Freedom’s tendency to overlook the vagaries of union leaders. This separation tended to be another of those formal divides which dissolved at grass-roots level. Yet there is no doubt that the view they presented was distinctive and that the journals they produced are of great interest.

The longest lived was Guy Aldred’s Herald of Revolt. As we have already seen, Aldred had intended to issue a paper of this name after the collapse of the Voice of Labor in 1907, but his removal to Shepherd’s Bush and his imprisonment for Indian sedition had interrupted him. During his imprisonment he was contacted by Sir Walter Strickland, a wandering eccentric aristocrat, who was to provide a great deal of financial support for Aldred’s paper. On his release Aldred issued the first number of his paper in December 1910 with support from Strickland and George Davison. Davison’s support did not last long, however — there was a preposterous argument between him and Rose Witcop over the subject of interior decorating, and Davison went off in a huff. The Herald of Revolt was issued monthly from December 1910 until May 1914 when its name was changed to the Spur, under which it continued until 1921. It is the opinion of the present author that the Herald of Revolt was a more vital and interesting paper than Freedom. The intellectual development of Freedom tended to be a little blinkered by a set of doctrinaire ideas. For all Aldred’s undoubted egotism and high self-regard, he was really interested in the spirit of the anarchist philosophy that lay behind general principles. As he himself was to say: “Catchwords have sacrificed freedom to despotism too often. … Marx’s watchword has replaced Christ’s; Morris’s hymns have superseded Wesley’s. The jargon of our faith has changed but it is every whit as lifeless; a dull, heavy, solemn dogma mouthed in unbelief, and twisted and turned to account by every fakir, who finds in the latest jargon a more acceptable cant than in those that have gone before. … For such ignorant trust in words, the only remedy is live and vital propaganda, steady consistent working towards the ever-coming dawn.”[468]

His paper could occasionally seem a little wayward when eclectic collections of rather arcane material were put together. Yet this represented a wide range of interests. Free-thought, the struggle of Carlyle for a free press in the early part of the nineteenth century, continuing concern with Indian affairs — all this material appeared in his paper. This was the result of Aldred’s concern for an ongoing discussion of ideas rather than a presentation of an already developed position. Aldred delighted in debate and several contemporaries have noted his ready repartee. (One particularly delightful incident was at a meeting on the necessity for free-thought. He said, “When Constantine adopted the Christian religion it was a political dodge, the same as when they put John Burns in the Cabinet.” The local Christian militants were incensed at this blasphemy.) On several occasions he was to print selections of the more libertarian writings of Marx under the heading ‘Was Marx an Anarchist?’ and compared them with similar passages in Bakunin’s writings. He also reprinted some ‘Anarchist Portraits’ by Malato, originally written in 1894, which took as their subjects the ‘grands anars’ of the terrorist period whom the more ‘philosophical’ among the anarchists preferred not to talk about. He also printed some excellent pieces by James Timewell who wrote on the regular abuses by the police of their power. Timewell seems to have been a oneman National Council for Civil Liberties at a time when the word of a policeman, even more so than today, could send someone to jail no matter how good the defense case.

Aldred was primarily a propagandist rather than an organizer, though he does deserve the title of agitator. His interventions in the politics of the time were real enough. The Herald of Revolt denounced the Freedom Group for its refusal to recognize the fakirdom of John Turner. More spectacularly he accused Hyndman of having a financial interest in the propagation of his jingo ideas.[469] Aldred demonstrated quite clearly that Hyndman had been involved with the ‘Colt Gun and Carriage Co. Ltd.’, whose shares rose and fell with war scares. He went on to allege that Hyndman’s bellicose patriotism was designed to increase the value of these shares: “Hyndman’s jingoistic policy is dictated by his financial interests in human murder.” His (clearly libelous) allegations were widely reprinted abroad though not taken up in England. At the time of the prosecution of Bowman and the Buck brothers in 1912 it was only through a number of misunderstandings that he did not print the Syndicalist during Bowman’s imprisonment — apparently Freedom had been asked to print it but had declined. When left-wing newspaper sellers were being harassed by the police for ‘obstruction’ in Hyde Park in 1911 Aldred organized a big ‘sellin’.’ In addition to a large turnout of left-wing newspaper-sellers he also arranged for a large ‘obstructive’ crowd to surround the always unhampered Christian Evidence sellers, which created an embarrassing impasse for the police.

Thus Aldred used his journal as an active base rather than as a pontificatory armchair. His main contacts were with the group round the Industrialist, which, if not an anarchist organization, certainly included many anarchists in its ranks. In March 1912 Industrialist was writing to Freedom: “I find that many Industrial Unionists are avowed Anarchists and many others are virtually Anarchist without knowing it: the balance is rapidly becoming a negligible quantity, as it is being absorbed by the other sections. I hold therefore that all working class Anarchists should join the I.W.W. … I have been a member of the Industrial League for a considerable time. The other members with whom I happen to be acquainted are also Anarchist Communists and include some of the most influential members of the League.” (The Industrialist League had been granted a charter as the English section of the Chicago section of the I.W.W. in late 1910. The Chicago I.W.W. was distinct from the Detroit section, the former being firmly anti-political and ‘direct action’ in orientation.) In 1911 Aldred was holding joint meetings with Industrialist League speakers. They contributed articles to his paper and he to theirs. Both papers carried advertisements for the other. When the Industrialist suspended publication in June 1912 because of financial difficulties, Aldred offered to come to an arrangement whereby the Industrialist League could use half of the Herald of Revolt in return for helping its circulation. This arrangement does not seem to have matured, but for several issues members of the Industrialist League wrote pieces of a semi-‘internal’ nature. However, the Chicago I.W.W. sent an organizer named Swazey to England in 1913, and by the end of that year there were some six branches of the I.W.W. in the country and a newspaper, the Industrial Worker, was being published.

Friendly relations were preserved with the anarchists however: the I.W.W. platform in Hyde Park and other places was used by them. Links were close between Aldred, other anarchists, the Industrial League/I.W.W. and groups like the North London Herald League. Henry Sara, for example, was a member of the Industrialist League, then cooperated with Aldred on the Herald of Revolt (and also incidentally became for a while Rose Witcop’s lover). Aldred spoke often for the Herald League, which included A.B. Elsbury, Beacham and R.M. Fox, all of whom were members of the I.W.W., and the latter two were contributors to Aldred’s paper. Elsbury and Fox were at various times editors of the Industrial Worker. Fox was active with Ponder in East London in the anti-militarist agitation. An old anarchist associate of Aldred’s, Charles Lahr, had a bookshop in Holborn. Fox recalled that “Most of those who clustered round the shop were either members of the I.W.W. or affected by the Syndicalists, industrial unionist, militant labor ideas.”[470] I.W.W. members also had lodgings above the shop. It is a further example of a libertarian socialist milieu which effortlessly ignored formal boundaries.

It is not altogether clear what happened to a number of groups that sprang up round Aldred’s paper in 1911. A North London Communist Group was the first formed and in February was reported as manning two pitches a week. By May there were three. (One of the speakers was Messer, possibly the same man as the Messer who was a member of the Clyde Workers’ Committee in World War One.) Also in May the Hammersmith Socialist Society was advertised — the result of a direct actionist split from the S.D.F. — and the South London Communist Group came into existence. By October 1911 there were two more groups at East Ham and Manor Park. Yet by mid-1912 there were only two Communist Groups, one in West London and another in Glasgow. Whether the others became merely moribund or, as is more likely, dissolved variously into other anarchist groups, the I.W.W., the Herald League or other groups, is not clear. The reason for their mushroom growth and disappearance is possibly due to Aldred’s increasingly widespread propaganda which allowed him less time to concentrate on London. Certainly after mid-1912 he was more or less commuting between Glasgow and West London — the only places where Communist Groups remained in existence.

One other paper is worth notice from the anarchist point of view. This was Jack Tanner’s Solidarity, which, of course, is significant from other points of view too. Jack Tanner had been involved in the anarchist movement since 1911 when he had become a coordinator of anarchist meetings in London after a meeting in August. He was a regular speaker, and a member for a while of the Marylebone group in 1912 formed out of the anarchist meetings in Regent’s Park. He was secretary to the Malatesta Release Committee until Aldred took over. He seems to have become involved in the amalgamation committee movement and in September 1913 Solidarity was published as the organ of the Industrial Democracy League, which was a reconstituted form of the Amalgamation Committees Federation. Tanner’s precise relationship to the paper at this point is not clear but articles by him appear in the issues which appeared up to June–July 1914. Later on Tanner is more clearly in an editorial role. His anarchist leanings are clear. He quite firmly denounces “the Wage System and the State.” Wartime issues of the paper were to include pieces by Stavenhagen, who had written for the Herald of Revolt, and reprints of Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread. It also included hilarious ‘phrenological’ studies of prominent labor politicians by the veteran James Tochatti where particular attention was drawn to “bumps of ambition” or “bumps of avarice.” Tanner’s later activity can be understood more readily if we remember this early training.