Chapter 8. THE GREENWICH PARK EXPLOSION[264]

If H.B. Samuels had only been a self-publicizing terrorist of the word perhaps the worst one could say of him would be the assessment made by a contemporary anarchist who knew him quite well, Louise Sarah Bevington: “about the most rubbishy character possible. … The keynotes of his character are vanity and vindictiveness.”[265] But the circumstances surrounding the explosion of a bomb in Greenwich Park which killed the man who was carrying it led some anarchists, the most prominent of whom was David Nicoll, to assert that Samuels was an agent provocateur employed by the police. This further led to accusations that Samuels was responsible for this man’s death. Anarchist bombs in England were now more than a matter of talk.

At 4.40pm on Thursday, 15^th February, there was a loud explosion near the Royal Observatory, Greenwich Park. When a park keeper and some schoolboys rushed to the spot they found a man very badly wounded but still alive. His left arm had been blown off and he had a large hole in his stomach through which his guts protruded. He died soon after being found. The police were called and they rapidly came to the conclusion that the man had been carrying a bomb which had exploded. Documents found on his body, including a membership card for the Autonomie Club, showed him to be Martial Bourdin, who was “well known among the Anarchists of London.”[266] Presumably, therefore, both he and his associates were known to the police. Yet the police were a little lackadaisical. Had they wished they could have had the details of the case collated with other information on Bourdin and could have made raids the same night. Shortly before the day of the Greenwich Park explosion Coulon had written to the Pall Mall Gazette saying that “There are few [anarchists] whose dossiers are not filed at Scotland Yard,” though anything Coulon might say has to be taken with a pinch of salt. In any case the documents the police had were enough to give suggestive addresses. It can hardly have been a question of legal niceties — after the arrest of Deakin in London they had not waited for a warrant to raid the Walsall Socialist Club. Neither was it the case that the police had been lulled into a sense of false security by general anarchist inactivity. Émile Henry’s bomb had exploded at the Café Terminus in Paris on 12^th February 1894, i.e. three days before the accident at Greenwich, and the sensation was still at its height. Indeed the English press, already full of the deeds of the continental anarchists, took the Greenwich explosion as a confirmation of its direst predictions of similar outrages in England. It was the main item of news for over a week and hysteria knew no bounds.

It is a little surprising, then, that the police did not move until the night of the following day. This allowed the dead man’s fellow conspirators (of whose existence the Central News was quite certain) to be warned by accounts of the explosion in the following morning’s papers.[267] Indeed Nicoll said later that Bourdin’s landlord had told him that after Bourdin’s death and before the police raids, one of Bourdin’s friends had warned him of the likelihood of police activity, and the landlord had destroyed Bourdin’s personal papers. When the raids came they were restricted to Bourdin’s lodgings and the Autonomie Club — both of them unlikely places to find conspirators under the circumstances. The Autonomie Club, in any case, was in bad odor in the movement because of the large numbers of police spies who hung around the place. Without the fact of Bourdin’s involvement with the club it would thus have been avoided by anyone who felt it necessary to be careful.

The police raid took place at 10pm on Friday, 16^th February. Inspector Melville gained admission to the Autonomie Club through knowing the ‘secret knock’ necessary — or so the papers alleged. Once inside he replaced the hall porter with Sergeant Walsh[268] and other policemen who were ordered to allow people in but not out. As people came in they were hustled down into the main hall of the club in the basement. Only one person seriously resisted, but he was overpowered (“a diversion, which it must be confessed, was greatly enjoyed by the officers”).[269] From 10.30pm until midnight the members of the club were interrogated. The club was searched and nothing in the way of explosives was found, although there were many leaflets and a poster that had been printed in London and read ‘Mort à Carnot!’[270]

Simultaneously raids took place on 18 Titchfield Street and 30 Fitzroy Street nearby. At Titchfield Street they were more lucky: hidden at the bottom of a wardrobe under a pile of newspapers was a small flagon of sulfuric acid, identical in detail to the one reconstructed from fragments at the site of the explosion in Greenwich.[271]

So in fact nothing new really emerged from these raids. No accomplices had been arrested. ‘Explosive’ material had been found at the house of the man who had blown himself up — interesting but not surprising. Yet further details were to emerge in the press over the following week which clearly implicated the now notorious H.B. Samuels. On the afternoon of the day of his death Bourdin “was observed in company with another man, in the neighborhood of Hanover Square and later on the two parted company in Whitehall, Bourdin then walking over Westminster Bridge and taking the tram to Greenwich.”[272] This ‘other man’ was Samuels. In a statement to the Central News Samuels “admitted that he had been in Bourdin’s company on the day of the explosion at two o’clock and had remained in his company a considerable time.” He also displayed some knowledge which might have encouraged the police to interview him. He said, “had this unfortunate accident not occurred, the consequences I feel certain would have been terrible. I don’t mean that Bourdin intended to commit any outrage on Thursday, but I do think that it was the commencement of an extensive plot. I have an idea, but I have no proof of its being correct, that the manufacture of bombs for Continental purposes has been going on here for some time.”[273] In later statements, Samuels said that he had been followed to Whitehall by detectives when he had been with Bourdin. It seems possible that Bourdin was under fairly systematic observation: the wretched Coulon alleged (in the Morning Leader) that he had been following Bourdin for some days though not on the day he died.[274] It is rather remarkable that in the face of all this Samuels was not even questioned by the police, particularly since Samuels was Bourdin’s brother-in-law.

Samuels was to display further knowledge of the details surrounding the death of Bourdin; but this was not until a much delayed issue of the Commonweal came out after Bourdin’s funeral. The funeral itself was a somber lesson to the anarchists in the extent to which the ultras had misjudged the power of bomb explosions to encourage the workers to revolt. Even before the funeral the Times wrote “everywhere, even in the streets near the Autonomie Club, the unpopularity of the anarchists is striking. To issue from the door is to encounter a storm of abuse which albeit coarse is distinctly animated by a proper spirit.”[275] Yet despite this, the anarchists seemed intent on trying to make Bourdin into a martyr. Their model in this was probably Vaillant, who had been executed on 6^th February 1894. His grave at Ivry cemetery had become a kind of shrine, with huge queues of people filing past throwing on flowers and wreaths. The anarchists were not alone in the light they gave to Bourdin’s death: Jack Williams of the S.D.F. did not find it forced to praise in the same breath the courageous examples of Vaillant and Bourdin at his unemployed meetings at Tower Hill.[276] At this point the possibility of a public anarchist demonstration at Bourdin’s funeral was being openly discussed in the press. Martial Bourdin’s brother was reported unwilling to “permit the Anarchists at large to make a great parade.” But the question rather depended on whether or not the police returned to his family the £13 in gold found on Bourdin’s body and was settled by the police declining to hand it over on the incredible grounds that it was “part of Bourdin’s equipment for an unlawful exercise.” Since the family could not afford a private funeral without this money, the anarchists took over the expense and management of the funeral.

The funeral procession was scheduled to start at 1pm on 23^rd February.

But by noon the crowds were already gathered outside the undertakers in Marylebone and in Fitzroy Square where the procession was due to call.

According to the Times there were 10,000 to 15,000 people in Fitzroy Square and although there were many anarchists and sympathizers present the general mood in both places was hostile and violent. In Fitzroy Square there was sporadic fighting and six medical students were arrested. A group of men went to the Autonomie Club stoned it, breaking several windows. Outside the undertakers was quieter until the coffin appeared. A large cordon of police held back the crowd and an attempt by a group of anarchists carrying red and black flags to burst through it was a failure. When the coffin was carried out to the hearse there was a great deal of booing and confused shouting and the crowd surged forward. Anarchists who attempted to link arms and form up behind the hearse were swallowed up in the crowd. The police held the people back as best they could and directed the hearse north — away from Fitzroy Square to the east — and blocked the road in a series of holding operations to prevent the crowd from following it. But people kept on running round these roadblocks through side streets and it was not until the hearse, moving at a fast trot, reached St John’s Wood, about a mile away, that the pursuers had been left behind. The Times said, “few can doubt that, but for the police, Bourdin’s funeral car would have been wrecked and Bourdin’s body would have been torn to pieces.” There was another largely hostile crowd at the cemetery. The police were stopping people at the gates, but despite this several hundred people were crowded round the grave and were pushed back into a circle. The coffin was quickly lowered without ceremony into the grave. “Hardly had the coffin reached the bottom of the grave before a tall, fair-haired man whose name is believed to be Quinn leaped forward. He had been admitted within the ring of police as one of the mourners and he was evidently ready to utter a funeral address. He succeeded so far as to shout ‘Fellow anarchists …’” He was seized immediately by the police and hustled away towards the gates. “A mob of a hundred or more followed and soon a cry of ‘Hang him’ was raised and reechoed all around.”[277] The grave was rapidly filled and the crowd dispersed.

There was an element of sightseeing in the whole affair. The Times reported that sensation-seekers had been visiting the undertaker’s to gawp at Bourdin’s body. The presence of medical students at Fitzroy Square indicated that a reactionary mobilization of some sort had taken place. The nature of the coarse remarks hurled at people emerging from the Autonomie Club was most probably racialist. The bulk of the newspaper comment on the Greenwich affair was to the effect that it marked the beginning of an importation of nasty foreign practices to England’s green and pleasant land. Socialism of any kind had been labeled ‘foreign’ from the beginning. But whether sensation, reactionary mobilization or chauvinism had drawn sections of the crowd, the fact remained that more or less spontaneously a crowd of mainly working people had gathered to attack the funeral of a man that the anarchists were trying to present as a martyr in the worker’s cause. It was a melancholy moment for the movement. The anarchists had faced harassment from the police and opposition, violent or otherwise, from identifiable groups with an ax to grind; but they had never had to face anything like a mass gut reaction hostility before. The extent of this hostility seems to have come as something of a surprise to the authorities, and they were to absorb and act on its implications. But it was a severe shock to the anarchists. There had been a tendency to think that, as George Tallis had put it, “the worker knows that the idle vicious class called masters bleed him to death, that he has no freedom, no liberty only to starve and he requires to be told how to prevent it.” The workers, it was assumed, were passive anarchists, and all that was required was exemplary action for them to become active. But if this analysis was correct there was something deeply wrong with bomb explosions as exemplary action as far as England was concerned. It must be understood how grave an admission it was for H.B. Samuels to write in the first issue of the Commonweal after Bourdin’s funeral “The workers are generally against us …”

On the black-bordered front page of the issue of 10^th March there is a long memorial to Martial Bourdin which sets this admission in the specific context of the events at the funeral: “Our noble comrade lies now beneath the sod. At an early age he risked his future chances of comfort, pleasure and life itself for the benefit of suffering humanity — ignorant, brutish suffering humanity — that greeted his funeral cortège with derision, contempt and hatred …” But this memorial also gives further background to the reasons for Bourdin’s presence in Greenwich Park in the first place. Samuels wrote after enumerating Bourdin’s qualities: “Such a comrade … undertook the conveyance of dangerous explosive compounds to a secluded spot, where none could have been injured, in order to put to the test a new weapon of destruction that would have furnished the revolutionary army with another means of terrorizing those who consciously or unconsciously consign so many innocent lives to destitution and despair.” At the same time Samuels was boasting in private of a closer involvement:

Samuels having as it is said on good authority supplied him [Bourdin] with the ‘new compound’, suggested to him to take it somewhere for the purpose of ‘experiment’. Well Bourdin in all good faith thought ‘experiment’ meant experiment and hit on Epping Forest as a place where he would have a good chance of exploding his compound against a big tree without great danger of its being heard, or him seen before he could get away. … Well as the fates had it, Samuels met him just as he was starting with his ingredients. ‘I’m going,’ says Bourdin, touching his pockets significantly. ‘Where to?’ ‘Epping Forest.’ ‘Oh don’t go there, go to Greenwich Park.’ ‘Alright.’ And they went together as far as Westminster where they were seen; and one of them accordingly was made the butt of the police. How do I know Samuels told him where to go? Because Mr Samuels, whom I used to see very often at that time, told me. Why do I repeat the conversation above? Because Samuels himself, before he was suspected by the Group and while he was desirous of seeming an important character in the eyes of sundry gaping comrades, boastingly related it.

The writer is Louise Sarah Bevington in a letter to Nicoll, reprinted in his pamphlet Letters from the Dead. She does not write as one who opposes the use of explosives, her attitude being summed up in the final lines of one of her articles for the Commonweal: “Dynamite is a last and very valuable resource and as such is not to be wasted on side issues.”[278] She had also published poems in praise of Lingg, Ravachol and Pallas, and her suspicions of Samuels — she was clearly convinced that he was a police agent — are not tinged with questions of interest as Nicoll’s are. Though Samuels had somewhat moderated his printed statements he seems in private to have continued to urge bomb attempts on all and sundry. His first ‘success’ was Bourdin, though there seems to have been something of a lull in these activities after this which is easily explainable by the funeral and its aftermath.

In order to understand subsequent events it is necessary to widen the focus somewhat to show the pressures the anarchist movement was acting under. We have seen that there was some measure of popular hostility. This was to combine with police harassment and the activity of agents provocateurs and made the anarchists jumpy and more prepared to take a jaundiced look at the super-militant among them. In one sense this represented a loss of nerve. It certainly tended towards a fragmentation of the movement. And one result of these combined circumstances was the end of the Commonweal as a paper that had any organic connection with the development of anarchism within the Socialist League.