Chapter 9. THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMONWEAL

The anarchists had become the apostles of total destruction in the more gullible sections of the popular imagination. The mad professor in The Secret Agent, the anarchists in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and the figure in cloak and wide-brimmed hat carrying a bomb marked ‘BOMB’ in Pip Squeak and Wilfred cartoons were all variations on a stereotype developed in the early 1890s. This was obviously related to some of the activities and statements of recognized anarchist militants. But it was also to do with the activities of agents provocateurs like Coulon, whose Anarchist Feast at the Opera had been read to such effect at the Walsall trial, and the quite blatant use of anti-anarchist ‘black’ propaganda in the press. We have seen the worst that Samuels and Coulon could do. Yet how does it compare with an article which appeared in Tit-Bits on 10^th Match 1894. The writer of the piece says that through a “Gentleman holding a high position in the detective force” he is able to get an introduction to a “swarthy, beetle-browed ruffian” who is a souteneur (i.e. pimp) and an anarchist. The gentleman in the detective force really seems to know his stuff, because this anarchist would appear to be a very dangerous man indeed — so dangerous, in fact, that one wonders what a detective is doing introducing him to reporters when he should obviously be thrown into the deepest dungeon available. The ‘anarchist’ talks at length about poison and bombs and “war to the death against Society.” Air is to be introduced into the gas mains so as to cause terrible explosions. Two comrades are in Berlin busily studying the culture of dangerous germs “so as to be able to infect some of the poorest and most squalid districts in the End of London.” Others are engaged in collecting the clothes worn by cholera victims on the Continent so they can be brought to Britain to start epidemics. Our reporter asks the detective whether the ‘anarchist’ is serious about all this. The detective, in that tight-lipped way detectives have, answers that the projected libertarian cholera epidemic is ‘interesting’ in the light of a previous incident. A notorious foreign anarchist had a parcel addressed to him from Havana, but he did not claim it. The parcel was then opened:

It proved to contain a lot of old clothing which was almost immediately burned, but three days later the two Custom House Officials who overhauled the stuff sickened and died; ‘I thought then,’ said the detective, ‘that the deaths were due to accident. Now I think it was probably a case of murder.’

‘And the weapon used by the murderer was …?’

‘Yellow fever!’ replied the detective grimly.

This kind of ‘black’ propaganda opened several useful possibilities for the authorities. It could be used to tar the left generally. This tended to scare other groupings and to isolate the anarchists — the S.D.F., for example, refused to cooperate with the anarchists in organizing a demonstration on 1^st May, 1894 because “bomb-throwing was prejudicial to the case of socialism.”[279] It tended to neutralize opposition to repressive measures used first against anarchists, which then became sanctified by precedent and could be used against other groups. In certain cases it could inspire a popular reactionary backlash — even if this had to be helped along a bit. As a result of the “capitalist press inciting all and sundry to attack and lynch Anarchists” a mob of ‘constitutional Peckhamites’ attacked an anarchist meeting in Peckham on 15^th March. They were assisted by Detective Sergeant Walsh of the C.I.D. “who exhibited his manliness by getting behind little boys and pushing them on us. … They surged up to the platform and tried to seize the red flag. A fight for possession ensued which ended with the flag being ripped to shreds.”[280] The speaker, Forrester, was arrested and charged with assault and causing a disorderly crowd to assemble. He was found guilty and bound over in £25 for six months with the option of a month in prison. Agnes Henry was refused permission to stand surety because she was a woman, and H.B. Samuels was refused because he would not swear on the Bible. After Forrester had been in jail for a week, W.B. Parker was eventually accepted to stand surety. The following week the Peckham group again held a meeting and:

an enormous crowd assembled. … Comrades Quinn, Banham, Carter and Alsford addressed the meeting which was perfectly orderly for some time until an organized gang of blackleg gas-stoker and detectives started hooting and pushing, finally breaking up the meeting by force. The police were present in large numbers watching eagerly for the least opportunity for a ‘charge’. These meetings have now had to drop owing to the fact that local comrades will not turn up and support but the propaganda will be kept up in other ways by the distribution and sale of literature.[281]

The police, it appeared, had won.

The 1^st May demonstration was the occasion of a further ‘popular attack’ on the anarchists managed and instigated by the police. The anarchists had two platforms at Hyde Park. One of them was left alone (speakers: Samuels, Louise Michel, Mowbray), but at the other one (Quinn, Turner and Leggatt) there were “constant interruptions, interjections and abusive epithets from a portion of the audience at the rear.” Both Freedom and Samuels state that those responsible were detectives “and those too who are tolerably well known to us.” They had been maneuvering about “now closing ranks in a circle to hold a conference; now scattering and looking around as if expecting more to come. After an hour and a half, groups of roughs, mostly youths of between 14 and 17, appear on the scene, forming the bodyguard of Melville’s gang. A hoot, a yell from these youths, jogged on this side and that by the Scotland Yarders, and the orderly assembly is rudely interrupted.”[282] There seems to have been some measure of hostility to the anarchists, for Samuels says that the audience were content with these interruptions though the detectives were not.

So when they saw a chance to urge on some fools to upset the speakers’ rostrum they did so, pushing themselves through the people until, when within reach, they deliberately struck at, and with both fists, any comrade they knew (and they know us now pretty well) following them up and chasing them with the ready assistance of contented slaves out for a bit of fun. I saw Banham punched and kicked, Tochatti brutally struck in the head and face. … One of our flags and a platform were destroyed by a rush of detectives, who justified the criticism Leggatt had bestowed on them by knocking him down and kicking him. … All this was done directly by the detectives (whose names I know) and others at their instigation.

The police were clearly using — or organizing — elements hostile to anarchism which had revealed themselves at the funeral of Bourdin. The 1^st May incident was, of course, represented by the press as a popular attack on the anarchists by outraged citizens. According to Freedom an attempt at a similar incident by the police on the ‘first Sunday in May’ and ‘official’ demonstration was rapidly discouraged by the crowds of socialists present. There was a lesson there if the anarchists would but have seen it.

The Commonweal was obviously under closer scrutiny by the police. From the issue of 28^th April 1894 until its demise, the Commonweal printed alongside its business address the following advice: “if a receipt is not forwarded within three days, notice should be sent to M. Galbraith, 82 Beresford Street, S.E. The authorities have great difficulty in delivering our letters to time or indeed at all in a number of cases where money has been enclosed.” It need hardly be said that this was only a roundabout way of saying that mail was being held and opened by the police. This surveillance was extended to individuals. In L.S. Bevington’s letter to Nicoll (August 1894) which we have already quoted, the first sentence reads, “Kindly send a postcard at once to let me know if this letter reaches you safely, the post gets increasingly uncertain.” The increased surveillance seems to have followed the Greenwich Park explosion. Bourdin may have been French, but it had been made apparent — not least by H.B. Samuels — that contacts between the foreign exiles and the native movement were close. Well-publicized arrests among the exiles kept the pot boiling. In early April a French anarchist called Meunier was arrested and extradition proceedings were begun. He was wanted for the Café Very explosion — despite the fact that the same accusation had been made by the French police about François, who after extradition from England was acquitted. Between twenty and twenty-five people in all had been posted at one time or another as wanted for this crime. Inspector Melville was alone when he arrested Meunier on Victoria Station; which was perhaps a brave thing to do, except that it made him eligible for all the reward offered for Meunier’s arrest. This was a considerable sum of money, amounting to some £2,ooo. A defense committee was organized by the Liberty group, but despite their efforts Meunier was extradited in June and sentenced to penal servitude for life in July in France.[283]

On 14^th April, Giuseppe Farnara and Francis Polti, two Italians, a blacksmith and a traveler respectively, were arrested for being in possession of materials intended for bomb-making. They had aroused the suspicions of the owner of a small engineering shop where they had gone to buy an iron pipe and had made inquiries about the possibility of having two screw caps made to fit it. This case caused quite a splash in the press since it became apparent that the bomb had been intended for use in England. When Farnara was arrested he apparently raved on about throwing a bomb into the stock exchange and threatening to kill every political policeman in England with a dagger. At his trial (before the repulsive Justice Hawkins) he pleaded guilty. Though his statements on arrest had been leaked to the press, they were not used at his trial; but he did not help matters by announcing to the court, “I wanted to kill the capitalists.” He was sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude and on 4^th May Polti was sentenced to ten years. A third man, called variously Carnot, Piermonti or ‘the banker’, seems to have instigated the plot and to have provided Farnara with chlorate of potash. (This ignites when in contact with sulfuric acid, which was to be used as detonator.) This third man was never caught, and there was great suspicion in the anarchist movement that he was an agent provocateur.[284]

On 1^st June, a German anarchist named Fritz Brall, a member of the Autonomie Club, was arrested in Chelsea. At his home the police found apparatus for forging coins, a quantity of chemicals and electric batteries. They also found a portrait of Vaillant, “written recipes for the manufacture of the most violent explosives, letters from prominent Anarchists in various languages and a copy of a pamphlet by the Anarchist Johann Most entitled ‘The Scientific Revolutionary Warfare and Dynamite Guide’.”[285] At the committal proceedings it was revealed that Brall had been connected with Meunier and François, the two anarchists extradited in connection with a bomb explosion in Paris. It was also said that the Autonomie Club was defunct. Already viewed with disfavor at the time of Bourdin’s death as a haunt of police spies, the club seems to have been closed as a result of police raids, publicity and arrests. Brall had been given the counterfeiting apparatus by a fellow member who was never arrested. It seems, in view of contemporary events, worth asking whether this was another police agent. However, the defense at Brall’s trial was efficient, and since the major charge concerned an eighth of an ounce of an explosive substance — the scrapings from an ‘empty’ jar — and convincing witnesses were produced to explain circumstantial evidence, he was found not guilty. Possession of the forging equipment was technically not an offense since it was for non-English currency.

The use of agents provocateurs had spilled out from the foreign movement into the English groups. W.C. Hart, secretary first to the Peckham and then the Deptford anarchist group, relates the following incident. A friend of Hart’s sheltered a Frenchman who had claimed acquaintance with the Walsall anarchists — at one point the friend even pawned his carpenter’s tools to buy food for the stranger. Pressure was put on the Englishman to ‘commit an outrage’, but he knew nothing about explosives. So a letter was written by the stranger on his behalf to be sent to Jean Grave in Paris asking for a copy of the L’Indicateur Anarchiste (which contained bomb recipes) “as he intends making an act of propaganda for the cause in London.” However, Hart read the letter before it was sent, and smelling a rat he put it in the fire. The Frenchman had gone out that morning and never returned. For some weeks afterwards Hart’s friend was followed by detectives. Hart was later told (interestingly enough “by a representative of Scotland Yard”) that the Frenchman, confident that the letter would be sent, had informed the French police of its likely arrival, and they in turn had informed Scotland Yard. Had the bomb recipes arrived, Hart’s friend could have been charged with conspiracy and in the atmosphere of the time could easily have gone to prison.[286] There were other similar incidents: “A man who had made himself prominent as the exponent of extremist views in politics — he was, in fact, an avowed Communist-Anarchist — received by post an ingenious working drawing showing how a soda-water bottle might be converted into a very destructive bomb.” He also received another drawing showing how such a bomb might be launched by springs. The day after the arrival of these drawings the man’s house was raided but nothing was found, because the man was suspicious and “on its receipt he packed it up and sent it off to Scotland Yard.”[287]

The harassment and surveillance of the English movement took place in an increasingly feverish atmosphere. Arrests led to suspicion and paranoia. The news of bombings and assassinations abroad mixed strangely with the sense of helplessness and rage in the face of the power of the authorities to smash up meetings, as at Peckham, Manchester and Hyde Park. The mass mobilization of the workers to offset this was not within the anarchists’ power. The organizations which had blossomed since the apparently pre-revolutionary days of 1889 and 1890 were increasingly committed to constitutionalism and electioneering. For some sections of the anarchists the result was a retreat into a fantasy world. The fantasy resided not so much in the feasibility of the assorted schemes put forward, though sometimes this was questionable, but rather in the small likelihood of their being carried out and the gap between the means and their stated aims. It represented a desire for revenge which was largely satisfied by bellicose words and schemes never designed to become flesh. It is a familiar psychological maneuver. Hart tells us that schemes were put forward to drop lice on the rich in the stalls from the galleries of theaters; to fill the carriages of the bourgeoisie with hydrogen sulfide, which has a rotten-eggs stench; to catapult small incendiary bombs from the top deck of a bus into the upper stories of the rich mansions of the West End. None of these schemes were put into effect, and even if they had been their precise relationship to the social revolution is not clear. Such proposals were not given the sophisticated gloss of a French anarchist leaflet issued in 1894 entitled ‘Long Live Theft!’ (‘Vive le Vol!’)[288], which for all its ‘logic’ remains firmly in the realms of fantasy:

First and foremost has it not long been admitted that production much exceeds consumption? Is this not so? And why this difference between the two which should not exist among humanity? With the purest logic we can reply that the fault is firstly in the capitalist system and secondly in the idiots who believe they are duty bound to produce for 10, 12 or 14 hours a day for a meager wage without consuming the things they need! Therefore to reestablish equilibrium between these two elements, the most simple solution is to suspend production and to consume as much as possible so that equilibrium is restored and the Revolution achieved. This is the best of all general strikes to talk about. … The more theft multiplies, the more property is divided and the sooner the Social Revolution is brought about. … In consequence, comrades, let us preach in our propaganda the necessity for theft in existing society as a right of war and as the strongest weapon against the capitalist bourgeoisie. Here is our most logical means of combat. So: long live theft! For it will surely lead us to the remaking of society. Vive l’anarchie!

The document is signed ‘les Impurs Universels’. While undoubtedly some anarchists had made out a case for theft which was based in the desperate want of the working class in the face of the indifference of the rich, this piece is fundamentally designed only to shock. Feeding off publicity, it seeks to generate more. However, the ‘revolutionary theory of theft’ had day-to-day consequences which were destructive of the sense of fraternity in the movement. Following on from the leaflet ‘Vive le Vol!’ further leaflets were issued justifying thieving between comrades.[289] Sympathy among the English anarchists for the sometimes desperate plight of the exiles in London seems to have laid them open to exploitation. Any resulting sense of outrage was initially numbed by a barrage of theoretical justification and abuse concerning the residual bourgeois attitudes of the exploitee. Hart, for example, is very bitter on the subject. He says that ‘comrades’ of this persuasion would rather steal from other anarchists “relying on the victim’s detestation of the law not to hand them over into its clutches” and adds that he himself had been “a victim of these rogues time and time again.” In fact the only reason he gives for leaving the anarchist movement in his bad, if sporadically informative, book is his complete disillusionment with the ‘companions’. He says, “I left them ultimately in utter disgust, they themselves having convinced me of the utter folly (not to say criminality) of the whole Anarchist scheme.”[290] His objections to anarchist theory are fundamentally little more than post-hoc rationalizations of this bitterness. Such off-putting tendencies were not only to be found in the French movement. Max Nomad describes, in his memoirs, how:

a German anarchist old-timer pointed out to me, at a distance, a middle aged German worker by the name of Konrad, whom he described as the last relic of a particularly unsavory phase of the movement in England, a phase characterized by certain German-language periodicals, published during the 1890s — as a rule short-lived ventures of which only a few issues ever appeared. The editors of these publications constituted a class by themselves. They were either, as most of the London anarchists suspected, police agents hired to discredit the movement by their propaganda, urging burglary (one of their organs actually bore the title Der Einbrecher, which means The Burglar), counterfeiting, murder and robbery, as revolutionary ‘techniques’; or else they were psychopaths. Konrad was one of the latter. He suffered from coprolalia and was unable to write a single paragraph without using unprintable expressions … he had never violated the law in his life, except by the printing of his obscenities; and was actually the most timid of men. His ultraradicalism was obviously a sort of compensation for his sense of inferiority.

In one case his mania resulted in tragedy for a German philosophical anarchist. On a visit to London, he had come across a pamphlet written by that maniac and had thoughtlessly put it in his suitcase with the intention of showing it to his friends in Berlin as evidence of how crazy some of these London ultras were. That pamphlet recommended arson as the best means for overthrowing the capitalist system. Konrad’s argument culminated in the sentence: ‘Even a beggar can afford to own a few matches and paper can be found in any shit-house.’ Found by the customs inspectors on the visitor’s return to Germany, that brochure resulted in the luckless man’s being sentenced to four years’ hard labor. His protests that these were not his ideas were of no avail. He was a broken man when he left prison.[291]

To try and work anywhere near the ultra sections of the anarchist movement meant living with black anti-anarchist propaganda and overblown rhetoric on the part of anarchists themselves. Strangers could be the next martyr, an agent provocateur or a con man pure and simple. There was constant harassment, surveillance and arrests by the police and identifying police spies was a constant problem. And who the spies were depended on the group or clique who were making the accusations or were being accused. A French ‘counter-espionage’ anarchist group who signed themselves ‘Anonymat’ distributed mysterious little leaflets making accusations. One of their leaflets accused Coulon (who undoubtedly was a spy) together with Tochatti (who equally undoubtedly wasn’t) and regretted not paying attention to one man but excused themselves on the grounds that they were “occupied with the Croydon narc on a bicycle.” Furious accusations and equally furious denials flew back and forth.[292] It was in this context that the accusations against H.B. Samuels were made. As we have seen, Samuels was openly boasting of his involvement with Bourdin. Towards the end of May 1894, says L.S. Bevington: “Samuels came to my house … and without more ado, sat down and proceeded to give the most minute instructions for making and charging bombs. He described all the ingredients and the quantities, where to get them, what pretext to give on buying them, everything about the latest (and simplest) materials used — and after an elaborate lesson he said, ‘I am telling this to everybody; there are soon going to be English acts too; it is high time there should be’.”

At about the same time, Nicoll tells us, Samuels was working with another tailor “whom we will call R—.” The man was a sympathizer and not believing Samuels’s constant boasts of knowing about and being able to provide explosives asked him to provide him with some. To his surprise Samuels turned up one day with a large bottle of sulfuric acid from which he poured out a phial-full and presented it to his fellow worker. Samuels informed him that he was going to distribute the rest of it to various other people. R— was scared stiff and threw his acid away.[293]

But that night in the street he met an acquaintance who was evidently in a high state of excitement. ‘Have you heard the news,’ he exclaimed, ‘Samuels has been giving explosives to J— and two days later J—’s house was raided by the police. They evidently expected to find something, for they tore up the boards of the floor.’ J— was a French Anarchist one of the leading spirits of the ultra-revolutionary school. He was extremely excitable and hot-headed but not likely to commit an act of violence. He was a fair speaker and most of his influence was due to this circumstance. For some time his house and shop had been raided again and again by Melville and Co. and they seemed bent on ‘having him’. It was thoughtful, to say the least of it, of Mr Samuels to supply him with ‘a small bottle of sulfuric acid’.[294]

Samuels had also provided other anarchists with acid and according to William Banham had been distributing “some other stuff” which combined with the acid would, Samuels said, produce a “beautiful and interesting experiment.” Nicoll says that this was potassium picrate, which had been the charge in the bomb carried by Bourdin. Samuels’s distribution of explosives and the raid on J—’s house made people acutely suspicious of Samuels. The result as Nicoll tells it was that “…one evening a young man who once believed in Samuels arose solemnly at the weekly meeting of the Commonweal Group and denounced him. Samuels was dumbfounded, he could only ejaculate, ‘They asked me for it’.” The question was left hanging for two weeks until a full hearing could be given to accused and accuser. At this meeting Samuels “admitted that he had given away sulfuric acid, but said he had done it at the request of his accusers. As to the Bourdin affair, he declared he had stolen the explosives out of the house of a comrade D— (Dr Fauset MacDonald) who had them for use in his business, and given them to Bourdin and that since that affair he supplied sulfuric acid, etc., to J— and R— from the same place.” He admitted that it was he who had accompanied Bourdin to Westminster Bridge and that they had been followed by detectives. Nicoll goes on “after the death of poor Bourdin, this calm philosopher, Mr Samuels wrote that interview with the Central News and received three guineas for his trouble. Mr Samuels ought to have a career in journalism.”[295]

Someone remonstrated with Samuels when they heard this. ‘You ought not to have done it,’ they cried. ‘You go and — yourself,’ said Samuels, ‘I shall make money how I like.’ But the questions grew pressing and inconvenient and some more facts might have come out for R — and others were about to ask some questions when he suddenly recollected something, ‘My wife is downstairs,’ he said, ‘I’ll bring her up.’ He brought her up and she immediately began to assail the group with violent abuse and threw the whole meeting into turmoil. ‘I suppose I must go,’ said Samuels and he went taking his wife with him. This saved him a troublesome cross-examination which might have been awkward.[296]

After Samuels’s farcical exit the Commonweal Group decided to depose him as editor and expel him from the group. No public statement was made about the accusations against him, the only indication on the surface being a note by Samuels in the Commonweal of 9^th June, which, to say the least, was low-key.[297] It read, “In consequence of lack of funds the next issue of the Weal will be held over until sufficient money is received to make a fresh start. There is a feeling here among comrades that it would be advisable to alter the policy hitherto adopted by the paper so I have tendered my resignation as editor which has been accepted by the group pending the settlement of the attitude the group will adopt in the reissue …” The CommonweaI Group seemed anxious not to wash its dirty linen in public. However understandable this was it allowed rumor and suspicion to bubble under the surface in a way which could only be disruptive. If a precise body of charges had been brought against Samuels and examined by an impartial ‘court of honor’ much of this disruption could have been prevented. David Nicoll was to press for such a course, but meeting with no response he felt forced to air his suspicions openly and unilaterally. While the turmoil after Samuels’s departure and disruption caused by police action are one explanation of the group’s lack of energy in the question, with every week that passed inactivity began to provide its own justification.

The group was not able to publish another issue of the paper before it was hit by the arrest of Cantwell and Quinn and the occupation of the Commonweal office by the police. Of necessity this took attention away from the question of Samuels; and the arrest and trial of the two men forms something of an interlude. The whole thing started ordinarily enough. Cantwell and Quinn had gone to the new Tower Bridge, which was to be opened the next day (30^th June) by assorted royalty and politicians. They intended to address the workers who had built it and their message was clearly written on a placard Cantwell had printed for the occasion: Fellow workers, you have expended life, energy and skill in building this bridge. Now comes the royal vermin and rascally officials in pomp and splendor to claim the credit. You are taken to the workhouse and a pauper’s grave to glorify these lazy swine who live upon our labor. The placard finished with the following lines from William Morris’s poem ‘The Voice of Toil’:

I heard men saying, Leave tears and praying

The sharp knife heedeth not the sheep;

Are we not stronger than the rich and the wronger

When day breaks over dreams and sleep?

Cantwell spoke first and made the points expressed by the placard. But this area in the vicinity of Tower Hill was a prominent speaking-pitch and thus tended to attract ‘professional’ anti-socialists. Further, they had chosen a rather sensitive time to preach anarchism, as the anarchist Santo Caserio had five days previously assassinated President Carnot of France with a dagger. The matter was still an extremely live issue. Cantwell was asked about Carnot’s death, the prosecution alleging more and more bloodthirsty replies as court hearing succeeded hearing. The defense was to claim that the question was ‘turned aside,’ and this would seem to be confirmed by the fact that press reports of the meeting mentioned no incitement to follow Caserio’s example. The explanation for this omission given by a reporter, who had been present, at the trial that “the evening papers do not care for sensational reports” can be safely disregarded.

When Cantwell had finished speaking Quinn took over. Cantwell, however, was soon in trouble in the crowd. According to one of the chief prosecution witnesses at the trial, one Braden, he said to Cantwell, “You are a dirty dog. Are you a specimen of an Anarchist?” to which Cantwell replied “Yes.” Braden then called him a dirty dog again and pushed him.

Several other people seem to have joined in, for Cantwell found it necessary to run for it. He was finally arrested in Gracechurch Street, where the policemen who did so said Cantwell “was waving a red handkerchief and shouting, ‘I’m an Anarchist.’ There was a mob of 400–500 persons around him. Some of them shouted, ‘Lynch him’; others attempted to strike him with large pieces of wood …” Being pursued by people who were trying to hit him with large pieces of wood obviously amounted to disorderly conduct and Cantwell was arrested and so charged. At the police station, however, anarchist literature was found on him and it was revealed that he was a “dangerous Anarchist well known to the C.I.D.” and on these grounds he was remanded in custody at the police court since “on the next occasion more serious charges would be preferred against him.”

Quinn meanwhile had slipped into a church to get away. He had then gone home. With more courage than sense he went to the police station the next day “to see fair play for Cantwell” as Freedom put it and was himself arrested. The meeting at Tower Bridge had been a bit hectic but unexceptional. The language of the placard was no different from those which announced in indignation meetings on the royal marriage in 1893.

The consequences on this occasion were to be rather different. In the index to the Times, the name of the person charged is given, followed by the nature of their offense. In Cantwell and Quinn’s case the offense is simply given as ‘Anarchism’. Their trial was something of a travesty easily explained as the consequence of political hostility.

Through various court appearances the two men were kept in prison for a month. Almost immediately after their arrest (on 1^st July) the Commonweal office was raided and occupied by the police. They stayed in possession of it until 30^th July, drinking vast amounts of beer, opening all letters that arrived and breaking up formes of type. The grounds for occupation were that Cantwell lived in the office, and that they were guarding Cantwell’s property until the legal owners of the office claimed it. (It was ironic that these should turn out to be David Nicoll and Frank Kitz.) The feeling in the movement at this time is given by John Turner in a letter to Nicoll: “This affair has put us in a fair mess, I can assure you — the police still in possession of the office and doing all they can to ensure a conviction of Cantwell and Quinn. Should they secure a conviction we believe it means the suppression of all open propaganda.”[298] It would appear from the eventual charges against the two men that the police were doing all they could to secure a conviction. Cantwell and Quinn were eventually committed for trial on four charges: (1) Incitement to murder members of the Royal Family and assorted politicians; (2) seditious libel on the Royal Family; (3) the publication of the leaflet Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb, and (4) a charge under the Explosives Act on the grounds of a manuscript found at the Sidmouth Mews office. Taking the charges in order, the incitement to murder largely depended on witnesses at Tower Bridge. The evidence given was contradictory and one of the witnesses for the prosecution admitted in court that he had “done things for the police which I do not wish mentioned.” Detectives “were overheard by the clerk of the solicitor for the defense zealously coaching up the witnesses outside on what they were to say.” As far as printed material was concerned the incitement to murder was alleged to reside in the William Morris line about “The sharp knife” which “heedeth not the sheep,” where the Royal Family, etc., were interpreted as the lambs for the slaughter. This is a complete inversion of the sense of the lines, which clearly call the workers the sheep and capitalism the knife. William Morris was called to explain this point but was cut short by the judge, who said, “It does not matter what the writer implies, the question is what the prisoners imply.” The charge of seditious libel boiled down to the fact that they called the Royal Family rude things and they were certainly guilty of this — as guilty as the editor of every socialist paper in England.

The leaflet Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb consisted of Vaillant’s declaration at his trial and a biographical piece which said that the workers should recognize his act as heroic. No evidence except the belief of Sergeant Walsh was offered to prove that Cantwell had printed the leaflet, which was, in any case, a rather mild affair. As to the manuscript found at Sidmouth Mews, Freedom described it as “some old lectures long ago publicly delivered” but not by Cantwell or any member of the Commonweal Group. This manuscript had been sent to the “Weal office to see if they would print it. They had no intention of doing so and did not even know it was still there, but unluckily when the office was raided the police found it among some old papers.” Another source alleges, however, that the manuscript was found behind a loose brick in the wall.[299] Wherever it was found it is worth speculating whether this was Cyril Bell’s translation of Most’s Revolutionary Warfare or the text of Coulon’s chemistry lessons to the Young Anarchists. But whatever its origin and despite the plea that the responsibility for the manuscript lay with the editor of the Commonweal (i.e. Samuels!) there is no doubt that it told heavily against the two men.

Five defense witnesses said that the prisoners had said nothing about bombs, assassinations or Carnot; these subjects were introduced by people in the crowd and ‘turned aside’ by the speakers. As to these people in the crowd, a policeman turned cab-driver “suggested that the disturbance was caused by a small clique and the crowd in general was not hostile to the speakers.” The defense was given short shrift by the judge, who repeatedly interrupted, to the cheers of prosecution witnesses who remained in court.

Defense witnesses on the other hand were only allowed one at a time into the court and some were threatened by the police, who packed the corridors outside. Spectators were kept out of the court if the police considered them friends of the prisoners and ‘dangerous characters’. One such (unknown) dangerous character who was shut out wrote to the Westminster Gazette saying that the undersheriff told him “he wondered a member of the well-to-do classes should take an interest and adding ‘Our object is to get such men out of the way as quickly as possible’.” Cantwell and Quinn were found guilty and given six months apiece.[300]

While the trial was occupying the Commonweal Group, in another quarter the question of Samuels’s alleged police spying was not being allowed to rest. Nicoll, by now in Sheffield and the editor of his own paper, the Anarchist, determinedly made the matter public. On his release from prison he had commenced work on his pamphlet The Walsall Anarchists, which he published at the end of January 1894. He had addressed many meetings, speaking at Regent’s Park with Cantwell through December 1893. As we have seen, he tried to hold a meeting in Trafalgar Square when anarchist meetings were banned there. As we have also seen, very little of his activity was noted by Freedom and even less by the Commonweal. The cause of this was obviously the dispute over the editorship of the latter.

Samuels would be unlikely to publicize a rival in his paper, and as far as Freedom was concerned the general London report was written by Presburg, a close associate and admirer of Samuels who had shown Nicoll copies of Samuels’s Commonweal as the sort of thing required of him. Nicoll also tells us that on his release he offered the text of his speech at his trial (later published as Anarchy at the Bar) to C.M. Wilson, the editor of Freedom: “Mrs Wilson sent it to Carpenter, Carpenter sent it to Gore [the Freedom Group’s solicitor in the Walsall case]. Gore said it was ‘libelous’ and Mrs Wilson declined to print it.”[301] This was not very brave of Mrs Wilson, and Nicoll can be excused for feeling that he was being subjected to something of a boycott. No doubt this feeling was considerably deepened by the circumstances, surrounding the conference in December 1893, which confirmed Samuels as editor of the Commonweal. Nevertheless Nicoll offered the Commonweal the text of his Walsall pamphlet. This offer too was refused. Nicoll was not sure whether it was because Samuels was “scared of a criminal prosecution for libel” or because of its accusations against Coulon, with whom Samuels had preserved relations.[302] Nicoll was being forced to plow a lonely furrow.

Nicoll left London in early February 1894, shortly before the Greenwich Park explosion, to fulfill some speaking engagements. He had also decided to try and start an anarchist paper in the provinces. He went first to Leicester, but the anarchists there were not keen on the idea. He then went to Sheffield where his paper was designed to be a revival of the Sheffield Anarchist.[303] Thus Nicoll was not in London when Samuels was accused at the Commonweal Group meeting, though letters of his to London could have been an instigating factor. It has to be said, though, that Samuels was under suspicion from more than one quarter and for more than one reason. William Wright, an anarchist cab-driver active in the cabmen’s strike in 1894 wrote: “I had my suspicions aroused some four months ago because I noticed that Samuels did not like Quinn because Quinn did not let him boss the show. It seems so strange for them to prosecute Cantwell and Quinn while Samuels has wrote three times more than that in the Weal and nothing was said about it. I tell you that from the time of the Bourdin affair, Quinn has been followed about and persecuted wherever he went.”[304] After Samuels was expelled from the Commonweal Group Nicoll wrote a rather gloating piece in the Anarchist. He reviews Samuels’s “distribution of explosives” and the subsequent police raid on J— , he then goes on to discuss his relations with Bourdin and his charmed life throughout. He ends, “When people are arrested for quoting some lines of a poem by a great writer and another man is tried at the Old Bailey for having a bottle in his possession with a few grains … of what a Government ‘expert’ is pleased to call ‘fulminate of mercury’ it is time to ask — Why people who incite to murder and supply others with explosives are allowed to escape?”

There was a mixed response to this article in the movement. (It has to be remembered that this was the first time that the nature of the accusations against Samuels had appeared in print.) Nicoll received the first of what proved to be a series from Samuels: “You are a cowardly envious liar and I shall make you eat your paper the next time I see you. No comrade in London places any reliance on what you say or do as it is well known that you are an imbecile and not responsible. H.B Samuels.” John Turner wrote to Nicoll, “Your facts re Samuels are a bit out but otherwise it is all right.”[305] Nicoll interpreted this to mean that Samuels had not distributed explosives but sulfuric acid, which, however, Nicoll says is an explosive under the meaning of the Explosives Act. Another result of Nicoll’s article was that Dr Fauset MacDonald and Herbert Stockton of the Manchester group traveled to Sheffield to try and persuade Nicoll “to make no disclosures in the Anarchist.” MacDonald “said he was firmly convinced ‘Samuels was not a police agent’.”[306] The interview was a somewhat heated one, for Dr MacDonald’s surgery had provided the chemicals that Samuels had distributed, and Nicoll was of the opinion that MacDonald himself was not above suspicion.

Nevertheless, Nicoll did agree to print nothing more on the matter on condition that a committee of inquiry was set up to look into his allegations. Herbert Stockton wrote to Mrs Wilson and to Dr MacDonald asking for the opinion of the London comrades on the matter. Stockton continues in a letter to Nicoll:

I told Mrs Wilson what happened at Sheffield and stated you asked her to take an initiative in the matter — requesting the favor of an immediate reply. This was last week directly I arrived home but Mrs Wilson has not replied yet. MacDonald wrote at once stating that the affair had died a natural death and almost forgotten and that the comrades had too much real work on hand to bother about personalities, expressing the opinion that if a conference was called nobody would attend. So it is out of my hands and your liberty of action remains unfettered.[307]

As a result Nicoll returned to the subject in the following issue of the Anarchist. He added one or two points of interest. Firstly, he alleges that Samuels had been in regular correspondence with the ‘Secret Police Agent’ (which is how Coulon was described in a newspaper article) for four months. Of course, he says, this could be quite innocent: “Some people if caught in the act of taking money from detectives would no doubt plead that they did it ‘for the good of the cause’ and perhaps some people might believe them.”[308] He then goes on to ask why an innocent man would, however, do his best “to dodge and evade all inquiry?”

This article drew a sharp response from John Turner. In a letter dated 29^th August he wrote:

I never read anything more stupid in my life. … Is it your own fevered imagination, fanned by a feeling of spite for the unfair way H. Samuels treated you re editing the paper? If so you are losing the confidence of the London comrades — not in your integrity but in your common sense. … If it were not for the annoyance it causes, by the S.D.F. using it at outdoor meetings to prove what they are always saying: That the Anarchists are either fools or police spies, you would, be merely laughed at by those that know. … The Commonweal Group has made all the inquiry it deems fit. … The conclusion the group came to was that there were suspicious elements in the case; circumstances connected, with some actions of Samuels which prevented absolute confidence in his conduct. The question of getting up dynamite plots has not been raised here. … You are acting against your own interests, as your ‘spy mania’ as it is called here, being reflected in your paper prevents comrades pushing your paper as they would. He — Samuels — is not thought to be a police spy, but it is thought he is not above making a bit by journalism.[309]

This is quite a contrast to his earlier mild statement that Nicoll’s facts on Samuels were “a bit out.” It is probable that MacDonald had been doing some lobbying — he and Turner were co-members of the Freedom Group. The question of Nicoll’s ‘spy mania’ might well have been raised by MacDonald, since at a later stormy chance meeting between Nicoll and Samuels in 1896, Samuels said, “I could put you away if I liked. MacDonald says you are insane!”[310] Certainly Nicoll’s reasonable request for an impartial committee of inquiry was being evaded by references to personal spite, public difficulties with the S.D.F. and veiled hints that the London distribution of the Anarchist would lack efficiency if embarrassing articles continued. If there were “suspicious elements in the case” they amounted to rather more than “making a bit by journalism.” The very vagueness of Turner’s phrases encourages speculation. Samuels quickly disappeared from the movement without much effort to clear himself. Though the Leeds group offered to pay his fare, Samuels did not attend the northern groups’ annual anarchist picnic in the Peak District in August 1894, where he and Nicoll could have thrashed the matter out in front of an impartial anarchist audience. An appearance at an open-air meeting by Samuels for the Canning Town group on 5^th August is the last mention of any activity connected with the anarchists. Nevertheless Turner’s letter did have the immediate effect of stopping Nicoll raising the matter in print for three years. The disputes surrounding these later writings are considered in a later chapter.

It is worth considering, however, just what evidence there was that Samuels was a police spy. Despite the interesting analogies Nicoll was to later point out, the evidence was circumstantial and boiled down to two points. One was Samuels’s charmed life through his noisy editorship of the Commonweal and his known relationship with Bourdin. The second was the distribution of ‘stuff’ to several people and a police raid on one of them shortly afterwards. There is no doubt that Samuels knew how to make bombs; in all probability was involved in the making of Bourdin’s bomb; and that he urged others to make and use bombs. But the fact that he was not arrested by no means proves that he had police protection. Samuels’s ‘incitements to murder’ were general bloodthirsty fulminations which might have landed him in the same situation as, say, Quinn, if he had not preserved a rather low profile in open-air appearances. Unlike Nicoll, Samuels had not ‘incited to murder’ specific people and was not trumpeting his intention to publish material damaging to the police. The distribution of sulfuric acid and a police raid shortly afterwards are not necessarily connected. Nicoll himself says that there had already been a number of raids at the same premises, and this could have been merely the latest in the series. Samuels’s relationship with Coulon remains unexplained and suspicious. All this could amount to little more than the fact that Samuels was a reckless aficionado of propaganda by deed who combined a certain self-preservative caution with a useful portion of luck. Yet it should be pointed out that it was largely fortuitous that Coulon’s role in the Walsall affair became anything more than a matter of speculation. Only the opening of the police files can finally decide the matter.

It was 25^th August before the next issue of the Commonweal appeared. It was four pages only and appealed more strongly than usual for funds. In their search of the Commonweal office the police had found documents which showed the finances of the paper to be in a parlous state and had announced as much at the trial of Cantwell and Quinn. It was rather an unconvincing piece of rhetoric on the part of Ernest Young (who co-edited the paper with John Turner) which asserted in the face of the evidence in this issue that “the ‘last legs’ are of a rather tough description and before very long both the Weal and the Torch will appear weekly …” Only two more issues were to appear — one in September and one in October 1894. By the September issue morale had dropped perceptibly: “We hope all comrades will help us in our present condition. New comrades are coming to our side and helping all they can; but old comrades must not get disheartened because we are impoverished by the persecutions. Our poverty keeps us honest …” It is possible that money was no longer forthcoming from MacDonald after Samuels’s departure and no other source of patronage had been found. The October issue demanded, “Is the Commonweal to continue? If so we must have money at once.” In this last issue there was a story about F. Goulding of Stratford East, who had refused to send his child to board school on the grounds that “he knows what education he wants his children to have.” The child was sent to truant school for three months. There was bitter infighting in Burnley between the anarchists and the S.D.F. — Billy MacQueen was proving a little too successful in his oratory in that market square for the social democrats’ taste.

Ted Leggatt, who had been blacklisted by the wharfingers of East London for his Carmen’s Union activities and his anarchist opinions, had been able to find no work for ten weeks and was in great distress. Ten open-air speaking pitches were advertised for Sunday meetings in London. The movement continued, but the Commonweal was dead.