By nine that night the battle was over. The pavements were covered with broken glass and wreckage, but the streets were empty except for the police patrols and a few ambulances cruising about to pick up casualties. Leeds Infirmary was full of the wounded, sobbing or shuddering with the sickness that follows mob violence and being tended with grim efficiency by the overworked staff. In the mortuary lay seven broken bodies, two of them in police uniforms, as witnesses that there was “still blood in Britain”.
Chapter Three
FACILIS DESCENSUS …
THE riot in Leeds marked the beginning of the nightmare period of English history which is not yet ended. Until then the slope into Avernus had been gradual, and the many people who hated the turn events had taken still felt that it was possible to arrest their course and scramble up the insidious incline on to some firm and level ground. But now the abyss opened suddenly at their feet and tune to turn back was not given. Englishmen were plunged into a chaos in which all the things that “don’t happen” were dreadfully fulfilled. The friendly half-tones and compromises of ordinary existence seemed suddenly to be resolved into the menacing blacks and blinding whites of improbable drama. Even now, at a distance of both time and space, it is difficult for me to visualize the main actors in that drama as real human beings, and not as portents of perfidy and heroism, oppression and martyrdom.
It is easy, for example, to label Sir John Naker a villain and a traitor; he has been called these names and worse often enough, and yet he was a man who under other circumstances might have lived out an obscure life as a prosperous if none too scrupulous business man. Those of us who met him before he trafficked in his country’s liberty thought of him as a not very pleasant character—he was too plausible and genial to carry any honest conviction—but there were other politicians whom we disliked as much, and there were financial magnates whom we suspected of equal dishonesty. We were prepared to believe the gossip-writers when they told us that he was an affectionate parent to his young family, and his expansive after-dinner speeches bore witness that he was an enthusiast for the genre novel, with a happy knack of quoting Dickens. But chance, or his own ambition, or the credulity of us, his countrymen, who had grown too prone to substitute mere ability for integrity, placed him in a position in which his ordinary and shabby failings were magnified into an extraordinary betrayal, and Naker the inadequate man was lost for ever in the Naker the arch-traitor. L’on fait plus souvent des trahisons par faiblesse que par un dessein formé de trahir.
Two days after I had returned from Leeds I was able to read the German version of the affair, as recounted in the Völkischer Beobachter. The British Press, at the urgent request of the authorities, had reduced the incident to a local street affray which had no national significance. There was no attempt to conceal the serious nature of the fighting or the death-roll, which had been swollen when two or three of the casualties succumbed to their injuries, but, deplorable as the disorder had been, it was felt to be too dangerous to lay much emphasis on it. Events were to show how mistaken was this policy. It was no longer the time to hush things up; nerves were too much on edge, and, since the days of the war, official reticence had been regarded as a veil drawn over catastrophe. Now came the German report, compiled by those practised in describing the enormities committed in the unenlightened areas outside the Reich. It appeared that the British police force had been utterly corrupted by Jewish influence and Jewish funds. Together with organized bands of hooligans from “the dance-hall and the gambler’s den”, this unscrupulous body had made an organized and bloodthirsty assault on a harmless gathering of patriots. There had been unparalleled scenes of cruelty and massacre. There was a heart-rending description of a band of heroes, armed only with “flagsticks”, falling in heaps before the “well-aimed volleys” fired by the police. Worst of all, a German had been involved. The war-hero, Meyer, whom the Führer himself had decorated with the Iron Cross, had barely escaped from this holocaust with his life. This was worse than an outrage: it was an insolent defiance of the honour of the Reich. It must be avenged in blood. Meyer, fresh back from England, contributed his “eye-witness account” of these horrors. “German swine” had said one of these English policemen, reeking of slaughter. “Back to your own verfluchte country.” It is, I believe, a fact that Meyer, suffering from a black eye, had been given a strong police escort as far as Harwich, where he was put on a boat for Germany.
The political repercussions were prompt. On the same day that the account appeared in the German newspapers, the German Ambassador presented himself at No. Ten Downing Street. He was accompanied by a brown-shirted escort similar to that which had attended him in the House of Commons, but this time It was armed with revolvers—“rendered necessary by the civil disorders”. He demanded a full-length apology from the British Government for this insult to a German citizen, and substantial compensation for the injuries “he had received at the hands of the police”. Furthermore, the German Government insisted that stem reprisals should be taken against the officials involved.
This was the first time that Dr. Evans had come into personal contact with the more downright methods of Nazi diplomacy, and he was worsted badly in the encounter. No details of that interview, which took place at ten o’clock in the morning, are available, but as soon as the German Ambassador had taken his leave the Home Secretary was sent for and requested by the Prime Minister to take exemplary measures of discipline against the constabulary involved in the suppression of the Leeds riot.
Mr. Bernard Goldsmith, the Home Secretary, had been regarded as rather a joke, at least by Fleet Street, up to that time. He was not considered to be particularly competent, and his fussy manner in the House of Commons, together with his sheep-like profile and gold pince-nez, had been favourite material for the cartoonists. His alleged Jewish ancestry had made him the target for the abuse of the Leaguers and their organ the Free Briton, which began to appear about this time, but the average man did not take these attacks very seriously. There was nothing of the “sinister Semite” about Mr. Goldsmith—only a catholic enthusiasm for all forms of welfare work and a tendency to take precipitate and rather indiscreet decisions. His reaction to Dr. Evans’s suggestion was instant and indignant. He had perfect confidence in the police: their conduct in this unfortunate affair had been admirable. If disciplinary action was to be taken it should be against the disorderly political organization which had provoked the riot. He would listen to no lectures from Dr. Evans on the subject of international tact. Rather than cast any slur on the well-known reputation of the British police force he would tender his resignation. The Prime Minister did his best to soothe him, and the conversation ended without any decision having been made.
Dr. Evans was in a quandary. “People were being very difficult,” as he observed pettishly to one of his secretaries, and the situation demanded that worldly wisdom, which, as he had been fond of remarking with mock deprecation from the platform, was abhorrent to his idealistic temperament. Consequently he turned to a source of that commodity which had become habitual to him, and the third visitor to Downing Street that day was Sir John Naker. The result of his advice was startling. The following morning Members of Parliament and the general public read with equal astonishment in their newspapers an open letter from the Prime Minister to Mr. Bernard Goldsmith accepting his resignation, “as tendered orally to me to-day”. The letter began in the approved manner, “My dear Bernard”; it paid a cordial tribute to the services which he had performed as Home Secretary, regretted deeply that he had not seen eye to eye with the Government on a matter of policy, and concluded by “Looking forward to the time when we may once more work in harness together”. The signature was the signature of Matthew Evans, but there were many who felt that the pen had been the pen of Sir John Naker.
The letter was not accompanied by any explanation or statement from Mr. Goldsmith. That gentleman had of course been rung up by the Press as soon as the letter was circulated, but, although he
professed the utmost astonishment at its contents, he refused to comment, reserving the matter, as he said, for the House of Commons.
The House that afternoon threw off for once the dread apathy which had invested it ever since the ratification of the Treaty of London. Every bench was crowded when Mr. Goldsmith made the statement to which he was entitled. In a voice which trembled with indignation and self-pity he described the conversation in which he had taken part at Downing Street. It was true, he said, that he had conditionally offered his resignation, but had he dreamt that the Prime Minister was contemplating such immediate and underhand action he would have demanded a meeting of the Cabinet. What had he done, he asked, wiping his pince-nez with a shaking hand, to forfeit the confidence of his colleagues? and what had the police of this country done that the word of a single and suspicious alien should be accepted against their official and careful report?
The Prime Minister proceeded to surround the affair with a smoke-cloud of involved eloquence—a screen which concealed the bomb which he exploded with his concluding words. He was pained, he said, by the misplaced emotion which had been engendered by this affair. Mr. Goldsmith’s indignation, which had led him to refer in ill-chosen and insulting words to a war veteran of our great ally, had also clouded the conversation at Downing Street, and it was perhaps due to this fact that Mr. Goldsmith had not then made his meaning as clear as it should have been. He (the Prime Minister) had then been fully convinced that the Home Secretary’s offer of resignation had been unconditional and to take immediate effect. Under the circumstances, whether they were due to a misunderstanding or not, the public interest had compelled him to take at once a step of which he felt sure that his colleagues in the Government would approve. While no-one deplored more than he did the loss of so distinguished and able a colleague as Mr. Goldsmith, he felt that the present situation, involving not only the maintenance of order at home but our relations with a great and friendly Power, called for extraordinary action. He had accordingly put Sir John Naker, the Foreign Secretary, in temporary charge of the Home Office. It was, he knew, unusual for one Minister to hold both posts concurrently, but he felt that the circumstances justified this appointment.
There was a moment of stunned silence when Dr. Evans sat down, and then pandemonium broke out. The issue was twofold. There was first the insinuation against the police, which was generally felt to be unwarranted, and then there was the extraordinary initiative taken by the Prime Minister without full consultation with his colleagues. Member after member of the Opposition rose and attacked the Government on one or other of these points, and there were signs of mutiny among the Government supporters. Sir John Naker, in an ill-judged attempt to calm the tumult, announced that he had instituted an official inquiry into the affair at Leeds, and that, while the report received by the German Government had, he thought, been somewhat exaggerated, preliminary evidence tended to show that the police had exceeded their authority in dealing with the rioters.
This temporizing only served to exasperate the House still further, and provoked a split in the ranks of the Cabinet itself. Sir Willoughby Parker, K.C., then Minister for Agriculture, and an old enemy of Sir John Naker, flouted all precedent by asking his own Prime Minister whether he considered that the Foreign Secretary was a fit and proper person to conduct such an inquiry, and whether the matter was not one for a full debate. Dr. Evans was about to reply when he received a note passed to him from Sir John Naker. The House watched him in dead silence as he read it. Then the Prime Minister rose, and in a shaking voice pronounced the final death sentence on free parliamentary debate in the British Isles.
“I have just received information”, he said, “that serious civil disturbances have again broken out in the North of England. In view of this fact and the unfinished character of the inquiry into the actions of the Leeds and West Riding police I do not think it expedient that this discussion should continue further at this time. Therefore, I propose immediately to advise the Council of Regency that this session of Parliament be suspended until further notice.”
I shall not describe the scenes that ensued. The demise of the British Parliament was without order or dignity. The Council of Regency had, as I have already said, been hastily constituted as a shamefaced and temporary stopgap to fill the absence of the Crown. Its powers, although a legal commission was attempting to determine them, were still undefined. Their very vagueness made them the more formidable and the less easy to challenge. No-one knew whether the Prime Minister possessed the authority he claimed, but the Speaker, after a vain attempt to quell the uproar and even violence which arose, declared the sitting adjourned and left the House. Members gradually realized the futility of their indignation, and angrily dispersed. There was no Oath of the Tennis Court.
Attempts were made afterwards to prove that the Tyneside disturbances had actually begun at the time of the Prime Minister’s announcement. But a few stormy meetings of the unemployed are all that can be adduced in support of this theory, and there is little doubt that the disorders to which he referred were fathered by the inventive brain of Sir John Naker, always ready to discover a quick exit from an embarrassing situation. Nevertheless, if these disorders were imaginary, they antedated the real thing by only a few hours. As the news of the Prime Minister’s action was spread by Press and wireless all the latent anxiety and unrest came to a head, and the confusion in which Parliament had broken up Was the prelude to something little short of anarchy throughout the land.
The disorder occurred in two main areas—Tyneside and London. In the north the League of Britons had apparently lost much prestige as a result of the Leeds riot. Middle-class citizens who had been inclined to sympathize with its flamboyantly expressed ideals fought shy of their violent expression. But, although the movement thus lost much of its respectable fringe of adherents, it had also gained enormously in momentum. The cards were on the table, and, in the words of the Leaguers, “war had been declared on the alliance between Jewry and bureaucracy”. Bureaucracy to the Leaguers meant the police.
The leaders of the movement did not lose sight of the confusion caused in high places by the German move, and seized their opportunity to stage another demonstration. This was to be a “battle march”—I detect Patrick Rosse’s phraseology—through Newcastle, Jarrow and South Shields, three places which had for long before the war suffered from the worst kind of depression and unemployment, and after the brief armaments boom felt themselves slipping back into their former misery.
Like so many of Rosse’s slogans the phrase “battle march” was vague but suggestive. The demonstration, which began in Newcastle as the usual affair of banners and brass bands, developed rapidly into a savage and semi-organized fight with the police. The authorities had their hands tied; already shaken by the questions which were being asked over the suppression of the Leeds affair, they now received a circular from the new Home Secretary warning them that on no account was popular feeling to be excited by the presence of large bodies of police or military. Nothing must be done which suggested persecution. Local forces were to deal with local disturbances.
The result was that the demonstrators found themselves from the first opposed by small bodies of police who, themselves affected by the indecision of their superiors, hesitated to take effective action and were quickly routed. As the mob saw the forces which represented discipline melt before it, its taste for triumph was whetted, and the next phase of the disorder was a series of deliberate attacks on police stations and assaults on isolated police units.
The marchers got no farther than Jarrow; here motor lorries and vans were commandeered, and the rioters circulated over a wide area of the poorer parts of Durham. In many places they were joined by parties of the younger unemployed, though it was noticed that the older, married men stood aloof. Everywhere small local police stations were attacked and looted, and in small villages the local constable’s house was searched out and broken up. The police, wherever they could, resisted furiously,
and would by now have acted without thought of future reprimands and inquiries, but the attack was so sudden and so widely dispersed that they had no time to form any effective concentration. Ten police officers were murdered by the rioters, and many others were man-handled and more or less seriously injured.
I have described the Durham disturbances from reports collected after the event, but I was myself a witness of part of the London trouble, and even I shudder as I remember what was for me the first spectacle of street anarchy, of open and destructive fury in men’s faces, and the ugly snarl of a fighting crowd. I was working in my office in Fleet Street when O’Flynn, of the Irish United Press, which had premises across the passage, ran into my room. “Get your hat on if you want to see some fun,” he said. “They say the boys are marching on Downing Street.”
We chartered a taxi and reached Trafalgar Square, where we were stopped by a police cordon and got out. It appeared at first that O’Flynn was wrong. From inquiries in the crowd and from a large and friendly police constable I learnt that the square was the objective of the march, that Sir John Naker, apparently with the object of convincing the world and Germany that the Constitution had room for all sorts of politics, had authorized a mass meeting of the League in the Square, and that a procession was even then approaching down Haymarket.
The procession appeared in due course at the north-west corner of the square. It was led like so many London processions by a small detachment of mounted police, behind which marched a large and efficient brass band. As they came into the open the mounted police drew off to let the marchers defile into the area round Nelson’s Column, but instead the brass band and the leading Leaguers advanced steadily down towards Cockspur Street and Whitehall. The police appeared momentarily nonplussed, and then, as the danger of the situation dawned on them, crossed the centre of the square at the trot and formed a weak cordon across Whitehall just below King Charles’s statue.
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