There
sure are one hell of a lot of Bloody
Sundays. Could make your head spin. A Wikipedia Disambiguation page lists
18 between 1873 and 1991 and I am not sure the list is definitive. The first was a Reconstruction Era race riot in Colfax, Louisiana in which White
Democrats attacked Black Republicans
and Militia members trying to
defend the ballot results of an election.
Between 50 and 160 Blacks
were killed, most executed after surrendering and their bodies dumped in
the river. The most recent was on January 13, 1991 in Vilnius, Lithuania when Soviet troops opened fire on civilians protesting rising prices in
newly independent nation. In between
most of the incidents were cases of police,
military, or armed security guards
opening fire on protestors. A handful
like a 1939 massacre of civilians at Bydgoszcz,
Poland by Nazi Germany were war
crimes.
Most
Americans associate Bloody Sunday
with the attack on voting rights
marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965
setting the stage for the historic Selma
to Montgomery March on March 21.
They may also recall a Bloody Sunday on January 30, 1972 when British Army Paratroopers opened fire
on unarmed Catholic demonstrators in
Belfast, Northern Ireland leading to
a twenty year-long guerilla war and bombing campaign by the Provisional IRA. It is remembered as much for protest
songs by Paul McCartney, Give Ireland Back to the Iris; John
Lennon, Sunday Bloody Sunday; and
U2’s song of the same name.
The
events in London’s famed Trafalgar Square on November 13, 1887
are virtually unknown to Americans,
but this particular Bloody Sunday was pivotal in British political, class, and labor
history and helped shape a generation
of struggle.
Times were hard in Britain in
the 1880’s. Had been since a crash in 1873 and would continue to be
until the turn of the 20th Century. The period is remembered as the Long Depression. There were many contributing causes but among the most significant was a collapse in agricultural commodity prices that combined with the introduction of modern farming equipment
displaced rural agricultural laborers and tenant farmers who with nowhere else to go flooded the cities. The
infusion of so many unskilled laborers
into the cities led to a collapse of
wages. Unemployment
skyrocketed and depressed wages
led to wide spread want.
Nowhere
was the agricultural depression felt
more strongly than in Ireland where
despite huge losses in population due to starvation and disease
in the Potato Famine decades earlier
and mass emigration to the United States, Canada, and Australia, continuing consolidation of landed estates forced more peasants
off the land, many of them piling
into English cities when they could not raise fare for new worlds.
Discontent had been building in the cities where there had
been demonstrations of the unemployed and
clashes with police for two years. And in
rural Ireland there were rent strikes,
boycotts, rioting, and unrest which caused the Coercion Act of 1881 allowing for persons to be imprisoned without trial.
The act was introduced by the Liberal
Government of William Gladstone and,
along with continued harsh measures in Ireland, led to the abandonment by the radical
wing of the Party. With the old Whigs shattered, the Tories—now officially the Conservatives, swept to power and would remain
in the saddle almost continually through the rest of the century. Their
hold was secured by the allocation of
seats in Parliament that still vastly underrepresented urban and working class districts while preserving rural safe ridings for the Conservatives.
The
Conservatives ideologically refused to
consider measures of domestic relief
or economic reforms that might have interfered with a free market. They were also most interested in the maintenance and extension of the Empire through
which the vast wealth of the world settled into the hands of banks, corporations, and an entrenched elite who were thus insulated from the domestic economic crisis.
These
conditions had given rise to new
movements—a small but growing socialist
movement including the Marxists
of the Social Democratic Federation
(SDF) and Socialist League, and the middle
class and intellectual Fabian
Society of reformist socialists. Discontented
Liberals and former Liberals had
rallied around organizations like
the National Secular Society,
various free thought movements, and radical dissenters including the Unitarians.
There
were also organizations of the Irish diaspora, increasingly radicalized by the Coercion Acts. These were galvanized by the recent arrest of Irish nationalist Member of
Parliament William O’Brien who was imprisoned
for incitement as a result of an
incident in the Irish Land War. The Irish
National League called for a mass
demonstration to demand O’Brien’s release.
The
SDF, led by William Morris, better
known to American viewers of Antiques Road Show as the textile and furniture designer who was the father
of the Arts and Crafts Movement,
was eager to curry favor with the burgeoning Irish populations of the
London slums and joined in the call for a demonstration.
They broadened demands to
include unemployment relief. They were able to attract fairly significant numbers of native English workers, many of them members of the struggling trade union
movement. The Fabians were not
official sponsors, but most prominent
members offered their support, including Irishman George Bernard Shaw, as did some of the radical Liberals and
Freethinkers.
The march was well publicized in advance. The Conservative government of Lord Salisbury vowed not to be intimidated and assigned infantry companies and cavalry troops in support of hundreds of massed Metropolitan Police who were armed only with their truncheons.
The
flash point would be Trafalgar
Square where the working class East End met the upper-class West End of London.
On that Sunday afternoon as many as 30,000 “respectable citizens” ringed
the square in hopes of witnessing the suppression of the march as if it were a spectator
sport. Ironically, although many of
the crowd probably hoped to see violence
unleashed against the demonstrators, the presence of so many witnesses
caused authorities to order that troops carry unloaded weapons and that the cavalry refrain from drawing
their sabers. There would be no repeat of the bloody
military attacks on Chartist demonstrators
40 years before.
The march was well organized and coordinated. Various feeder marches converged on the Square from different points in the East End. Columns were led by Morris, fiery trade unionist and SDF leader John Burns, National Secularist League speaker Annie Besant, Scottish radical Liberal MP Robert Cunninghame-Graham, and the socialist feminist Elizabeth Reynolds. Their prominence is an indication of how much of the leadership of the movement had slipped from the hands of the Irish nationalists to the socialists and radicals.
But
the majority of the marchers,
estimated at around 10,000 in numbers were Irish. And they were plenty mad. By all accounts
many had come armed with clubs, iron bars, gas pipes, and knives. They were met with a force of 2,000 police and 400
troops. As soon as Annie Besant attempted
to address the crowd, she was restrained
by police, who despite her insistence declined to arrest her. But police did attack other leaders including Burns and Cunninhame-Graham beating both men badly before dragging them away.
Police charged the crowd with truncheon’s swinging. They were met and resisted by many of the armed Irish in a bloody melee in which dozens on both sides were seriously injured. Perhaps biased press accounts claimed that the Police suffered greater injuries. Troops surged forward to disperse the crowd, the cavalry trampling many and some demonstrators were stabbed by bayonets. Scores were injured and at least two demonstrators, Alfred Linnell, a young clerk and W. B. Curner died later of their wounds.
Burns
and Cunninhame-Graham and others who were arrested
were sentenced to seven weeks in prison. In Parliament most Liberal MPs supported the Conservative government’s use of force and its refusal to offer any concessions to the demonstrators.
William Morris's Memorial illustrated by Walter Crane was widely circulated in cheap editions for the poor. |
One week later a second protest meeting was broken up by police. Shortly after Linnell, who had not even been a participant in the march, but an unlucky spectator run down by a cavalry horse, died. William Morris composed a memorial hymn which was published and widely disseminated. Morris spoke at a memorial for Linnell telling thousands assembled that, “It is our business to begin to organize for the purpose of seeing that such things shall not happen; to try and make this earth a beautiful and happy place.”
When
the prisoners were released in
February an open meeting lead to a breach between the radical Liberals,
secularists, and reformist socialists and the more radical Marxists. SDF leader Henry Hyndman violently denounced
the Liberal party, and singled
out for criticism even radicals like Cunninghame-Graham for being insufficiently committed to the working
class. It represented a rejection of “respectable” middle class leadership leading eventually to a new
strategy centering on the Trade Union
movement and the creation of a working
class led social democratic Labour
Party.
The
British labor and socialist movements would look back on Bloody Sunday as an
almost mythic event in their self-defined origin stories.
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