The last anti-Jewish pogrom in Britain, which took place in Wales in 1911
It is difficult to imagine troops being mobilised in this country to deal with crowds intent upon carrying out a pogrom against a Jewish community
It is a matter of common observation that rioting and disorder tends to be more frequent in hot, sunny weather than when it is cold, rainy and overcast. The summer of 1911 was gloriously sunny from May until September. In July a temperature of 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded at Ascot and that month still holds the record for the amount of sunshine seen in one month in this country; a total of three hundred and eighty four hours at the south coast resort of Worthing. The heat however, welcome as it was for holiday-makers, had a bad effect upon the crowds of angry and discontented workers who were striking that summer. The industrial areas of Britain were a tinder box.
The hot weather coincided with a series of major strikes. In May, dock workers went on strike for better working conditions and an increase in wages. By August, twenty thousand dockers were idle in London and in Liverpool the docks had been brought to a complete standstill. Some carters also came out on strike, which meant that raw materials could not be transported to and from the docks. There was mass picketing and violent scenes in London; with lorries and buses overturned by angry crowds of strikers. On 11 August, the government made the fateful decision to use troops to restore order and ensure that supplies began moving again. The carters ended their strike that day, but now it was the turn of the railwaymen to take industrial action.
A century ago, the railways were the arteries of Britain. They were the only the way of getting from one end of the country to the other and no government could allow its trade and industry to be paralysed by a union in this way. Troops were sent into London and Liverpool to protect the railway lines from sabotage and ensure that those who wished to continue driving trains were not prevented from doing so by intimidation from union pickets. Over twelve thousand soldiers were quartered in London and Hyde Park was turned into a tented army base. Troops with fixed bayonets guarded the main railway stations and patrolled the lines. In Liverpool, three and a half thousand soldiers were brought in to prevent disorder, but their presence in the city had precisely the opposite effect.
Almost a quarter of a million men and women were on strike in Liverpool by 13 August and a strike committee was now virtually running the city; deciding which vehicles could use the streets and who might and might not work. It looked very much like a parallel government along the line of the soviets which emerged during the Russian revolution a few years later and when a crowd of eighty thousand men gathered and began moving towards the centre of the city, it was felt that firm action was needed. A large body of police was formed to break up the march and they were backed by cavalry. After the Riot Act had been read by a magistrate, anybody who remained on the streets was defying the law and force could legitimately be used to disperse any gathering. The mounted troops then attempted to clear the streets, with disastrous consequences.
Before the reading of the Riot Act, the demonstration had been peaceful, if a little boisterous. When the police moved in and began to push people back and the cavalry began riding into groups of strikers; violence exploded. Almost two hundred strikers were hospitalised with injuries caused by the heavy-handed tactics used against them by the troops and police. Windows were smashed, fires started and makeshift barricades set up to block the streets. A hundred or so men and a few women were arrested and taken to court the following day on charges ranging from obstruction to assaulting the police. The stage was now set for the final act of the tragedy.
A warship, the cruiser HMS Antrim, had been ordered to Liverpool and was anchored in the Mersey. Armed sailors landed and took control of the docks, while heavily armed troops patrolled the streets in a bid to deter further gatherings of strikers. Police in armoured cars were also in evidence. The stage was set for the final act of the tragedy.
The members of the crowd who had been arrested appeared in court on 15 August and were, almost without exception, either sentenced immediately to prison or remanded in custody to face trial at a later date on more serious charges. The vans carrying the prisoners to Walton Prison had been assigned a guard of thirty hussars; mounted soldiers carrying rifles. The relatives and friends of the men being taken off to prison had formed a sizable and hostile crowd in the streets between the court and the prison and were blocking the way forward for the prison vans. Then, bottles and stones began to be thrown at the cavalry escort. It was unclear if this was an attempt to rescue the prisoners by breaking open the vans, but whatever the intention, it could have come as little or no surprise when things grew very ugly.
The vans and their military escort were now hemmed in on all sides and unable to move forward or back. Some of the men in the crowd now darted forward and grabbed at the bridles of the soldiers’ horses, perhaps trying to move them away from the vans. At this point, the order was given to open fire and the hussars levelled their rifles at the crowd and began shooting. Five men were hit by the hail of fire; two of whom died almost at once. John Sutcliff was shot twice in the head. He and Michael Prendegast, the other fatality, were both in their twenties. The sudden, shocking death of these two young men, both were in their twenties, seemed to bring the city of Liverpool to its senses. Before the railway strike ended though, there was to be even more bloodshed elsewhere in the country.
Incredibly, the two deaths in Liverpool were not the worst loss of life in the disturbances which racked Britain that summer. Things were even worse in South Wales. In the mining districts, feelings were running very strongly against the authorities and there was great support for the striking railwaymen. Some engine drivers though resisted the call to strike and trains still ran. One reason that it was so important to the government that the railways kept running was that it was by means of the railways that troops were moved from one part of the country to another. Over fifty thousand soldiers had been mobilised and the railway system was vital for transporting them to where they were needed. In addition to the other problems facing the government at that time, a civil war was looking increasingly likely in Ireland and it was necessary to move military reinforcements to ports in Wales, so that they could take ship for Ireland. The Great Western line, for instance, ran through South Wales to Fishguard and was a quick route to move men and equipment to the restive, southern provinces of Ireland.
The railway line to the Welsh ports in the south ran through Llanelli and the strikers there and their supporters were utterly determined that there would be no strike-breaking in the area. Trouble erupted on 18 August, when hundreds of men, including not only strikers, but also colliers and tinplate workers who supported the railwaymen, blocked two level crossings on the line through Llanelli. A local magistrate appealed for military assistance, as the police were unable to clear the tracks. The following day, troops from the Worcestershire Regiment arrived in Llanelli, with orders to secure the railway line and ensure that trains could pass freely through the district. When attempts were made to prevent a passenger train from advancing to the coast, the troops were given the order to fix bayonets and charge the crowd. They did so, but as the train entered a steep cutting, some of the strikers climbed onto the locomotive and raked out the fire. This meant that the line between England and the South Wales ports was now completely closed. Soldiers who had followed the men intent upon sabotaging the train now found themselves trapped in the cutting and the crowd showed their feelings by throwing stones and lumps of coal down at them from the embankments.
The situation for the surrounded troops was embarrassing, rather than dangerous and the obvious solution would have been for their officer to order them to retreat. As it was, he gave the order to open fire. Two men were killed in the first volley. This was the signal for some of the most ferocious rioting to be seen in Britain that year. Over the next few hours, trains were set on fire and looted, with terrible consequences. One wagon in a railway siding was full of calcium carbide; an explosive chemical. When this was torched, there was a tremendous blast, which killed four men.
The railway strike was settled by a combination of concessions which the companies running the lines were encouraged to make by the government and also, supposedly, by appeals to the patriotism of the strikers. The Agidir Crisis in July had nearly ended in war between Britain and Germany and the railways would have been crucial in mobilising the army. The leaders of the strike were asked if they really wished to cripple the army, in the event of a war. This at least was the public perception of the resolution to some of the most violent and damaging industrial action ever see in Britain. There was another reason why the railway companies were urged to settle and end the strike. Having chosen to use the armed forces to confront the workers and prevent what could end up as a general strike, it was essential that troops could be moved swiftly to where they were needed in Britain; whether Liverpool, London or Llanelli. With the railway network more or less in the hands of the strikers, the very movement of the troops was under the control of the men facing them. It was, as the strike continued, becoming almost impossible for the government in London to be sure of transporting soldiers to where they were most needed. Home Secretary Winston Churchill summed the matter up in his usual, pithy manner; declaring, ’We cannot keep the trains running. There is nothing we can do. We are done!’
A few years later, in 1914, David Lloyd George revealed that even without the use of railways, Winston Churchill had thought that the government could still defeat the rebellious strikers in Wales. The account which Lloyd George gave of the crisis shows more clearly than anything, just how fragile was the stability of Edwardian Britain and how close it really was to the abyss of what was practically civil war. Writing of the summer of 1911, Lloyd George said that;
Winston then had a plan to shut the Welsh miners into their valleys by a
military cordon and to starve them out. A mad plan. He had all the country
planned out for a military campaign. I shall never forget the remarkable
scene which I witnessed at the Home Office. Winston with his generals, and
his plan of campaign.
Fortunately, wiser counsels than Churchill’s won the day and the plan for what would have amounted to a war was quietly abandoned.
In Wales though, there was to be still more disorder which would need to be put down by the army; even with the end of the railway strike. There was considerable unease about the scale of immigration into Britain in the first years of the twentieth century. Some of this popular discontent was linked to anti-Semitism; a large number of the refugees being Jewish. As is still the case today, most of the asylum seekers sought to stay in London and the other large cities; the places where there were already communities of people from the same countries as those from which they had fled. There was also more opportunity for work in the cities. Some though found their way to South Wales, where they mostly set up as small shopkeepers.
The newsreels of the ‘Battle of Stepney’, as the Siege of Sidney Street was also known, had been shown at cinemas and music halls across the whole country and the scenes of soldiers engaging in a gun battle with foreign Jews brought out the worst instincts in some people. There was general anger not only about the danger posed by allowing so many asylum-seekers into Britain, people who would willingly shelter terrorists, but also against Jews in general. This led to the first pogroms in Britain since the Middle Ages.
The railway strike had been settled on 19 August, but there was still unrest and it was not long before a new target for the angry working men of South Wales was found. Tredegar was a town containing twenty thousand people. Of these, only a handful of thirty families were Jews. The rumour began to be spread that these Jews monopolised the shops and other businesses in the town. There were in fact just seventeen Jewish shopkeepers in Tredegar, along with a rabbi and one or two other businessmen. No sooner had the strike ended and the troops returned to their barracks, than rioting began in Tredegar, with the aim of driving out all the Jews living there. Shops were besieged and looted; the police being unable to cope with this new outburst of violence.
From Tredegar, the anti-Jewish rioting spread to Ebbw Vale, Brynmawr, Bargoed and several other villages and towns. The single avowed aim of those taking part in these disturbances was to drive all the Jews from South Wales. In Ebbw Vale, a tobacconist’s shop owned by a Jew was surrounded and then broken into and looted. The owner and his family retreated upstairs to their living quarters and then barricaded themselves into the attic. Even the floorboards were ripped up and the light fittings pulled from the walls, so as to render the place uninhabitable.
The police in Wales were quite unable to cope with the mounting disorder in the valleys of South Wales and, for the second time that month, the decision was made to call for the army to come to the aid of the civil power. Elements of the Somerset Light Infantry and Worcestershire Regiment were brought into Tredegar and other towns. It took some determined efforts, even for the troops, to bring the situation under control and bayonet charges were made along the streets, before the rioters realised that there was to be no more pussy-footing around. A number of Jewish families were evacuated from the area; leaving behind their wrecked homes. It was one of the most shameful episodes in twentieth century British history; a pogrom indistinguishable from those taking place at that time in Tsarist Russia.
Excellent piece.
Two minor issues:
Agadir, not agidir. As I type this my spellcheck thinks both are "wrong",
Calcium Carbide is not an explosive, but creates Acetylene gas on contact with water. I suspect you recall "carbide lamps" from the old days. Combined with oxygen from the air this makes an excellent explosion.
A most entertaining material, useful for "educating" boys.
Many thanks for your good-humoured and eclectic journalism in print and video. (and the westerns)
A little bit of onomatopoeia trivia - I once read that a pogrom is so called because it is the sound of marching jackboots on cobbles.