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The Police and the Hunger Marchers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Ralph Hayburn
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The use of informers and agents provocateurs by both the government and the police has not been uncommon in British history. Edward Thompson has made lengthy references to the employment of spies by the authorities in the period from 1790 to 1830. The highest levels of the London Corresponding Society were penetrated in 1794 by an informer known as “Citizen Groves”, and, following this, use was made of informers in combating the Luddite movement, and in the Pentridge Rising, the Despard and Spa Fields Affairs, and, most important of all, the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820. The use of political spies is also known to have occurred during the First World War and immediately afterwards, and allegations were made in Parliament in this respect during the period of the General Strike in 1926. The recent opening of the files of the Metropolitan Police for the 1930's has revealed that informers were also used during the unemployed disturbances of these years, in particular in the attempt to prevent the outbreak of violence during the marches on London organised by the National Unemployed Workers' Movement (NUWM) in 1932, 1934 and 1936, and on the occasion of the National Joint Council of Labour demonstration in Hyde Park in February 1933, although in these instances it has not been possible to establish the identity of the person or persons concerned.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , August 1972 , pp. 625 - 644
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1972

References

page 625 note 1 Thompson, E. P., Making of the English Working Class (1963), especially pp. 82, 135, 485–94, 604, 616, 663.Google Scholar Thompson concludes that the use of spies is “an ancient part of British statecraft as well as of police practice”.

page 625 note 2 See, for example, Chandler, F. W., Political Spies and Provocative Agents (Sheffield, 2nd ed., 1936).Google Scholar

page 625 note 3 Hansard, 5th Ser., CXCV.

page 626 note 1 This article is based on “The Responses to Unemployment in the 1930's, with special reference to South-East Lancashire” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Hull, 1970).

page 626 note 2 In April 1923, for example, the Third National Conference rejected a resolution calling for a united front with the communists. The Ninth National Conference at Derby in 1934 repudiated any suggestion that the movement was an “ancil-liary” or “auxilliary” of the CPGB. There was, however, some truth in the argument used by leaders of the “official” Labour movement at the time, namely that the unemployed movement was deliberately hiding its association with the Communist Party in order to win Labour and Trade Union support. Mac-Farlane, L. J., The British Communist Party (1966), p. 126Google Scholar; Report of the Ninth National Conference of the N.U.W.M., 1934. For the National Minority Movement, see Martin, R., Communism and the British Trade Unions, 1924–1933: A study of the National Minority Movement (Oxford, 1969).Google Scholar

page 627 note 1 Regan, T., The Hunger March of 1922: by one who was on it (Manchester, n.d.) 20 pp.Google Scholar; Hannington, W., The Insurgents in London (1923), 32 pp.;Google Scholar Never on Our Knees (1967), p. 112; Unemployed Struggles (1936), pp. 74 et seq. Also Home Office file HO 11275, Unemployed Marchers, November 1922 and February 1923.

page 627 note 2 Other hunger marches were held in 1929, 1930 and 1932; about two hundred men took part on the Jarrow March of 1936, the only march to receive the official support of the Labour Party Executive and General Council of the TUC. This march was organised by the Jarrow Town Council.

page 627 note 3 Times, 4, 12, 15 and 17 October 1932.

page 628 note 1 The remaining file concerned the May Day demonstration of 1933 (Metropolitan Police Records, Mepol 2, 3051). The police files were consulted at New Scotland Yard in the spring of 1970.

page 628 note 2 Mepol 2, 1958, Unemployed Processions, 1920–1925. Following the onset of the post-war depression in 1920, the first organisations of unemployed were local Ex-Servicemen's Organisations, whose sole purpose was to beg charity as a means of relieving distress. In October 1920, a conference of delegates representing the Ex-Servicemen'sOrganisations of eleven London boroughs was held, and the London District Council of unemployed was established, with Wal Hannington as Organiser. The NUWM followed from this.

page 628 note 3 Seven contingents of unemployed, who assembled at nineteen different points throughout the Capital, converged on Whitehall in support of a deputation of London Labour Mayors to No 10 Downing Street. See photographs in Rodgers, W.T. and Donoughue, B., The People into Parliament: An Illustrated History of the Labour Party (1966), p. 87.Google Scholar

page 628 note 4 Mepol 2, 3033, Commissioners' directions about hostile demonstrations, July 1932; Mepol 2, 3035, “Meetings, Processions and Demonstrations”, Pts I to III, November 1933; Mepol 2, 3037, “Meetings, Processions and Demonstrations”, Pts IV and V, 1934–1935; Mepol 2, 3039, “Meetings, Processions and Demonstrations”: Comments from police officials.

page 629 note 1 Mepol 2, 3064, National Hunger March, 1932; Mepol 2, 3065, Hyde Park Demonstration, 27 October 1932. This man is known to be still alive, and his name has, therefore, been withheld.

page 629 note 2 Mepol 2, 3064, National Hunger March, 1932.

page 630 note 1 Mepol 2, 3053, Hyde Park Demonstration, 8 November 1936; Mepol 2, 3091, National Hunger March, 1936. In 1937, in an article in Civil Liberty, Kidd wrote: “It is disquieting to find that provocative agents have been employed within recent years for political purposes, to attempt to discredit political or economic movements which are disliked by the government of the day. The writer of this article and one of his friends witnessed two incidents of the use of agents provocateurs during the Hunger March of 1932. The discrediting of the Hunger Marchers was without doubt the deliberate policy of the Government in 1932 and 1934. In the latter year, the then Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, abused his public position by attempting to create a panic mentality before the arrival of the marchers. A day or two before they were due to arrive in London, Sir John, though the medium of the Press, warned the public not to be at large and to keep their children off the streets, and he advised shopkeepers to shutter-up their windows.” Kidd went on to describe an incident in a demonstration in London during the March, when two “roughly dressed” men, wearing scarves and cloth caps, in the midst of a police baton charge suddenly drew from under their coats regulation police truncheons, and proceeded to “lay about them”, and made two arrests. At a moment when the demonstration appeared to be calming down, a “well-known” detective sergeant, dressed in a trilby hat, drew a missile from his pocket, and threw it at the mounted police. This action prompted a further baton charge. Civil Liberty, No 2, Autumn 1937; also, Kidd, R., British Liberty in Danger (1940), p. 145.Google Scholar

page 630 note 2 Mepol 2, 3053, Hyde Park Demonstration, 8 November 1936. The 1936 Hunger March attracted far greater support than any of its predecessors from the British Labour movement in general. Events in Germany since the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 had done much to bring about a new spirit of co-operation between the rank-and-file of the Labour movement and the left wing. A more sympathetic attitude towards the NUWM was one aspect of this change, and was first apparent on the 1934 Hunger March, when the unemployed movement was able to form an influential committee which publicly issued the call for the March. James Maxton, George Buchanan, Aneurin Bevan and Ellen Wilkinson were all members of this committee. In 1936, many local Labour parties, trades councils and trade union branches gave support to the March, and the South Wales Miners' Federation undertook responsibility for the South Wales contingent. Seven other Labour MP's besides Attlee and Bevan spoke at the Hyde Park demonstration on 8 November 1936.

page 631 note 1 Mepol 2, 3053, Hyde Park Demonstration, 8 November 1936.

page 631 note 2 Mepol 2, 3071, National Hunger March, 1934.

page 631 note 3 E. P. Thompson, writing of the early nineteenth century, suggests that, since the informer was paid by “piece-rate”, “the more alarmist his information, the more lucrative his trade”. E. P. Thompson, op. cit., p. 485.

page 632 note 1 Mepol 2, 3064, National Hunger March 1932. It is not clear as to how the information relating to the statue of Eros and concerning the Dockers reached the police.

page 632 note 2 Ibid.

page 633 note 1 Mepol 2, 3050, National Joint Council Demonstration, 5 February 1933.

page 634 note 1 Ibid. 59 Cromer Street was the headquarters of the National Minority Movement. On 4 February, Scotland Yard informed the NUWM that they would, after all, be allowed to take one rostrum into the Park. There is no evidence to indicate that the NUWM tried to take more than one platform into the Park, or that Hannington tried to reach one of the TUC platforms.

page 635 note 1 Hannington was sentenced to three months imprisonment in November 1932 on a charge of attempting to cause disaffection among the police. He was arrested at the NUWM offices on 1 November 1932.

page 635 note 2 Mann and Llewellyn were both gaoled for two months in December 1932 on charges of incitement and disturbing the peace. The Seditious Meetings Act of 1817 and an Act of 1360 were invoked to bring about the sentences, which the Magistrate himself admitted were largely preventive. Mann and Llewellyn were each required to find sureties of £200 and bind themselves to keep the peace for twelve months, the alternative (which they chose) being imprisonment. The TUC General Council sent a letter protesting against the sentences to the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, and George Lansbury raised the matter in the House of Commons, and visited Mann, who was in his seventies, in Brixton Prison. The Executive Report of the Labour Party for the following year expressed the opinion that the sentences were examples of the “vindictive treatment meted out to political opponents on account of their pronounced and extreme opinions”. Report of the 32nd. Labour Party Conference, 1932, p. 21.Google Scholar

page 635 note 3 See Unemployed Struggles; Never on Our Knees; also Ten Lean Years (1940). Most of the reports of the quarterly meetings of the National Administrative Council were made available to the author during his research, and copies of these are now contained in the University of Hull Library. Since the NUWM was never in a strong financial position, it is unlikely that an outsider attended these meetings to act as secretary, which rules out this possibility as a source for police information.

page 637 note 1 Mepol 2, 3064, National Hunger March, 1932.

page 637 note 2 Mepol 2, 3071, National Hunger March, 1934.

page 638 note 1 It is not clear as to what this address was; it may have been the offices of one of the East London branches, or the home of a local leader.

page 639 note 1 Mepol 2, 3071, National Hunger March, 1934. There is no evidence to show that any attempt was made to take sticks or missiles into Hyde Park, although on the occasion of the 1932 Hunger March, the police confiscated 154 ash-sticks, many with nails protruding from their heads, from a lorry accompanying the Lancashire contingent to the Hyde Park demonstration, and a van that had somehow gained access to the Park was found by police to have sixty sticks inside it, hidden under foodstuffs (Hansard, 5th Ser., CCLXIX). The two incidents must not be confused.

page 640 note 1 Special Branch report dated 25 July 1936 (Mepol 2, 3091, National Hunger March, 1936). It is likely that a number of earlier reports of the possibility of a hunger march being arranged by the NUWM had been received by Scotland Yard, hence the expression “for the past few weeks”.

page 640 note 2 A small contingent of women first took part on the 1930 Hunger March.

page 640 note 3 Mepol 2, 3091, National Hunger March, 1936.

page 342 note 1 Ibid.