The Liverpool Times

From the book The Night the Police went on strike.

Hope people find this part of Liverpool’s history interesting. It’s just a scan of a book, nothing added (apart from an image) or taken away.

Gunboats up the Mersey

`If the police of Manchester or Liverpool or Glasgow go wrong today,’ Macready had said in March, ‘it would be very uncomfortable for those particular towns, but it would not shake the Empire.’

Half of the Liverpool police ‘went wrong’ during the August Bank Holiday week-end of 1919. The immediate result was the worst outbreak of mob violence, looting and burning which even Liverpool, with its long history of similar troubles, had ever experienced. Before the Liverpool police strike was over, a battleship and two destroyers had raced at full steam from Scapa Flow to train their searchlights on both banks of the Mersey (for the riots in Birkenhead as a result of the strike in that force were equally serious).

Scarcely a shop window remained unbroken in Scotland Road and London Road, the two major thoroughfares bordering the Liverpool dock area. More than three hundred prisoners were sentenced for their part in the week-end debauchery, and one man lay dead in the mortuary, shot by one of the hundreds of soldiers drafted into the city to protect property and prevent the trouble from extending to the whole of Liverpool.

Constables Holliday and Smithwick were the two Liverpool delegates who had gone to London for the executive meeting of the Union at which the strike question was argued for so many hours. But when the final decision had been taken, neither was in London. They had caught an afternoon train from Euston on 3o July, assuring Hayes and Marston that they could count on the total support of Merseyside.

The Liverpool branches wanted a strike and it mattered little to them that the rest of the provinces were overwhelmingly against such a step. Even the resignation of Patterson, Adams and Pack did not deter Holliday and Smithwick. They regarded the defections as a matter for London and the internal politics of the Metropolitan branches. Things might well be better in London, they argued, but only a strike would improve the condition of their members in Liverpool. Looking back now, it is probable that Liverpool would have ignored the executive if the decision had been against a strike. The mood of so many of the force was for immediate and decisive action.

The complete determination of Liverpool must have been valuable moral support for Marston as he urged the executive to call more branches out. Even if things did go as badly as expected in London, there was still the chance that action in Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield would rescue the Union by forcing the Home Secretary to negotiate. Hayes, after all, had spent most of the preceding weeks in just these areas and the reception at meeting after meeting had been good.

Liverpool was not particularly fortunate in the two men who were mainly responsible for the city police. The chairman of the Watch Committee, Mr Maxwell, was dictatorial and detested by the force. If they had little respect for the head of the police authority, however, the men had none at all for their Head Constable, as Liverpool’s chief of police used to be called. This was Mr Francis Caldwell, Member of the Victorian Order.

Mr Caldwell, whose survival in office for years after the strike was one of the unexplained mysteries of the event, was not regarded as a policeman by the men under his command. All his twenty-nine years in the force had been spent inside divisional offices and police headquarters. He had little contact with the force and left the day-to-day administration to the superintendents, some of whom ruled their divisions more by terror than leadership. The conditions were bad, even by the standards of the time. The men were all nursing a particular grievance over the failure of the Watch Committee to grant compensation for the rest days they had forfeited at the beginning of the war, whereas nearby forces had all been paid for them. Police pay, in spite of the 1918 award, was still below what could be earned by labourers in Liverpool docks. There was a shortage of constables in the force which was due more to the reluctance of the police authority to spend money than to anything else, as there proved to be plenty of recruits ready to step into the strikers’ boots when the call for volunteers went out.

The deficiencies had been offset by making the men work on alternate rest days, so that a constable had only one day off in two weeks and, because of the unimaginative way in which the things were arranged in Liverpool, it was always the same day of the week. A constable who managed to get a day off at the week-end was a very lucky man.

Public respect for the police was not at all high. It was common knowledge that some of the men were willing to supplement their pay in various illicit ways. Publicans, as a matter of course, supplied free ale to the men on the beat but this was regarded as a normal `perk’ in many areas. More serious was the existence of understandings between the police and the bookmakers, in which the street runners and the ‘pitch and toss’ schools that flourished on every piece of waste land around the docks went unmolested in exchange for bribes. In an area where violence was commonplace, the police had their own ways of keeping on top of the petty thieves and drunks they encountered on their beats. Only the robust and ruthless found themselves able to police their beats successfully, and there were many areas where no constable dared walk alone.

Organized labour hated the police. There had been bitter clashes at the dock gates in times of strikes and lock-outs, and these were remembered when the local unions were asked to support the striking police. It may have surprised the workers who had suffered under baton and mounted charges that the police, the natural allies of the employers in all their troubles, should be forced to strike to protect their trade union rights, but the irony was lost on them. Trade union leaders like young Walter Citrine who was to rise to be such a pillar of the titled establishment, tried in vain to persuade the Liverpool workers that they should demonstrate their solidarity with the Police Union. (later Lord Citrine, one time General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress.) It is an odd comment on the passage of time that Citrine should be referred to, in a Liverpool police report, as a ‘dangerous agitator’. Apart from any question of principle such as the right to have a union, the Liverpool police had other powerful reasons for discontent. The working day should have been eight hours but it was common for the men to work many extra hours without compensation. The men in the mounted section suffered the most, as their shifts stretched to twelve hours. When the mounted men changed from night to day duty, they remained on duty for the full twenty-four hours, as all stable and grooming chores had to be performed outside the nominal eight hours which had to be spent on patrol. In return for all this extra work, the police authority paid the mounted men the princely extra sum of eight shillings a week, which hardly covered the cost of the special boots which each mounted man had to purchase. A similar complaint came from the men who spent their days on traffic points in the city. They were always required to perform an extra hour’s duty each day. Sergeants on station duty were expected to work two extra hours each shift.

Promotion was another complaint among the men. Smithwick, the Union leader, had mentioned the subject when he gave evidence on behalf of the Liverpool constables to the Desborough Committee. A constable did not come into the reckoning for promotion until he had served for eight years, when he was allowed to take the examination. Smithwick passed at the first attempt, but had then suffered the mortification of seeing younger men promoted over his head and he alleged that some of these had actually failed the examination. This was the root of his own bitterness. He felt he was being victimized for his outspoken ways.

During the war Smithwick, as a former Guards sergeant, had been recalled to the colours to drill recruits. As a token of their patriotism and to encourage the flow of recruits to the Army, the police authority had agreed that any man who was promoted in the army would be regarded as an ‘honorary’ sergeant in the police also and would be in line for full promotion when he returned to the force. The men called up in this way at the beginning of the war found that they still had to wear police uniforms, and the sergeant’s chevrons gave them some authority. But when Smith-wick came back to the force and found that the police authority’s liberal distribution of stripes did not extend to paying him a sergeant’s wage, he ripped them from his sleeve. Another Union figure prominent in the strike, Sergeant George Miles, told Desborough that he had only received his promotion after personally threatening to report the Head Constable for ‘gross neglect of duty’. Smithwick told Desborough that the system of promotion in Liverpool had ‘driven men into the Union’.

Liverpool had done little to improve the housing conditions of the force. The police found it hard, in the central areas, to rent houses and the men incurred heavy expenses in travelling. Mr Caldwell would let his men live only in streets officially listed as `respectable’ and this meant that they were often paying rents well in excess of what they could reasonably afford. The Watch Committee refused to reimburse the men for costs incurred on the trams, travelling to work, although most of the other forces in Lancashire permitted free travel in uniform.

With all these grumbles to work on, the surprising thing was that the Liverpool men waited until after the London strike in 1918 had been so successful before they started to form their own branch of the Union. (Liverpool did not permit a representative board to be elected, in spite of Home Office advice in 1918.) Once the need for secrecy had gone, however, Liverpool rapidly came to the front of the Union’s affairs as one of the strongest and most vocal groups. Macready said afterwards that he was not surprised that so many of the force had refused duty in Liverpool, because there were so many Irishmen in it. Macready had always made a point of refusing admission to the Metropolitan police in the case of Irish applicants because he felt they were sorely needed in the detested Royal Irish Constabulary. Also, Macready had noted the strong position held by Roman Catholics in London under Henry’s rule. This had led to rival `self-help’ among non-Catholic police, who joined Masonic orders in the belief that this would help their careers. Similar pressures undoubtedly existed in Liverpool, where local discontent often sprang from the religion of the local superintendent.

Some of the Labour councillors on the Watch Committee did their best to assist the growth of the Police Union, but the organization had an implacable opponent in Alderman Maxwell, the chairman. Mr Caldwell regarded the Union as akin to Bolshevism.

The two most significant factors in the Liverpool situation, therefore, were the fondness for violence of the population of the docks and the very low morale of the force. The action of the police strikers unleashed the restraining hold, at all times a frail one, and the mob made the most of its unprecedented opportunity.

The Liverpool leaders had timed the strike to coincide with the call in London. Divisional representatives, briefed by Smithwick, Holliday and Miles, spent the afternoon of 31 July touring their areas on bicycles, passing on the news to trusted supporters. Late that afternoon, hints of impending trouble reached the ears of some of the superintendents but little attention was paid at headquarters to rumours of a strike.

At ten o’clock, the Union went into action according to a carefully arranged plan, which included posting pickets at the police stations and touring the central area in chartered taxi-cabs to pick up every man who had already gone out on his beat. In order to locate the beat constables, the Union men leaned out of the cabs blowing their whistles. As a constable came running to see what was wrong, he was promptly persuaded to join the strike.

Mr Caldwell had decided to spend the night at the Central Police Office just in case the rumours of Union trouble turned out to be justified. He may have been relieved when the first two hours up to midnight brought in only isolated reports of men who had walked off their traffic points. If this was all, it was probable that the situation could be dealt with quite easily. In fact, men were leaving their beats in droves and sergeants and inspectors, appalled at what was happening, were hesitating to send in reports which could end the police careers of the men concerned. The position was chaotic as everyone tried to find out from his colleagues what was taking place.

In some of the stations on the fringes of the central area, where only a few men paraded for each relief, the officers managed to keep the men on duty by warning them of the risk they were taking and, in some cases, keeping the men in the station away from the gauntlet formed by the pickets.

By half-past two on the Friday morning, however, there was a shouting crowd of at least eighty men outside police headquarters cheering each new recruit to the strike as he arrived to hand in his night lamp. The yelling and cheering must have told Mr Caldwell, closeted in his office with Alderman Maxwell, that he was faced with a real mutiny. When it was clear that there was not a constable left on duty in the city centre. the strikers spread out in search of more support. At Hatton Garden Fire Station they managed to rouse the sleeping duty crews by blowing their whistles and shouting, but they suffered their first rebuff here when the firemen refused to join the strike. Another party hurried to the dock gates, where they had more success in persuading the police on duty to withdraw their services.

The night editor of the Liverpool Daily Post sent every available reporter to cover the main police stations. The first London paper to arrive with news of the strike was the Daily Herald, which had scooped its rivals simply because Lansbury was aware that the Union was going to act.

Telephone calls to the London office of the Post revealed the unhelpful information that the situation there, in the first hours of the strike, was just as confused as in Liverpool. As against the categorical claims of the Herald, the reporters in London could find little evidence of mass police support for the strike. The Post reprinted some of the statements made by the Daily Herald, and the Liverpool pickets were able to use this to persuade waverers that, once again, the Union was winning the battle in London.

At the instigation of Lt-Col. John Ritchie, the Lord Mayor, a special meeting of the Watch Committee was called that Friday morning. Sir Edward Troup and Macready were both able to assure the Liverpool officials by telephone that the strike in London was a complete failure. Troup, having given one demonstration of his ultra-calm in a real crisis, was now inclined to suspect that the Liverpool authorities were exaggerating their own position. The Watch Committee was well aware, whatever the Home Office might think, of the true temper of the Liverpool mob. They were sitting on top of a rumbling volcano, and they knew it. The first task, as they saw it, was to try to reason with the hundreds of police who had gone on strike. It was all very well for Macready to insist on ‘the sack and no re-instatement’ in London when only a small proportion of the men were affected, but here half the force was absent. The Watch Committee also knew that some of the strikers had been badly misled by the pickets and that some had been victims of intimidation.

So the Watch Committee made a generous offer. It infuriated Macready as a clear indication of weakness, but it proved to be of some value in dealing with the riots that were to follow. They announced that every striker had until eight that evening to recant and report back on duty. Two sergeants and fifty constables took advantage of the offer and went back before the deadline. Later, when the police authority was rewarding the men who had stayed loyal throughout the trouble with four weeks’ extra pay, the returning prodigals were given a week’s money in consideration of their change of heart – their thirty pieces of silver, as the bitter strikers promptly called it.

As the Watch Committee was issuing its amnesty offer, about six hundred strikers and many more curious onlookers were meeting on the wide plateau in front of the great St George’s Hall in the centre of Liverpool. After a series of confident speeches from their leaders and some well-known trade unionists, they marched through the streets.

For each man who was slipping quietly through the pickets to report back for duty that afternoon, there were many others who were joining the strike, simply by not turning in when the time came to start their shifts. Others found the pickets so hostile and threatening when they approached their stations in uniform that it did not take much persuasion to make them turn back. By this time, half the force had refused duty.

The talk in the pubs at the dockside that Friday night centred around the strike. By the time the landlords had at last barred their doors and put up the shutters on the windows, the first brave spirits had begun to take advantage of the depleted police force by throwing bottles through shop windows. Fortunately, the authorities had been able to concentrate the available men in the most likely trouble spots, and the show of apparent strength was sufficient to persuade most of the would-be looters to go home. But the remaining police knew quite well that the following evening would bring a different situation, when it became known that so many of the force had actually struck.

On Saturday morning, the Lord Mayor issued a direct appeal for all special constables to report for duty at six that evening. He also appealed to every citizen who was willing to assist in preserving law and order to come forward. Troup got another telephone call from the Lord Mayor which made it clear that the civil authority remaining in Liverpool was insufficient to be able to guarantee the safety of the public. Colonel Ritchie asked Troup to tell the Home Secretary that the Navy should be called in at once, in addition to as many troops as were available in the Liverpool area. Ritchie stressed that warships would be useful, as they could unload troops and naval ratings on either bank of the river. He was aware that the trouble in Birkenhead was likely to be just as grave.

Troup duly conveyed the Lord Mayor’s message to Mr Shorts, who at once supported the idea of calling in the Navy. The Duty Captain at the Admiralty over that holiday week-end was less enthusiastic. Did not the Home Secretary realize that the fleet was hundreds of miles away at Scapa Flow ? The naval commanders at Scapa told the Admiralty that the last thing they wanted to do was go to Liverpool. Twice recently they had been placed at the disposal of the civil power – always a distasteful chore for the armed services – and as a result all leave had been cancelled. Most of the men had gone home for the August Bank Holiday period and this was their first leave in months. Morale in the Navy was no higher than anywhere else at that time, and the commanders were frank in their warning that there might be serious consequences if a sudden recall was ordered.

Mr Shortt was furious at the Navy’s attitude. He had staked his political reputation on his own ability to smash the Union. Now that he and Macready appeared to have achieved just this object in London, failure to deal with the provincial situation could mean, after all, that the Union would win. Lloyd George was not at Downing Street, but Shortt tackled Bonar Law, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Walter Long, the First Lord of the Admiralty. (Walter Long, MP, was a fierce opponent of Labour, and one-time Vice-President of the Anti-Socialist Union.) Long tried to justify the reluctance of the naval commanders but Shortt was contemptuous of what he regarded as timidity. He brushed away the suggestion that the temper of the naval ratings was unreliable. Surely the Navy knew how to deal with malcontents, or did they want Macready to teach them ? Was His Majesty’s Navy, fresh from its wartime conquests and now the undisputed ruler of the seas, immobilized by home leave ?

The message went out from the Admiralty and at half-past ten that Saturday night, full crew or not, the battleship Valiant, 27,500 tons and eight 15-inch guns, left Scapa bound for the Mersey, with the destroyers Venomous and Whitley alongside. Once at sea, the destroyers sailed ahead of the Valiant, which would take a full two days on the journey.

Below, HMS Valiant…

End.

Coming soon - the next chapter - all hell breaks loose in the chapter ‘The Scuffers are out’