In November 1916, former Colne Valley Socialist MP and would-be revolutionary Victor Grayson enlisted with the 1st Battalion Canterbury Infantry Regiment in New Zealand. On September 9th the following year, he and his regiment arrived at Étaples Base Camp just as riots were taking place by New Zealand and Scottish Troops. What part if any did Grayson play in the mutiny and what was Grayson and his Manchester associate Adela Pankhurst doing in New Zealand in the first place?
One of the most curious details to emerge from a fresh look at the Étaples Mutiny of September 1917 is that notorious Socialist firebrand Victor Grayson arrived at the camp on the very day the riots kicked off. Grayson, who famously disappeared for good in 1920, had enlisted with the 1st Battalion Canterbury Infantry Regiment during a prolonged stay in New Zealand in November 1916. After basic training at Bulford Camp in Wiltshire his unit marched into the Étaples Reinforcement Camp on Sunday September 9th. It gets a glancing mention in David Clark’s biography, ‘Victor Grayson: The Man and the Mystery’ but it has never been explored in any significant detail. In fact for the most part, it’s been completely overlooked by historians on all sides of the political divide.
For mystery lovers, though, the question is not whether Victor Grayson played a part in the Étaples Mutiny, but whether Special Branch — spurred on by Joseph Ball’s appointment as Head of B Division at MI5 — suspected he did. Grayson had certainly spoken in support of troop rebellions on previous occasions. If Sir Basil Thomson and Special Branch were poised to act on those suspicions, could the fear of impending arrest for espionage or sedition have driven Grayson to vanish?
Whilst accounts differ on the exact nature of the Étaples riots and the resentments that fueled them, mutineer—and later communist—James Cullen was adamant that a ‘small council of action’ led by Communist agitators took control as the mutiny entered its second phase.1 What makes this all the more intriguing is that Grayson was embedded among the very Anzac units that led the initial assault on the camp police. It was Arthur ‘Jock’ Healy and roughly a dozen men of the New Zealand Field Artillery who first rushed the bridge cordon blocking access from the local town, only to be apprehended and beaten as ‘deserters’ by the overzealous ‘Red Caps’ (WO 95/4027/5).
By 5.00pm on Sunday September 9th, a sizeable crowd had gathered around the police guardroom. One of the New Zealand Sergeants came forward and demanded the release of Gunner Healy. Members of Healy’s family insist that the beating during his arrest was fairly ‘trivial’ by Étaples standards, and that scores of other soldiers had endured the same humiliating routine, quietly, if a little grudgingly. But this time, the response was very different.
As a result of a warning by a corporal in the 27th Base Infantry Depot that the New Zealanders intended raiding the police hut, Gunner Healy had already been released by the time the mob had arrived, and the Sergeant was shown an empty cell. In spite of the foresight shown by the guards, the mood of the crowd turned increasingly hostile; trouble was clearly being sought at all costs and more aggressive attempts were being made to rush the police guardroom. According to the Base Camp diary, the crowds in the vicinity of Three Arch Bridge and the Police Hut by early evening were some ‘3,000 – 4,000 strong’ (WO 95/4027/5).
As part of an effort to get to the bottom of the disturbances and stave-off further dangers, a special Board of Enquiry was set-up on the Tuesday to ‘collect evidence as to occurrences’ on the 9th. And inevitably, among the senior ranks, suspicion began to fall on agent provocateurs. In the eyes of military top brass, this wasn’t a spontaneous grass-roots uprising, but an organised anti-war protest backed by German money.
In an entry dated September 12th, Field Marshal General Haig notes in his diary that “men with revolutionary ideas” from “new drafts” had carried “red flags and refused to obey orders.” Much the same thing was repeated in a letter published in Sylvia Pankhurst’s revolutionary newspaper, Workers Dreadnought that November:
“We are being fed like whippets … It is something hellish. The men out here are fed up with the whole bloody lot … About four weeks ago about 10,000 men had a big racket in Étaples, and they cleared the place from one end to the other, and when the General asked what was wrong, they said they wanted the war stopped. That was never in the papers.” — Workers Dreadnought, November 3rd 1917 from an unsigned letter dated September 30th 1917.
The incident set in motion a violent chain of events that saw a “seething mass of infuriated Kiwis” break the ‘Canary’ cordons and rampage through the town. In the words of R. H. Mottram, the men here swarmed ‘in motion like an ant-hill, in sound like a hive of bees’. By 7.30pm, many of the Police had fled into Étaples itself. In his diary, General Thomson notes that a crowd of about 1,000 men had tried to break into the Savigne Cafe where several Police were in hiding. A private in the 4th Gordon Highlanders told the Aberdeen Press and Journal that at least one Red Cap had sought refuge in a hut, down by the railway cutting, only to be forced to find sanctuary elsewhere after being stoned from above by a gang of angry Jocks. The ‘demeanour of the crowd was so threatening’ that practically all of the Camp Police had ‘disappeared’. They were simply ‘unable to cope’ (WO 95/4027/5).
All it wanted was a spark
In 1927, ex-serviceman James Cullen, one of the few men charged and sentenced as a result of the mutiny, told the Glasgow Weekly Herald that the ‘Bolshevists’ among the troops had been keenly aware of the incendiary atmosphere. After the first of the disturbances, large bodies of men had broken through the piquets into town where they had held ‘noisy meetings’. As a result of the meetings, a small council of action was set-up with the ringleaders ‘giving their directions by under-channels’.
One man among the small council of action described by Cullen was New Zealand gunner, Arthur Weber Todman. Todman, a headstrong Union leader back in his hometown of Wanganui, had been enlisted into the same Canterbury Regiment as Grayson, and like Grayson had found himself in the thick of the action in the Anzac Reinforcement Camp on the day of the mutiny. In an interview with Bill Allison for his book, The Monocled Mutineer, Todman describes how this small council of action had held a meeting in a camp canteen the morning of Monday the 10th. The men wanted the Military Police withdrawn immediately or they would torch the Red Cap compound. As the wooden building sat adjacent to the ammunition dump, it was decided that if Thomson failed to comply then the Canterbury troops would do a ‘two in one job’ and ‘burn the bastards out and blow up the dump at the same time’. (MM, p.94).
Shortly after these meetings, a ‘seditious’ leaflet had fallen into Cullen’s hands, bluntly asking the troops ‘to ground arms and stop the war’. ‘Let them fight their own bloody war’ it bayed. Resentments, which had been brewing for the best part of 12 months, were now at ‘fever pitch’. ‘All it wanted’, Cullen explains, ‘was a spark to cause a first rate explosion.’ 2 That spark came ‘when a corporal in the military police stationed at Étaples shot a Gordon Highlander.’ Cullen goes on to describe the event as being ‘the signal for a general outbreak by extremists’ (Glasgow Weekly Herald, February 1927).
The man shot was William B. Wood of the 4th Gordon Highlanders (No.240120), born in Pitsligo, Aberdeenshire to parents John and Rebecca Wood. He was shot in the head and died shortly after admission to hospital. A French woman standing in the Rue de Huguet was also hit by a bullet. The man doing all the shooting was Private Harry Reeve (No.204122), recently seconded to the Camp Police from the 10th Middlesex Regiment, and a champion boxer of the early 19th Century (WO 95/4027/5). His manager was Dan Sullivan, small-time boxing promoter, and bookmaker deeply embroiled in the murky East End underworld, and working at this time for Bella and Dick Burge at The Ring at Blackfriars.
In the chaos that ensued, it appears that Reeve had snatched a gun from one of the New Zealanders, firing randomly above the heads of the crowd as the ‘seething mass’ of furious Anzacs taunted and jeered the Police who had dared to remain by the huts.
The shooting of Corporal Wood had become the flashpoint for rebellion.
It’s a curious story to say the least, and made all the more curious still when you learn that Harry’s uncle, Charles Reeve featured in the hysterical émigré cortège that swarmed around the infamous Whitechapel murders. The first murder had taken place with yards of the family’s home at 5 Thomas Street and as a direct response, Charles and the political firebrand, George Lusk had formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee from the activists and social champions that made up the International Working Men’s Educational Club.
At the time of the murders the club was still on Berner Street, a favoured haunt among Whitechapel’s surly Russian exiles, and which in subsequent years at least, was more than casually frequented by the militant associates of a young Victor Grayson. At this time, however, it had the more lurid reputation for being the place where the third Ripper victim, Elizabeth Stride had been found. Club steward, Louis Diemschutz had driven his cart into the yard shortly after 1.00am on September the 30th and found the poor woman with blood still pouring from her neck. As Jonathan Moses rather blithely sums up in his essay, The Texture of Politics: London’s Anarchist Clubs, 1884 – 1914, the club consequently became subject of intrigue for a popular press ‘clamouring to connect lurid violence on the continent with the more prosaic realities of Britain’s domestic life’. The census of 1881 shows the Grayson family living at 10 Sydney Street in Poplar, just a twenty-minute walk away.
Over the course of four days, some 400 military foot and mounted police arrived to restore order, and reinforcements were drafted in from the Honourable Artillery Company and the unflinching Machine Gun Corps. As the largest troop transit camp in Northern France, the threat to discipline was immense. Hundreds of men within the New Zealand and Scottish units were charged with military offences, dozens of men were charged with mutiny, and one man, Jesse Short, was executed. Many others received sentences of up to 10 years imprisonment. Just as in Petrograd, it was the Police that were the target of aggressions. The Officers, like those in Russia, were treated respectfully. Accounts of the Base Camp ‘faroany’ being hunted down the steep embankments and fleeing down to the River Canche are eerily reminiscent of the scenes played out in Palace Square:
We found the riotous crowd in a street near the bridge trying to break into a house where some military, police were believed to be sheltering. A plucky Scotch colonel forced his way to the doorway and spoke to the men, promising that the guilty policeman should be punished — Manchester Guardian, February 1930
When viewed against the fast moving changes emerging in Russia as a result of the February Revolution, the disturbances at Étaples (and among Russian troops at La Courtine, led by Jean Baltais and Klavdia Vavilov) make for very unsettling reading, and inevitably, certain questions arise. The first of these is likely to be obvious to anyone who has heard of Grayson, and one that almost certainly went through the heads of Military Intelligence in the immediate aftermath of the mutiny: did Victor Grayson — generally regarded as one of the best mob orators in Europe — have any foreknowledge of the riots and if he didn’t, what part, if any, did he play in the disturbances?
In the first of his series of four articles for the Glasgow Weekly Herald in the mid-1920s, mutineer James Cullen described how the paid-Communist agitator had to know “the psychology of the mob mind” and was taught ‘how to inflame his speeches with the catchwords and phraseology calculated to appeal to the down and out.’ And if anyone should know it was Cullen. In 1905, Cullen had been among the casualties of a British Collier ship when a mutiny broke out on the ‘Nikolif’ built Russian battleship, the Kniaz Potemkin in Odessa harbour. The mutineers, who had already murdered several of its officers by throwing them overboard, seized 2000 tons of coal before scuttling their own ship in shallow waters. Cullen was one of several young British ship workers who had fled the ordeal as rebellion spread across the port, and spent the following six months in Russia. 3 It was only the intervention of the British Foreign office that got him out (FO 369/37/58, Kew).
If there is one thing that could be said without any uncertainty at all it was this; no one knew the psychology of the ‘mob mind’ better than Victor Grayson.
The Red Feds
Just a few weeks prior to the riots Private John King, a soldier in Grayson’s Canterbury Regiment, had been executed by the firing squad for desertion. Absenteeism was nothing new and was usually met with nothing more serious than a week confined to barracks, but frequent and sustained desertion was something else, and the response, more often than not, was swift and brutal. There was also a parallel saga taking shape at home. Just a few months prior to Grayson enlisting, several of his Socialist associates in New Zealand, including Yorkshire ex-pat Mark Briggs and Archibald Baxter, made the headlines for refusing their conscription orders into New Zealand’s Expeditionary Force. Bundled into their regiments regardless, the treatment of the men was barbaric and carried out in full view of the troops.
Back in New Zealand, Briggs had been a senior figure within the Industrial Union of Workers at the Manawatu Flaxmill. Since 1911 the Union had become increasingly radical, supporting their affiliation with the ‘Red’ Federation of Labour – also known as the ‘Red Feds’. Adela Pankhurst, who campaigned tirelessly on Grayson’s behalf in the Colne Valley by-election of 1907, paid a visit to Briggs and the Manawatu Flaxmill in July 1916. It was just a few months after this meeting that Briggs and his associates refused their mobilisation orders. By March 1917 and irrespective of their objections, Briggs and his men were escorted to barracks by force. What part Pankhurst played in their decision to refuse conscription isn’t known, but it is curious to think that such a close associate of Grayson’s had been among these men at such a critical stage in their lives.
It is also curious that Adela and her sister Sylvia Pankhurst had already come to the attention of Étaples Camp detective, Edwin T. Woodhall, who discusses his encounter with the women (and his encounter with Percy Toplis in the deserter camps around Étaples) in his 1929 book, Detective and Secret Service Days. His superior at Special Branch, Basil Thomson, had also discovered that Adela and Sylvia Pankhurst had set up the People’s Russian Information Bureau on funds supplied by the Bolsheviks (Queer People, Basil Thomson p.293). And her clandestine activities weren’t confined to the First World War either.
In June 1941, just one week after Germany had invaded the Soviet Union, police had searched her house and confiscated a substantial volume of Japanese propaganda. Pankhurst had planned to distribute the material at meetings organised by the pro-fascist, Australia First Movement, as part of the group’s ongoing offensive at the 1942 by-elections. In spite of being hastily ejected by the party for suspected espionage, Adela and twenty other members of the AFM were deemed too great a threat to National Security. In March 1942, they were arrested, charged and interned under Section 13 of the National Security Act. On March 30th, 1942, the Evening Post ran the headline, ‘Alleged Spy Ring’, sensationally lifting the lid on ‘seized documents’ plotting the ‘assassination of prominent people.’ (Australia’s Evening Post, Volume CXXXIII Issue 75).
It was a curious set of circumstances indeed, and made all the more curious by other developments.
In July and August 1917, Adela’s mother, the celebrated Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst and Colne Valley-cum-Manchester activist, Jessie Kenney, were part of a small delegation of Labour and Suffrage supporters dispatched to Russia to meet provisional leader, Alexander Kerensky. Pankhurst Senior had been thrilled to see the overthrow of the oppressive Tsarist regime that February, but like many had viewed the Provisional Government as vulnerable. It was a largely self-funded mission, driven by the needs of publicity and marred by excessive hubris. Pankhurst had rushed across determined to help the women of Russia organise themselves and teach them how best to use the vote. That it had been the peasant women of Russia who had got the revolution off the ground, seems to have escaped the attention of Pankhurst, and her efforts went largely ignored. The women workers of Petrograd, desperate and hungry from months of rising food prices, had organised a protest in the Nevsky Prospect demanding an increase in rations for soldiers’ families. And the response it drew from Police was as violent as it was unprecedented. By the evening of February 23rd support for the working women drew in crowds of 90,000. Women’s Day 1917 changed the lives of Russians forever.
In October 1917, just as attempts were being made to restore order at Étaples, New Zealand objector, Mark Briggs, was taken from Bulford Camp in Wiltshire to the camp in Étaples and sentenced immediately to Field Punishment 1: the ‘crucifixion’.
Was Briggs part of a two-pronged Trojan plot to cause division within the ranks of the New Zealanders? Did this account for both Adele Pankhurst and Victor Grayson arriving in New Zealand within weeks of each other, just as they had arrived within months of each other in Australia in 1915? It’s unlikely, but not impossible.
Speculation about collusion may have been overlooked as a result of Grayson’s fanatical pro-war behaviour, which was seemingly at odds with Pankhurst’s equally belligerent activity in the opposing Women’s Peace Movement. But whilst I am no expert on the vagaries of revolutionary thinking during this period, Grayson’s position and intentions may not be as straightforward as many might think.
The Lesser of Two Evils
There’s been a tendency among some writers and historians to frame Grayson’s jingoistic pro-War stance inside a treacherous and mercenary shift to populism and Conservatism; this is despite the fact that several prominent revolutionary leaders in Russia also backed the war including Alexander Kerensky (a member of the ‘Trudovik’ faction within the Socialist Revolutionary Party who played a key role in Russia’s February Revolution), Irakli Tsereteli and Georgi Plekhanov, generally considered to be the founder of Russian Marxism and one-time Lenin supporter. Even on return to Russia, Bolshevik leader, Joseph Stalin, sided initially with the Reformists.
To understand why, you have to remember that at the beginning of the war, Germany had set out to seize significant parts of the Russian Empire. The Septemberprogramm as it became known, had been prepared by the German chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and it is clear that territorial expansion had been Germany’s primary motive for war (huge territories in Western Russia had already been taken, including Congress-Poland, Lithuania and parts of Courland and western Volhynia). Revolutionaries like Kerensky and Plekhanov observed that successful revolution and change was less likely under Imperial Germany and they needed to push back its not inconsiderable eastern advance.
To safeguard their own revolutionary interests, a significant proportion of Menshevik (‘majority’) faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party backed a military response to the ‘Prussianism’ of the Junker — Germany’s ruling military class. The remaining Bolshevik (‘minority’) faction withheld their support for the war on the basis that it was rooted in Imperialist Capitalism. The long and short of it? Opinion on the issue of war among Socialist and Labour supporters was as divided in Russia as it was in Britain.
There is no contradiction here. Grayson’s pro-war belligerence was not an indication he was losing interest in a Socialist revolution—quite the opposite. The pugnacious Social Chauvinism championed by Grayson and fellow British Socialist Henry Hyndman likely stemmed from a desire to preserve a Revolutionary ideal, not reject it.
Revolutionaries like Plekhanov believed that German victory could be disastrous for the world’s proletariat. Siding with the bourgeoisie on the issue of defence was simply the lesser of two evils. Grayson might have had another reason for backing conscription; in Russia, conscription and desertion among the country’s ‘peasant army’ had undermined the country’s war effort on several fronts, making the conditions ripe for revolution. There were food shortages in the towns due to the diminished labour force in the countryside (skilled and non-skilled men were in the army), and military transport and provisions congested the railway networks. These factors led to a rise in food prices which meant growing hardship for the workers, and inevitably this led to strikes.
It may come as no surprise to learn that in the autumn of 1916, Grayson was reassuring his Socialist comrades in New Zealand that conscription, whilst unfavourable, would at least train men in the use of munitions and prepare them for the revolution that would almost certainly follow the war. Just weeks before, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had similarly written that ‘an oppressed class which does not strive to learn to use arms, to acquire arms, only deserves to be treated like slaves’. If men were to be given a gun, they must ‘take it and learn the military art properly’ so they could fight the bourgeoisie of their own country (The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution: II, September 1916). Men, Lenin went on, must ‘set to work to organize, organize, organize’. Grayson expressed much the same sentiment in a speech he made to the Wellington Social Democratic Party that same September:
The men who have reaped the experiences of the trenches would come back trained to use guns and bayonets, and to act unitedly, and they would never again be satisfied with the old life of unemployment and want and hardship. They would make demands upon their governments … and knowing the value of organisation they would be in a position to enforce their demands — Victor Grayson speaking to the Wellington Social Democratic Party, Maoriland Worker, Volume 7, Issue 293, 27 September 1916
It was not an isolated statement by any means. In September 1907, Victor Grayson had dangled a similar revolutionary carrot in Wigan. In a monologue that drew as much in the way of gasps as it did applause, Grayson told the crowd of Independent Labour Party members gathered at the Co-op Assembly Hall on Dorning Street, that he was looking forward to the time when the ordinary British soldier would ’emulate his brother of the National Guard of France, and when asked to turn his rifle on the people who are fighting for their rights’, would turn his rifle ‘in the other direction’. He had no gripe with the Soldier. He was just another ‘poor wage slave who does his work for a shilling a day’. The ‘propaganda work’ that he and his comrades were carrying out in the armed forces, Grayson continued, was ‘making Socialists there by the dozen’. Grayson had made no bones about the fact that when the ‘parliamentary game’ had been exhausted they would need ‘something unconstitutional to agitate the ponderous brains’ of British bureaucracy.
Grayson makes one thing abundantly clear: as far as the present war was concerned he was patriotic, but like his comrades Plekhanov and Tsereteli in Russia he felt the workers movement would have more opportunity to flourish under the allies than under ‘Prusso-German’ rule. Flooding the ranks with a readymade Socialist division would simply accelerate the process of any post-war coup d’etat.
In the words of one Tracy Chapman, Vic was still talkin’ ’bout a revolution. As he told the Wellington Social Democratic Party just one week previously: the workers had ‘the means and remedy in their own hands – organisation’. Whatever they did they must ‘organise, organise, organise.’ (Labour and the War, Evening Post, Volume XCII, Issue 70, 20 September 1916). His words were unusually prescient. Just months after making this speech, the mutinies that swept through the ranks of Russia’s Volynski and Pavlovski regiments played a decisive role in its February Revolution, when significant numbers of the troops not only refused to fire on the rioting crowds, but turned their rifles instead on Police.
Several years earlier in October 1909, Grayson had addressed 8,000 social democrats who had gathered in Trafalgar Square and made a ‘violent speech’ denouncing the execution of Catalan anarchist, Francesc Ferrer. According to the press, Grayson ‘advocated a life for a life’ before declaring that even if ‘the heads of every King in Europe were torn from their trunks tomorrow it would not pay half the price of Ferrer’s life’. (Star, Issue 9676, 19 October 1909). Attending that same demonstration was Naomi Ploschansky, James Dick and Fred Bower, a ‘Liverpool agitator comrade’ from Grayson’s early days in Liverpool.
Under the direction and inspiration of Ferrer, Dick and Bower had helped set up the Anarchist Communist Sunday School in Liverpool. Ploschansky set-up a sister school on Jubilee Street in the Whitechapel district of London (a venue used by Lenin, Trotsky and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party just a few years previously). In 1909, just twelve months after its conception, the Liverpool school was moved to Beaumont Street in Toxteth, just minutes around the corner from Grayson’s mother on Northbrook Street. Ploschansky and his father returned to Russia in 1917 in time for the October Revolution.
Bower is an interesting character. Born in Boston but raised in Liverpool, the colourful ‘anarcho-syndicalist’ claims he campaigned on Grayson’s behalf in the final week of the Colne Valley by-election of 1907. In his 1936 autobiography, Rolling Stonemason, Bower describes meeting his “old towny” and having many “happy chats” that week. He also claims he was the first to inform the Pankhursts of Victor’s astonishing triumph at the polls. A red handkerchief was waved from an upstairs window in a house in Slaithwaite. It was the signal that they had won. Bower dashed around the corner to the four Pankhurst women who were waiting in a nearby car. According to Bower, the Pankhursts had “worked like Trojans” for the candidate for the full duration of the campaign. “It was a great day”, writes Bower, “and the hills resounded with the Red Flag”.
Bower was to meet Adela Pankhurst again when he visited Sydney shortly after the war. It was through Pankhurst that he was introduced to Bolshevik Consul, Peter Simonoff —Lenin and Trotsky’s newly appointed representative in Australia. Between 1918 and 1919, Simonoff had been observed entering the house of Ronald Graham Gordon, a member of several local patriot groups but later arrested as a German spy. Gordon, who claimed to have been born in Inverness in 1879, had been in the employment of Carl Frederick Muller, executed some years earlier for spying in Britain. It’s an extraordinary tale in itself, featuring deceptions as implausible as a secret printing press hidden inside an old piano, and mysterious war-time errands for Lord Kitchener.
Gordon was deported to Germany but reappears in England in the mid-1930s teaching German to officers at Special Branch. In 1940, he was detained at Her Majesty’s Pleasure under Defence Regulation 18b under ‘hostile associations” and possible affiliation with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. He was released in 1944 (see records HO 283/39 and also HO 45/25734 of the National Archives).
Fred Bower also claims to have been present at the murder of Australian MP Percy Brookfield in March 1921. An old friend of Grayson and Bower’s days in Liverpool, Brookfield had become a confidant and friend of Consul Simonoff. Although Official Police Reports cite no political motivation behind the murder, Bower claims the killer, Russian émigré, Koorman Tomayoff had pictures of Lenin, Trotsky and Brookfield in his room. Simonoff subsequently married a New Zealander.
In 1914, Bower told British reporters that it was he and not Tom Mann who had written the infamous, ‘Don’t Shoot: An Open Letter To British Soldiers’ pamphlet encouraging British troops to mutiny. Mann had been jailed in 1912 but released after seven weeks of public pressure. When Mann left for South Africa both Bower and Grayson were with him at the station when his train left Waterloo for the boat train to Southampton. According to Mann’s memoirs, there is some indication that Victor Grayson was very nearly arrested alongside Tom Mann (Tom Mann’s Memoirs, MacGibbon & Kee, 1967)
The Trafalgar demonstration wasn’t the only time Grayson showed he was prepared to endorse the use of violence either. Shortly after his election to Parliament he told striking dock workers in Belfast that if they were attacked by soldiers or police they had every right to fight back using any means possible, including ‘broken bottles’. His old Labour associate from Liverpool, Jim Larkin, now leader of the Belfast Dockers Union, had managed to persuade 600 of the 1000-strong Royal Irish Constabulary to mutiny in support of the workers. Like Glasgow’s John Maclean, the revolutionary Socialist subsequently appointed by Bolshevik Consul in Scotland, Grayson had been invited to Belfast to witness first-hand the challenges faced by the striking workers.
On his arrival in Belfast on August 8th, Larkin accompanied Grayson around streets ‘possessed by military’ looking for a few ‘bones to split’. Grayson told the Sheffield Daily Telegraph that at every street corner a ‘gang of them with fixed bayonets’ waited eagerly for the signal to charge.’ He had gone to some of the poorest areas of the city and saw the ‘wretched people huddled together’. Later in the evening, Grayson addressed a meeting of carters and dockers, and laid down a challenge; either the military withdrew or the workers would be forced to ‘do their duty’ and respond. And according to the Londonderry Sentinel he ‘did not care how soon one side or the other made a start’.
A few days later on August 11th, within hours of Grayson of declaring that if the workers ‘had not the shrapnel to shoot, they had broken bottles to throw’, those same British troops shot dead two of the rioters and injured scores of others as the panicking authorities imposed in a state of martial law. If Grayson could incite striking workers to sedition he’d have no trouble in inciting troops if the situation arose and the booze took its usual unruly hold of his judgement. 4
But there’s a question we need to ask: could replicating the social conditions in which revolution took root in Russia engender the same kind of change in Britain? I’m not so sure. Equipping men with guns and training them in combat may have changed the shape and scale of organized crime in the UK and US dramatically (especially when paired with prohibition), but there was little hope of it ever transforming your average milkman into a dangerous revolutionary. And if Victor Grayson thought it would, then his one-bottle-of-whisky-a-day drinking habit had clearly got the better of him.
In spite of Lenin’s opinion that the working class people of Great Britain were too ignorant and too disorganised for revolution, Special Branch took a more cautious view. In his 1922 book, Queer People, Sir Basil Thomson writes:
“Bolshevism has been described as an infectious disease rather than a political creed, a disease which spreads like a cancer, eating away the tissue of society until the whole mass disintegrates and falls into corruption … I noticed the same symptoms in a young policeman who was shouting, ‘Let’s have a revolution!’ during the police strike.”
Thomson is only too aware of what a surfeit of ‘Bolshevik oratory’ and ‘bad alcohol’ can lead to, and it’s worth noting that on Grayson’s return from Étaples in January 1918, Thomson is believed to have tasked Maundy Gregory, an associate of Grayson, to keep a watchful eye on his movements. Victor Grayson, according to Thomson, was a ‘dangerous Communist revolutionary’ who would, before too long, either link up ‘with the Sinn Feiners or the Reds’.
Disturbances among New Zealand troops carried on well into 1920, when many of the men still at Bulford (known to New Zealand Army as the Anzac Camp and unofficially as ‘Sling’) felt they should be going home. 14 of the New Zealand conscientious objectors, including Mark Briggs and Archibald Baxter, had been housed at this camp, and in 1919, significant numbers of the 4,600 of the New Zealand troops still awaiting demobilisation at Sling Camp rioted. That so-called ‘Monocled Mutineer’, Percy Toplis turned up at the camp that same year could only ever only add to the intrigue, and the myths.
Timeline & related articles
The timeline is not an exhaustive account by any means and is clearly too narrow in scope for any serious analysis, but it’s hoped that it might provoke discussion at the very least. Or, as is more likely, further discussion may take Victor’s lead and simply vanish.
Grayson Timeline and Biography:
https://pixelsurgery.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/grayson-timeline/
https://www.monocledmutineer.co.uk/hilda-porter-georgian-house
1 The British Lion, 20, July 1927.
2 This is no idle use of the word ‘spark’. It’s probably a reference to the pharse “Из искры возгорится пламя” (“From a spark a fire will flare up”) which became the motto of the revolutionary paper, Iskra, and for many years printed in London. The line was dedicated to revolutionary martyrs, the Decembrists in prison. The martyrs, incidentally, were composed of military personnel. Were the riots staged as a tribute to previous revolutions and intended to register at a symbolic as much as practical level?
3 Glasgow shipbuilders, John Brown Shipbuilding, John Elder & Company,Beardmore, Maxim and Vickers Ltd were among a handful of British companies awarded contracts at the Black Sea Shipyard as part of a deal with the Imperial Russian Navy. Several were to provide technical assistance in the Nikolayev shipyard that Cullen mentions in his report. In his article for the Glasgow Weekly Herald Cullen mispells Nikolayev, ‘Nikolif’.
4 Grayson responded to criticism of his ‘bottle speech’ by saying that bottles had been thrown at troops before he made his remarks in Huddersfield on August 4th. In fairness, it’s a grey area and Victor subsequently admitted that he had lost no shortage of sleep over both the ambiguity of his phrasing and the timing of his remark (his remarks had been made on Sunday August 11th and that night Belfast’s striking dockers had fought back with broken bottles, but bottles had also been thrown the previous evening). As a result of the violence two unarmed Catholic supporters of the dockers (Charles Mullan and Margaret Lennon) were shot dead. Grayson’s subsequent lecture of ‘The Destiny of the Mob’ scheduled to be held at the Corn Exchange was duly refused. One of his last words on the subject was this: “there was never a strike were people were killed by broken bottles, but in Belfast, strike people were killed by bayonet and shot. People did not ask questions about the bayonet and shot.” (Gloucester Citizen 07 December 1907).
5 Curiously, Labour’s John Beckett, who claims his father lost substantial sums of money in an earlier scheme by Bottomley, says he was one of the few people who saw Victor Grayson alive shortly before he disappeared. The latter claim was made by John’s son Francis Beckett (co-author of Blair Inc) in his 2016 book, A Fascist in the Family (Routledge). In 1939 John Beckett was interned under Defence Regulation 18b for his pro-Nazi activities as part of the British Union of Fascists.
6 Lydia was also a very good friend of intrepid Swiss explorer, Isabelle Eberhardt who embarked on her own legendary fight against the empire. Isabelle’s mother, Nathalie Moerder was a Russian aristocrat and her father, Alexandre Trophimowsky was a renowned Bakunin anarchist. In addition to being an explorer, Lydia also worked as a correspondent for French newspaper, Le Figaro in St. Petersburg. Lydia married Nikolai Mikhailovitch Paschkoff, son of respected General Vasily Paschkoff, a close friend of Tsar, Alexander II. The Paschkoff family held mineral and agricultural estates later purchased by Manchester MP, Alexander Brogden and his company, The Russia Copper Company. The Paschkoff family became enormously popular among Russian peasants and were major proponents of Russian Evangelism, which subsequently became known as Paschkovism. The movement spread and links were developed with the Baptists and nonconformity groups in Britain. After the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 many Paschovite leaders were exiled in Siberia as subversives. Paschkoff’s nephew was Vladimir Chertkov, a close friend of Leo Tolstoy, who briefly sought exile at Tuckton House in Bournemouth, England. Grayson’s father in law, John Webster Nightingale, a prominent nonconformity figure himself, also lived in Bournemouth during this period. The progress of Russia had been seen as incompatible with Tsarist rule among Socialists and Capitalists alike. Social agitation began to embrace not just the revolutionary but the Conservative. Chertkov’s Tuckton House became a key location in the development of Soviet espionage networks in post-October 1917 Britain. According to historian, David Burke, visitors to the house included Peter Kropotkin, Gertrude Stedman and Jacob Peters who later became a high ranking member of Lenin’s ‘Cheka’ (security forces). Stedman’s daughter, Melita Norwood would go on to become one of the most successful Soviet agents in Britain and reported to be even more highly valued than the Cambridge Five. Manchester University’s David Briggs claims that his grandfather, Charles Lionel Briggs introduced Grayson to Chertkov (Tchertkoff) at Tuckton House were he became a tutor and mentor to Chertkov’s son, Dima. In one of his wartime letters, Briggs says of his friendship with Grayson, “We had great times together at Tuckton” (A Quiet Lion and his Battlemaid, David Briggs)
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