THE GREAT FIGHT IN FLEET STREET.
Until three o'clock on Monday afternoon there was no new disturbance,
no reassembling of the rioters; but soon after that hour it was clear
that something was astir. This time there was no marching in companies,
but the vast crowds that were quietly but systematically pouring
cityward from every quarter were clearly acting under instructions, and
according to some method of organisation. So far as I could see, it was
towards the open space in front of the Royal Exchange that the crowd
was converging, and thither I allowed myself to be carried with the
stream.
On this occasion it was quite clear that the mob was neither sanguine
nor confident, and for this there were reasons. The first was the
absence of the Dumpling. That he was to have met his lieutenants at
a certain hour, and at a certain place, that morning, but for some
unaccountable cause had failed to keep the appointment, was already
common knowledge. When he was present, that heterogeneous gathering
seemed organic. It acted not as a mob, but as one man; and one man,
in a sense, it was, since each contingent--come as it might from
Bermondsey, from Poplar, or from Canning Town--seemed like one of
the limbs of a human body, of which this man, the Dumpling, was the
controlling brain.
By his absence, however, this body politic seemed dismembered. The
magnetism exercised by his single personality was extraordinary. So
long as he was known to be at their head, the rioters followed their
appointed leaders, his lieutenants, with fearless confidence, moving
and acting in concert, not like an undisciplined mob, but like drilled
troops, trained and controlled by a master of men. Now, in a single
day, the whole movement seemed, in his absence, to have gone to pieces.
Another reason for the nervousness of the rioters was the mysterious
action, or inaction, of the military and the police. No attempt
either to prevent the people from assembling, or to disperse
them when assembled, had been made; and no blue or red-coated
myrmidons of the civil or of the military forces had attempted to
bar the thoroughfares, or to offer opposition of any sort to the
revolutionaries. With the Dumpling present, as their leader and head,
the absence of the police and of the military would have been counted
by the mob as a signal proof of the completeness of their victory. With
him away, it seemed ominous of ambush, pregnant with evil; and when
the Dumpling's second in command announced that he intended, in their
leader's absence, to carry out the plan of campaign as arranged by
their leader himself, and gave the order for the riflemen to form up,
and for the rank and file to fall in behind, the order, though obeyed,
was obeyed spiritlessly and unwillingly.
Then came the news that troops, mounted and on foot, were approaching
by way of Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside; and as the trees of a
great forest sway and waver before the coming of a storm, so over the
rebel army there passed a sudden tremor, as if the members of that army
were undecided whether to fight or to fly.
Sharp and clear, however, came the words of command, and sullenly the
legions of Labour prepared for the fray. Once again victory rested
with the revolutionaries. Nor was I surprised, for to me, at that stage
of the struggle, it seemed as if the police and the soldiers had bided
their time too long. An armed mob gathered together in the space known
as the Poultry, and holding all the approaches, would be difficult
to dislodge, presenting as it did a solid phalanx to any opposing
force which, owing to the comparative narrowness of the converging
thoroughfares, would of necessity be compelled to present a somewhat
narrow front to the rebel army. Queen Victoria Street, it is true,
being broad, would allow the soldiery to come on in companies, forming
an attacking line of formidable length. This, however, the Dumpling's
second in command had realised, for, immediately facing Queen Victoria
Street, he placed the pick of the rebel riflemen. No sooner did the
troop of cavalry, which was advancing upon the rioters, come within
range, than the barrels of the riflemen, and the saddles of the front
row of soldiery, were almost simultaneously emptied. After each volley
Queen Victoria Street was for a moment blocked by a line of dead
and dying soldiers and horses, but no sooner was the opposing line
re-formed, and ready to come on, before another volley from the rebel
riflemen emptied every saddle again.
In Queen Victoria Street, at least, the victory of the rebels was
complete, and what happened to the troops in Queen Victoria Street,
happened upon a smaller scale to the police and to the military who
attempted to disperse the mob by making charges by way of Cheapside,
Lombard Street, and the other narrower approaches. Recognising the
hopelessness of the position, and anxious to husband their strength for
the final struggle, the officers in command of the police and of the
military gave the word for withdrawal. In this withdrawal the mob saw
a tacit admission of defeat, and became more reckless, more eager for
destruction, more difficult of organisation. Freed from the restraining
and controlling influence of the Dumpling, it swept along Cheapside to
St. Paul's and down Ludgate Hill, no longer an organised rising with
a definite end in view, but a rabble of reckless ruffians, ready and
greedy to rob, to rape, to wreck, and to destroy.
At Ludgate Circus it divided, part going westward by way of Fleet
Street and the Strand, another part by way of St. Bride Street, and
yet another by the Embankment.
Then it was that the police and the soldiery showed how prepared
they were for the outbreak, how admirable was their organisation.
Suddenly down St. Bride Street, and moving by some inside and unseen
motor-power, there appeared a procession of engines of war, the like
of which none of the rioters had ever seen. These engines had been
constructed secretly and in sections so as to be ready to put together
and run out at a moment's notice, and had been concealed at the various
fire stations till such time as they should be required.
Imagine, if you can, that a square-built fort had suddenly detached
itself at the corners, so as to break up into four armed sections, each
of which presented on either side an iron-plated front, almost as steep
and almost as high as the side of a house, with gun-mouths grinning
out at regular intervals. Armoured trains the rioters had heard of,
but armoured sides of an iron-built house, moving, each complete in
itself, upon unseen wheels in a long procession down St. Bride Street,
was something entirely new. For an instant the mob surged back, awed
and wondering. Then, like an angry sea leaping against a breakwater, it
flung itself forward upon the first of these new and advancing engines
of war.
But for the tragic loss of life, the impotency of the rush would have
been ludicrous. It was as if a child, by the throwing of a handful of
sand, had tried to stop a motor-car going at the top of its speed. The
huge instrument of war not only did not swerve an inch from its course,
but, so great was its weight, that it passed, without so much as a
bump, over the bodies of those who fell beneath it, scrunching bone and
limb into shapeless and quivering pulp.
Then from either side belched sheets of flame, and, for the first time
since the rising, the mob fell back and away, leaving the monsters of
war-mechanism to accomplish their manœuvres unhindered.
On the four moving walls filed, like a troop of ambling elephants. The
foremost wheeled heavily round the obelisk in the centre of Ludgate
Circus till it blocked London southwards by barricading off New Bridge
Street and Blackfriars Bridge. The second steered round the obelisk
westward, till it faced and closed Fleet Street. The third stretched
itself eastward across the foot of Ludgate Hill; and the fourth,
by spanning the road where St. Bride Street and Farringdon Street
bifurcate, thus closed those roads to all comers.
The four walls now formed a huge square, and as soldiers "dress" the
line and close up in a drill yard, so at a given signal--a shrill
whistle twice repeated--the four sides edged closer and closer
together, till, if I may use such a term, they touched elbows. Then
came a second signal--the same whistle three times repeated--and now
there were the clink and rattle of bolts and chains. The four walls
were locked impregnably together, thus forming a fort, facing London on
every side. No sooner was the locking accomplished than, upon the walls
of the fort, hundreds of policemen swarmed to complete the closing up
of the streets. At a word of command from above, iron barriers shot out
to the required lengths from the four corners of the fort below, and
when it was impossible to adjust these barriers with sufficient nicety,
absolutely to close every opening, huge sacks of sand were hurled from
the walls, so that in less than five minutes the army of rioters was
divided up into four separate wings, each for the moment effectually
cut off from holding any communication with any of the others.
The great body of the rebel army and the riflemen were, however, now
west of Ludgate Circus, and passing up Fleet Street and the Strand; so
that the closing of the ways seemed for a few minutes to have come too
late.
But the authorities who had anticipated this outbreak, and prepared
for it by constructing these street-barricading forts, knew what they
were about. From mouth to mouth of the rebels, passing up Fleet Street,
Strandwards, the word was repeated that similar forts now blocked
advance at Charing Cross.
Panic-stricken, the mob surged down the side streets to the Embankment,
only to find that similar barriers had been erected at either end.
Then the forts at every point opened fire, and with terrible results.
The scenes that followed I do not wish further to describe, except to
say that, for the present at least, the rout of the leaderless rebels
was complete, and only a shattered section escaped to press on to
Buckingham Palace, the point to which all contingents of that great
army had been instructed to converge.