THE DARK WINTER
The autumn of 1918 had proved unusually mild. It was said that many of
the migratory birds delayed their exodus for weeks beyond their normal
times, and in sheltered gardens and hedgerows in the south of England
flowers and fruit were making an untimely show; but about midday on the
24th of November it began to grow dark, and, without any indication of
fog, it grew darker, until the greater part of England and Wales was
plunged into a nocturnal gloom. As there was a marked fall in the
temperature, men looked up to the clouds and predicted snow, but they
were wrong. Had it snowed it might have been the White Winter of 1918,
for that night the frost began, and the 24th of November had already
become an ill-omened date to usher in a frost. It did not belie its
character. The next day broke clear but bitter, and those who read
newspapers learned with curious interest that during the night the
seven-tailed comet of 1744 had been observed by several astronomers, to
the great confusion of their science, for its appearance was premature
by a round hundred thousand years. The phenomenon afterwards grew into a
portent to the vulgar mind, for that was the beginning of the great
frost that lasted seven weeks without an intermission.
Outside certain limits, life was proceeding very much as before. The
condition of the upper classes was not materially different from what it
had been before the policy of retaliation had been declared. The
Personal Property Tax had not been proceeded with, and the Minimum Wage
Bill had been dropped for the time. There were diplomatic explanations;
the real reason was that the Cabinet was too sharply divided over the
expediency of anything in those days to make the passing of important
measures practicable. While none had the courage to go to an extreme
either in aggression or in conciliation, there was a multitude of
counsel vehemently wrangling over the wisdom of little concessions and
little aggressions.
In London the great increase in the number of unemployed began to be
observable in the early autumn. The obsolete "marches of unemployed"
were revived, but, as might have been foreseen, except among the poor
themselves, they met with no financial encouragement. Even the poor were
becoming careful of their pence. They saw what the winter must mean, for
every one knew of a score of deserving cases around his own door, and it
was commonly reported that the Government contemplated reducing the
Unemployed Grant to two-thirds its normal basis before the year was out.
That was the Cabinet's idea for "breaking it gently." So, meeting with
no response in the suburbs, the City, or the West End, the processions
groaned occasionally, broke a few windows, enhanced the bitter feeling
existing against their class by frightening more than a few ladies, and
were finally kept in check by the special constabulary raised in the
suburbs, the City, and the West End. Finding so little profit for their
exertions, they abandoned their indiscriminate peregrinations, and took
to demonstrating before St Stephen's and to hooting outside the houses
of Cabinet Ministers until the processions and meetings were disallowed.
There was no public charity that winter, either organised or
spontaneous, for the benefit of the working-class poor. The conditions
of labour would have warranted a Mansion House Fund being opened in
September, but no one suggested it, and no one would have contributed to
it. Abroad it was generally recognised that England was involved in
civil war to which it behoved them to act as neutrals. The Socialists in
Belgium collected and despatched the sum of L327, 14s. 6d. for the
relief of their "persecuted confraternity in England," but as the pomp
and circumstances attending the inauguration of the Fund had led their
persecuted confraternity in England to expect at least a quarter of a
million sterling, some intemperate remarks greeted the consummation of
the effort, and it was not repeated.
To those who did not look very deeply into the situation it appeared
that a long, hard winter must operate against the interests of the
League. Their opponents would burn more coal. The Government, indeed,
issued an appeal asking them to do so, and thus to relieve the tension
in the provinces. The response was not promising. The Government was, in
effect, told to mind its own business, and particularly that detail of
its business which consisted in the guarantee of a full and undocked
living wage to every worker in or out of work. The contention so far had
been that with the surfeit, coal would be so cheap that even the poorest
could burn it unstintingly. But soon a new and rather terrible
development grew out of the complex situation. Coal became dear, not
only dear in the ordinary sense of the word--winter prices--but very,
very dear. The simple truth was that a disorganised industry always
moves on abnormal lines, and coal was a routed, a shattered, industry.
There was no oil to be had by any but members of the League; in some
places there was no gas to be had, for many of the small gas companies,
and some of the large ones, had found it impossible to continue amidst
the dislocation of their trade, and the cheapest coal was being retailed
in the streets of London at two shillings the hundred-weight. The
Government had left oil contraband after the discovery of the League's
secret store down the quiet country lane, for they recognised that to
remove the embargo immediately would kill them with ridicule. They
promised themselves that the freedom of commerce should be restored at
the first convenient opportunity. In the meanwhile they decided to do as
they had done in other matters: they bravely ignored the fact that the
League members were any better off than any one else, and declined to
believe the evidence that any store existed.
That was the state of affairs before the winter set in, and in London
alone. The Capital was feeling some of the remoter effects of the blow,
but from the provinces, from the actual battle-fields, there came grim
stories. Northumberland, which had been loth to accept the Eight Hours
Bill, now traced the whole of the trouble to that head, and declared
that the only hope was for the Government to make a complete surrender
to the Unity League, on the one condition that it restored a normal
demand for coal both at home and abroad. Durham, on the contrary, held
that it was necessary for the Government to crush or wear out the
League. In both counties there had been fierce conflict between the
rival factions, and blood had been freely shed. After a single day's
rioting at Newcastle and Gateshead seventeen dead bodies had been
collected by the ambulances.
The "Beaconmen" in Glamorgan were setting fire to the pits themselves in
a spirit of fanaticism. In one instance a fire had spread beyond the
intended limits, and an explosion, in which three score of their
unfortunate fellow-workmen perished, had been the net result. The
Midlands were the least disturbed, and even there Walsall had seen a
mass meeting at which thirty thousand colliers and other affected
workmen had called insistently with threats upon the Government, in
pathetic ignorance of the Treasury's plight, to purchase the nation's
coal pits at once, and resume full time at all of them, as the only
means of averting a national calamity.
And all this had been taking place in the mild autumn, while the
Government was still paying out sufficient relief funds to ensure that
actual starvation should not touch any one, long before it had been
driven to take the country into its confidence. The spectre of cold and
hunger had not yet been raised to goad the men to madness; so far they
regarded existence at least as assured, and the question that was
stirring them to rebellion was not the fundamental one of the "right to
live," but the almost academic issue of the right to live apart from the
natural vicissitudes of life.
The Government had other troubles on hand. The two principal causes for
anxiety among these, if not actually of their own hatching, had
certainly sprung from a common stock.
The Parliament sitting at College Green deemed the moment opportune for
issuing a Declaration of Independence and proclaiming a republic. Three
years before, all Irishmen had been withdrawn from the British army and
navy on the receipt of Dublin's firmly-worded note to the effect that
since the granting of extended Home Rule, Irishmen came within the
sphere of the Foreign Enlistment Act. These men formed the nucleus of a
very useful army with which Ireland thought it would be practicable to
hold out in the interior until foreign intervention came to its aid.
Possibly England thought so too, for Mr Strummery's Ministry contented
itself with issuing what its members described as a firm and dignified
protest. Closely examined, it was discoverable that the dignified
portion was a lengthy recapitulation of ancient history; the firm
portion a record of Dublin's demands since Home Rule had been conceded,
while the essential part of the communication informed the new republic
that its actions were not what his Majesty's Ministers had expected of
it, and that they would certainly reserve the right of taking the matter
in hand at some future time more suitable to themselves.
The other harassment was that Leicester lay at the mercy of an epidemic
of small-pox which threatened to become historic in the annals of the
scourge. In the second month the average daily number of deaths had
risen to 120, and there was no sign of a decrease. In the autumn it was
hoped that the winter would kill the disease; in the winter it was
anticipated that it would die out naturally under the influence of the
spring sunshine. The situation affected Mr Chadwing more closely than
any of his colleagues, for Leicester had the honour of returning the
Chancellor of the Exchequer as one of its members. Under normal
conditions Mr Chadwing made a practice of visiting his constituency and
addressing a meeting every few weeks, but during the six months that the
epidemic raged he found himself unable to leave London. His attitude was
perfectly consistent, in spite of the hard things that some of his
supporters said of him in his absence: like the majority of his
constituents, he had a Conscientious Objection to vaccination, but he
also had an even stronger conscientious objection to encountering
small-pox infection.
The 24th of November ushered in a new phase of the strife. It marked the
beginning of the Dark Winter. Early in December the newspapers began to
draw comparisons between the weather then prevailing and the hard
winters on record. At that date it was noticeable how many
rustic-looking vagrants were to be seen walking aimlessly about the
streets of London. The unemployed from the country were beginning to
flock in for the mere sense of warmth. The British Museum, St. Paul's
Cathedral, the free libraries, and other places where it was possible to
escape from the dreadful rigour of the streets, were crowded by day. At
night long _queues_ of miserable creatures haunted the grids of
restaurants, the sheltered sides of theatres, the windows of printing
houses, and any spot where a little warmth exhaled. On the nights of the
4th, the 5th, and the 6th of December the thermometer on Primrose Hill
registered 3 deg. below zero. On the 7th pheasants were observed feeding
among the pigeons in the main street of Highgate, and from that time
onwards wild birds of the rarer kinds were no unusual sight in the
London parks and about the public buildings. In the country it was
remarked that the small birds had begun to disappear, and the curious
might read any morning of frozen goldfinches being picked up in
Camberwell, larks about Victoria Park, and starlings, robins,
blackbirds, and such like fry everywhere. By this time dairymen had
discovered that it was impossible to deliver milk unless they carried a
brazier of live charcoal on their cart or hand-truck. Local
correspondents in the provinces had ceased to report ordinary cases of
death from cold and exposure; there were cases in the streets of London
every night.
Early in December Sir John Hampden was approached unofficially by a few
members of Parliament, including one or two of minor official rank, to
learn his "terms." The suggestions were tentative on both sides, and
nothing was stated definitely. But out of the circumlocution it might be
inferred that he expressed his willingness to rescind the boycott, and
to devote five million pounds to public relief at once, in return for
certain modifications of the franchise and an immediate dissolution.
Nothing came of the movement, and during the first week of December the
Government sent round to the post-offices and to all the Crown tax
collectors notices that the licences ordinarily falling due on the 1st
of January must be taken out on or before the 15th of the current month,
and the King's Taxes similarly collected in advance. The League did not
make any open comment on this departure, but every member merely ignored
it, and when the 16th of December was reached, it devolved upon the
officers of the Crown to enforce the payment by legal process. In the
language of another age, the Government was faced by five million
"Passive Resisters." It soon became apparent that instead of getting in
the taxes a fortnight before their time, the greater part of the revenue
from that source would be delayed at least a month later than usual.
On the 20th of December one million and three-quarters State-supported
unemployed of various grades presented themselves at the appointed
trades unions committee rooms, workhouse offices, employment bureaux,
Treasury depots, from which the Fund was administered, to receive their
weekly "wage." As they passed in they were confronted by a formal notice
to the effect that the disbursement was then reduced to half its usual
amount. As they passed out they came upon another formal notice to the
effect that after the following week the Grant would be "temporarily
suspended." Possibly that also embodied an idea of "breaking it gently."
The cry of surprise, rage, and terrified foreboding that rose from every
town and village of the land when the direful news was at length
understood, can never be described. Its echoes were destined to roll
through the pages of English history for many a generation. The
immediate result was that rioting broke out in practically all parts of
the country except the purely agricultural. The people who had been
promised a perpetual life of milk and honey had "murmured" when they
were offered bread and water. Now there seemed every prospect of the
water reaching them as ice, and the bread-board being empty, and their
"murmuring" took a sharper edge. In some places there were absolute
stampedes of reason. In justice it has to be remembered that by this
time the most pitiless winter of modern times had been heaping misery on
misery for a month, that the chance of finding work or relief was
recognised to be the forlornest hope, and that very, very few had a
reserve of any kind.
The indiscriminate disturbances of the 20th of December were easily
suppressed. A people that has been free for generations loses the gift
for successful rioting in the face of armed discipline, even of the most
inadequate strength. But for constitutional purposes the body of one
dragooned rioter in England was worth more than a whole "Vladimir's
battue" east of the Baltic.
On the 27th of December the certified unemployed drew their diminished
pittance for the last time. They left the buildings in many places with
the significant threat that they would return that day week, and if
there was nothing for them would "warm their hands" there at the least.
There was renewed rioting that day also. The forces of law and order had
been strengthened; the rioters appeared to have been better organised.
In one or two towns the rioting began to approach the Continental level.
Bolton was said to have proved itself far from amateurish, and Nuneaton
was spoken of as being distinctly promising. At the end of that day
public buildings had to be requisitioned in several places to lay out
the spoils of victory and defeat.
Two days later every newspaper contained an "open letter" from Sir John
Hampden to the Government, in which he unconditionally offered them, on
behalf of the Unity League and in the name of humanity, sufficient funds
to pay the half grant for four weeks longer. It was a humane offer, but
its proper name was strategy. It embarrassed the Government to decide
whether to accept or decline. It embarrassed them if they accepted, and
if they declined it embarrassed them most of all. They declined; or, to
be precise, they ignored the offer.
By this time England might be said to be under famine. London, in its
ice-bound straits, began curiously to assume the appearance of a
mediaeval city. By night one might meet grotesquely clad bands of
revellers returning from some ice carnival (for the Thames had long been
frozen from the Tower to Gravesend) by the light of lanterns and torches
which they carried. None but those who had nothing to lose ventured out
into the streets at night except by companies. Thieves and bludgeoners
lurked in every archway, and arrests were seldom made; beggars
importuned with every wile and in every tone, and new fantastic creeds
and extravagant new parties sent out their perfervid disciples to
proclaim Utopias at every corner.
To add to the terror of the night there suddenly sprang into prominence
the bands of "Running Madmen" who swept through the streets like fallen
leaves in an autumn gale. Barefooted, gaunt, and wildly dressed in rags,
they broke upon the astonished wayfarer's sight, and passed out again
into the gloom before he could ask himself what strange manner of men
they were. Never alone, seldom exceeding a score in any band, they ran
keenly as though with some purposeful end in view, for the most part
silently, but now and then startling the quiet night with an
inarticulate wail or a cry of woe or lamentation, but they turned from
street to street in aimless intricacy, and sought no definite goal. They
were never seen by day, and whence they came or where they had their
homes none could say, but the steady increase in the number of their
bands showed that they were undoubtedly the victims of a contagious
mania such as those that have appeared in the past from time to time.
Almost as ragged and unkempt was the army that by day marched under the
standard of Brother Ambrose towards the sinless New Jerusalem. Reading
the abundant signs all round with an inspired and fatalistic eye,
Ambrose uncompromisingly announced that all the portents of the
Millennium were now fulfilled, and that the reign of temporal power on
earth was at an end. Each day his eloquence mounted to a wilder flight,
each day he dreamed new dreams and saw fresh visions, and promised to
his followers more definitely the spoil of victory, and parcelled out
the smiling, fruitful land. Drawn by every human passion, recruits
poured into his ranks, and when he marched in tattered state to mark the
boundaries of the impending Golden City, the Legions of the Chosen
rolled not in their thousands, but in their tens of thousands, singing
hymns and interspersing ribaldry.
A very different spectacle was afforded by the bands of the Gilded Youth
which by day patrolled the approaches to houses of the better class,
wherever smoke had been seen issuing from the chimneys, and by night
with equal order and thoroughness turned out the public gas lamps in the
streets, until many of the authorities at last gave up the lighting of
the lamps as a useless formality.
It was impossible for the occupants of a house that had incurred their
enmity to have them removed by force, or to maintain an attitude of
unconcern in the face of their demonstration, yet everything they did
came under the term of "Peaceful Picketing" within the provisions of the
Act, and an attempt to fix responsibility upon the Unity League for the
high-handed action of its agents in a few cases where the Gilded Youth
had gone beyond their powers, failed ignominiously through the precedent
afforded by the final settlement of the celebrated Tawe Valley Case.
In the provinces the rioters were burning coal, burning coal-pits,
smashing machinery and destroying property indiscriminately, blind to
the fact that some of the immediate effects were falling on their
fellow-workmen, and that most of the ultimate effects would fall upon
themselves. In London and elsewhere the bands of the Gilded Youth were
going quietly and systematically about their daily work, "peacefully"
terrorising house-holders into submission, and carefully turning out the
public lamps at night as soon as they were lit. To the reflective mind
it was rather a dreadful power that the time had called into being: an
educated mob that "rioted peacefully" and did nothing at all that was
detrimental to its own interest.
Each morning people assured one another that so unparalleled a frost
could last no longer, but each night the air seemed to be whetted to a
keener edge, and each day there came fresh evidences of its power. Early
in January it was computed that all the small birds that had not taken
refuge in towns were dead, partly through the cold itself, but equally
by starvation, for the ground yielded them nothing, and the trees and
shrubs upon which they had been able to rely for food in former winters
had long since perished. There were none but insignificant hollies to be
seen in English gardens for the next generation, and in exposed
situations forest trees and even oaks were split down to the ground.
All this time there was very little destructive rioting going on in
London on any organised scale, but every night breadths of wood pavement
were torn up by the homeless vagrants, who were now allowed to herd
where they could, and great fires set burning at which the police warmed
themselves and mingled supinely with the crowd. By day the police went
in pairs, by night they patrolled in companies of five. For the
emergency of serious rioting the military were always kept in readiness;
against the more ordinary depredations on private property the owners
were practically left to defend themselves. In those dark weeks watch
duty became one of the regular occupations among the staff of every
London business, and short shrift was given to intruders. Inquests went
like marriages in busy churches at Easter-tide--in batches, and the
morning cart that picked up the frozen dead had only one compartment.
The time was past when the effects of the vast disorganisation could be
localised. Every trade and profession, every trivial and obscure
calling, and every insignificant little offshoot of that great trunk
called Commerce was involved in depression; it was not too much to say
that every individual in the land was feeling some ill effect. Frantic
legislation had begun it ten years before; the coal war had brought it
to a climax, and the grip of the long, hard winter had pressed like a
hostile hand upon the land.
It had resolved itself into a war of endurance. Coal was no longer the
pivot; it was money, immediate money with which to buy bread at the
bakers' shops, where they carried on their trade with the shutters up
and loaded weapons laid out in the upper rooms.
Not the least curious feature of the struggle was the marked
disinclination of the starving populace to pillage or bloodshed.
Doubtless they saw that whatever they might individually profit by a
reign of terror, their cause and party had nothing to gain from it. Such
an outburst must inevitably react unfavourably upon the Government of
the day, and it was _their_ party then in power. But they had not the
mob instinct in them; they were not composed of the ordinary mob
element. In the bulk they were neither criminals nor hooligans, but
matter-of-fact, disillusionised working men, and the instincts of their
class have ever been steady and law-abiding. In Cheapside a gang of
professional thieves blew out the iron shutter of a jeweller's shop with
dynamite, and securing a valuable haul of jewellery in the momentary
confusion, sought to hide themselves among the mob. Far from entering
into their aspirations, the mob promptly conveyed them to the nearest
police station, and returned to the owner the valuable articles that had
been scattered about the street. The climax of the incident was reached
by half a dozen of the most stalwart unemployed gladly accepting a few
shillings each to guard the broken window until the shutter was
repaired.
At the collieries, the mills, the workshops, and the seats of labour
there were outrages against property, but away from the immediate
centres there was neither cupidity nor resentment. Whenever disturbances
of the kind took place they were invariably in pursuit of food or
warmth. The men were dispirited, and by this time they regarded their
cause as lost. Their leaders, in and out of Parliament, were classed
either as incompetent generals in a war, or as traitors who had misled
the people. The people only asked them now to make the terms of
surrender so that they might live; and they did not hesitate to declare
roundly that the old times when they had had to look after themselves
more, and had not been body and soul at the disposal of semi-political
Unions, were preferable on the whole.
The position of the Cabinet was daily growing more critical. Its chiefs
were execrated and insulted whenever they were seen. All the approaches
to the House were held by military guards, and the members reached its
gates singly, and almost by stealth. Every day placards, written and
printed, were found displayed in public places, calling on the
Government that had no money to let in one that had. "You thought more
of your position than of our needs when Hampden offered us help," ran
one that Mr Strummery found nailed to his front door. "You have always
thought more of your positions than of our needs. You have used our
needs to raise yourselves to those positions. Now, since you no longer
represent the wishes of the People, give way to others."
The delay of the Government in throwing up an utterly untenable position
was inexplicable to most people. Many said that the reason was that
Hampden refused to take office under the existing franchise, and no one
but Hampden could form an administration in that crisis that could hope
to live for a day. Whatever the reason might be, it was obvious that the
Government was drifting towards a national tragedy that would be
stupendous, for in less than a month's time, it was agreed on all hands,
the daily tale of starved and famished dead would have reached its
thousands.
Still the Government hung on, backed in sullen submission by its
automatic majority. Changes in the Cabinet were of almost daily record,
but the half dozen men of prominence remained. Cecil Brown was the last
of the old minor men to be dropped. A dog trainer, who had taken up
politics, succeeded him. "It is too late now," Cecil Brown was reported
to have said when he learned who was to be his successor. "They want
bread, not circuses!"