(William Morris; Robert Cunninghame Graham)
Bloody Sunday. Most often—before the film buffs’ recall of the 1971 John Schlesinger film Sunday Bloody Sunday, starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch and Murray Head—the phrase triggers memories of the Bogside area of Derry, 30 January 1972, when thirteen unarmed demonstrators were killed by British troops (a fourteenth died later), an event whose aftereffects are still very much with us.
But there was an earlier ‘Bloody Sunday’, 13 November 1887, when tens of thousands of protesters, in and around Trafalgar Square, were blocked—and columns of demonstrators broken up—by police, and troops. The politician John Burns and the writer and radical MP Robert Cunninghame Graham were among those beaten and imprisoned. It was, Fiona MacCarthy remarks, ‘the scene of the most ruthless display of establishment power that London has ever seen.’ There were more than 400 arrests and more than 200 marchers were treated in hospital, ‘only a fraction of the many people injured.’ A law copyist, Alfred Linnell, was killed, probably beneath the hooves of a police horse. William Morris, who had been present at ‘Bloody Sunday’, quickly produced a pamphlet, its cover by Walter Crane, sales of which went to the Linnell family. The funeral, another occasion for mass demonstration, was held on 18 December, the pall-bearers including Morris, Cunninghame Graham, the crusading journalist W. T. Stead and Annie Besant.[1]
(Working Class Movement Library:
https://www.wcml.org.uk/contents/creativity-and-culture/art/walter-crane/)
Here’s another socialist, half a century later, Naomi Mitchison, on a research trip to Edinburgh, 13 November 1941:
Going along Princes Street and up the Mount to St Giles, felt a queer kind of pride and anger; the lion flag was flying on some building, I could have kissed it. Walked into Parliament Hall, with its bloody awful stained glass—all the pictures are put away—and thought of James VI’s remark when young “There is ane hole in this Parliament” and suddenly felt the most passionate and disconcerting longing to be a member of the first Scots Parliament under the New Order, or maybe the Supreme Soviet of Scotland, working with the others all over Europe.’[2]
(Naomi Mitchison)
A hole in this Parliament rather than this Parliament in a hole. Those were the days, eh?
On one more 13 November, this one exactly one hundred years ago, an essay by a certain Ezra Pound: ‘Capital v. Labour is not the only conflict; there is also the endless conflict between the furnished and the half-furnished mind.’[3]
Notes
[1] Fiona MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), 567-572.
[2] Naomi Mitchison, Among You Taking Notes . . . The Wartime Diary of Naomi Mitchison, 1939-1945, edited by Dorothy Sheridan (London: Victor Gollancz, 1985), 169.
[3] Ezra Pound, ‘The Revolt of Intelligence. I’, New Age, XXVI, 2 (13 November, 1919), 22.
Reconstructionary Tales 