As the threat of May Day riots looms, John Mullan traces the chaging nature of a very British tradition
Special report: Mayday
Saturday April 28, 2001 The Guardian
As May Day approaches, warnings have grown louder about impending riots in the capital. Where will they be? Two years ago it was the City, last year Westminster and Whitehall. This year the rumours - fuelled by internet announcements by would-be protesters - point to that canyon of Mammon, Oxford Street. "Mayhem" (the favoured word in the popular press), it seems, is to be the order of the day. Stores are said to be hiring extra security staff; litter bins will be removed so that they cannot serve as missiles. Particular outlets that have been singled out for attention are Starbucks, Gap and, predictably, McDonald's. The idea of agitators giving prior notice of their intended targets might seem odd, but Britain has a long tradition of riots and, down the centuries, mobs have often made their intended targets clear in advance. Protesters have realised that the anticipation of a riot can be as disruptive as any actual assault on property, and riots are more often remembered for their targets than for their causes.
While the May Day protests are a relatively new phenomenon, they share many of the historical protocols of the British riot. The disturbances in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, for example, especially those directed against the enclosure of common land, frequently took place on traditional holidays. The rioters would throw down the fences erected to deny access to land on which they had once been allowed to graze their animals, demonstrate their contempt for the landowner (occasionally by surrounding his house or burning him in effigy) - and then would dutifully return to work the next day. Holidays were used for the brief expression of a long-nursed discontent. Nearly 500 years ago, on May 1 1517, riots were directed against the property of affluent foreign merchants and craftsmen plying their trades in London. These became known as the "Evil May Day" riots.
The idea of targeting buildings that stand for conspicuous consumption, too, is an old one. The peasants' revolt of 1381 saw ferocious disturbances in London, and what was called "luxury" was one of its targets. Various palaces and grand houses were attacked; Lambeth Palace, the home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, was sacked - not because he was head of the church, but because it was his seat of opulence. At the height of the riot, the Savoy Palace, the most magnificent private mansion in England, was systematically demolished. The Savoy was the huge riverside home of John of Gaunt, Richard II's uncle and the nation's power broker. Standing on what is now the Strand, it was famous for its owner's magnificent collection of furniture, tapestries, jewels and ornaments. The rioters, who blamed John of Gaunt for the introduction of the poll tax that had detonated the revolt, destroyed everything. What could not be smashed or burned was thrown into the river. Jewellery was pulverised with hammers, and it was said that one rioter found by his fellows to have kept a silver goblet for himself was killed for doing so.
Looting, however, has rarely been controlled so strictly by protesters. Before the 19th century, food riots, usually set off by price rises, often led to the looting of warehouses, and occasionally even of ships carrying food for export. Those who wished to mock the political radicals behind the so-called Pall Mall riots of 1886, which arose from a socialist demonstration against government policies, were quick to publicise the rioters' thefts from St James's vintners. These campaigners for a new social order, unable to resist the temptations on offer, had drunk the finest brandy from their cupped hands.
More recently, we have become familiar with the idea that, when property is attacked, rage can give way to acquisitiveness - even if the rioters have initially been infuriated by the acquisitiveness of others. Still vivid in the memory are the images of the Brixton riots of 1981. When police retreated, local shops were attacked and political symbolism was undermined as TV viewers watched rioters stumbling up Brixton Hill clutching 26-inch television sets.
Until the 20th century, the most frequent targets for urban agitators were prisons and places of religious worship. After the restoration of Charles II in 1660, "loyal" crowds attacked the meeting-houses of Quakers, who, although peace-loving, were associated with Cromwell's commonwealthmen.
In the so-called "Sacheverell riots" of 1710 and 1715 (named after the rioters' hero, a High Church preacher), the places of worship of Dissenters, such as Presbyterians, were attacked, some burned down. (These disturbances led to the passing of the Riot Act, the reading of which we still talk of.) In the Gordon riots of 1780 - London's longest-lasting and perhaps most terrifying riots - Catholic chapels in London and Bath were pulled down.
When the protesters in the peasants' revolt arrived in London after their march from Kent, they first broke open the two prisons in Southwark, King's Bench and Marshalsea, and let loose their captives. They then crossed the river and did the same to Fleet and Newgate. The latter was also famously stormed during the Gordon riotsestrictions placed on Catholics. Newgate, which had just been grandly rebuilt, bore the brunt of the rioters' fury.
The poet George Crabbe was an eyewitness to these events and "never saw anything so dreadful". He graphically described how the crowd tore holes in the prison's roof, from which captives appeared as silhouettes against the flames. The event is also commemorated in Dickens's imagining of the scene in his novel Barnaby Rudge. Dickens wrote that he progress of the escaping prisoners up Holborn "was proclaimed to those citizens who were shut up in their houses, by the rattling of their chains, which formed a dismal concert, and was heard in every direction, as though so many forges were at work".
Another riotous storming of a prison was also immortalised by a 19th-century novel, Walter Scott's The Heart of Midlothian. This described the assault by an enraged crowd on Edinburgh's Tollbooth prison (the Heart of Midlothian of the title). This was during the so-called "Porteous riots" of 1736, when John Porteous, an English captain of the city guard who was held responsible for firing on a crowd at an earlier demonstration, was dragged from the prison and hanged. The original disorder had arisen after government attempts to crack down on smuggling and the evasion of excise duty, regarded by many as practices hallowed by custom. Scott deplored all civil disorder in his own day, but in his novel treats the lynch mob with notable sympathy.
Probably the most famous historical image of violent protest is that of an attack upon a prison: the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 that is taken as the beginning of the French Revolution. This was partly an achievement of later propaganda by the revolutionaries - the prison, far from being the vast, institutional embodiment of despotism, in fact contained a mere seven petty criminals. The sans-culottes also marched on Versailles, the real seat of power, yet it is the symbol of the Bastille that is remembered.
In revolutions of the modern era, parliament buildings and TV stations have been the preferred targets; for successful revolutions, in this age of mass media, are also public performances. In Yugoslavia last year, Belgrade's parliament building served as a spectacular stage set for popular insurrection. The Berlin Wall was the perfect symbolic location for German celebrations after the downfall of the DDR. And it is largely thanks to a film-maker, Sergei Eisenstein, that the storming of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg - with the masses trampling the thick carpets of the tsar - became as central to the notion of the Russian Revolution as the storming of the Bastille to the French.
Revolutions turn to the very centres of power; riots usually target symbols of power. Before the 18th century, rioters, especially those hungry or impoverished, often chose as the focus of their hatred the tollgates on England's roads. These could be easily and satisfyingly thrown down, and economic oppression symbolically thrown off. In the 18th century, the new turnpikes, which financed Britain's new roads, were a frequent provocation to provincial riots. In the mass destruction of turnpikes in West Yorkshire in 1753, at least 10 protesters were killed by the local militia.
It is worth noting at this point that the breaking of windows in the City - a tactic associated with the recent May Day protests - is not a new idea. During the Wilkite riots of 1768, every window and lamp of the City's Mansion House, symbol of its financial and political power, was smashed, and the Gordon rioters attacked the Bank of England. Yet these protesters, led by Lord George Gordon, president of the "Protestant Association", were entirely and furiously conservative.
Indeed, anti-authoritarianism has not always been progressive in nature. Patriotic, reactionary rioters, demonstrating in Birmingham in 1791 against those radicals who sympathised with the French Revolution, destroyed the laboratory and library of the intellectual Joseph Priestley.
One of the principal causes of riots throughout British history has been xenophobia.
>From the anti-Jewish riots that accompanied the coronation of Richard the Lionheart
in 1189, when the homes of London Jews were looted and burned, to the wrecking of
German bakers' shops in the East End in 1914, popular rage has often turned against
the property of foreigners and outsiders. In 1736, thousands of London weavers,
fearful of being displaced by Irish workers, destroyed Irish pubs and dwellings in
Shoreditch and Spitalfields; and in the late 1860s, mobs roused to anti-Catholic
fervour burnt to the ground houses in the Irish enclaves of several Lancashire towns.
Sometimes an entire profession has attracted the ire of the mob. During the peasants' revolt, rioters vented their fury on the Temple in London, the hive of lawyers, who were hated as the agents of manorial lords, helping them control and bind their serfs. The Kentish men sacked the lawyers' inns and dwellings: an approving eyewitness recorded, "It was marvellous to see how even the most aged and infirm of them scrambled off, with the agility of rats or evil spirits." Shakespeare was perhaps reflecting this historical reality in Henry VI part II when he had Dick the Butcher, right-hand man of the rebel Jack Cade, cry, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
Fear of the mob was keenly felt in Shakespeare's England. Dearth was a constant threat, food shortages were frequent and the populace was readily thought of as what one of his contemporaries called "the Beast with many Heads". The opening scene of Coriolanus, where the patrician, Menenius, confronts a rabble of "poor citizens" demanding bread and threatening violence, dramatises those fears. He tells them: "You may as well/Strike at the heaven with your staves as lift them against the Roman state, whose course will on/The way it takes, cracking ten thousand curbs/Of more strong link asunder than can ever/Appear in your impediment."
The word "mob" was first used in 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, at a time of great political upheaval, and it was to become a key word in the 18th century. Writers such as Addison and Swift complained about the inelegance of the term (short for "mobile vulgus", the excitable crowd), but it stood for a vulgar, sometimes irrepressible reality. Henry Fielding sardonically called the London mob - rather than the press - the "fourth estate".
The age of Enlightenment saw its share of rioting and in the late 18th century, with the birth of the confident, organised and educated urban mob, riots began to show signs of the sophistication that they have today. In the 1760s and 1770s, protesters took to the streets in support of John Wilkes. Wilkes, who himself coined the dismissive term "mobocracy" to describe the revolutionary government of France, was dubbed in the press the first "mobocratical" politician. He campaigned for wider parliamentary representation and the "liberty" of bourgeois Englishmen, including the freedom of the press. Every move in his campaign was accompanied by displays of support on the London streets, bouts of window-smashing in the City, and by indiscriminate attacks on the houses of wealthy Londoners - some of whom were supporters of Wilkes.
The most destructive riots of the early 19th century added another word to the English language. The Luddite disturbances in the north and the midlands, later fictionalised in Charlotte Brontë's novel Shirley, occurred between 1811 and 1816, when rioters broke into mills and workshops to destroy the new machinery that threatened their jobs and rates of pay. In some cases, factories containing machines such as the new steam loom were destroyed. Yet as with today's prospective rioters, the Luddites' power was exerted as much through rumour as through action. Employers were warned of possible attack, often in letters signed with "Ned Ludd's compliments".
Rioting became more difficult for agitators with the founding of the Metropolitan police in 1830, and then the establishment of police forces nationwide in 1856. Nonetheless the Victorian age saw a rash of election riots (sparked by the mismatch of new democratic hopes and an old, corrupt reality), and a number of notable urban riots, especially from the 1860s to the 1880s. As well as the Pall Mall riots there was, in 1866, the breaking-down of the railings surrounding Hyde Park by a huge crowd demonstrating for political reform (inspiring Matthew Arnold to write Culture and Anarchy). There were also the "Murphy riots" of 1867, named after the touring speaker William Murphy, a Protestant zealot who roused his audiences to anti-Catholic fury. On one occasion, a mob pulled the roof off Birmingham Town Hall because Murphy had been refused permission to hold a meeting there, and Catholic churches were attacked after his meetings on several occasions.
It was the Victorian mob that first adopted the practice of turning the forces sent to prevent or control a riot into a target. In the "Bloody Sunday" riots of 1887, in the streets around Trafalgar Square, the police became the focus of the rioters' wrath. The demonstration against unemployment became the kind of running battle with the police with which we are now entirely familiar.
The fear of rioting stoked in the press over the last few weeks also follows traditional patterns. Often, for instance, a kind of mythology attaches to the supposed leaders of riots. Readers of London's Evening Standard were shown grainy photos (from CCTV cameras) of the supposed organisers of last year's riots, when the Cenotaph in Whitehall and Winston Churchill's statue outside the Houses of Parliament were daubed with graffiti decrying capitalism. These "24 missing anarchists" have evaded all public appeals and police raids; they are the dark spirits presumed to be plotting mayhem for this May Day.
In the past, fear and mystery (or, presumably, for protesters, excitement and a passing sense of power) generated strange names and wild reputations for those who "captained" dangerous disturbances. Among many others, there was Captain Pouch, who was proclaimed leader of the Midland food riots of 1607; Anderson of the Fens, reputed organiser of anti-enclosure riots in 17th-century Cambridgeshire; Tom the Barber, who led anti-Irish riots in London in the 1730s; and, most famously, Ned Ludd, mythical commander of protesting machine breakers.
In this, as in so much else, the elusive architects of modern May Day anarchy are part of a long lineage. And though they might wish to distance themselves from the reactionary xenophobes who led many of Britain's popular insurrections, the expressed targets of next week's planned disturbances - American multinational businesses - are curiously reminiscent of the "wealthy foreign merchants" who received the unwelcome attentions of the medieval mob on "Evil May Day" 500 years ago.