Royal Dublin Fusiliers in Action Against Workers in 1911 and 1912

Here are some pictures gleaned from a memoir about Percy Harvey, a bandsman in the Second Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. 

They are a reminder that soldiers in Britain’s professional army were routinely employed to break strikes in the ‘Great Unrest’ before the First World War.  In this case it shows ‘The Toughs’ deployed in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, August 1911 where they fixed bayonets to disperse striking railway men and in the London Docks Strike of summer of 1912. On the latter occasion however the dockers, armed with cudgels, dispersed after some booing and jeers.

It is one of history’s ironies that soldiers, drawn overwhelmingly from the ranks of unskilled and unemployed workers were used regularly in support of the employers.

Our thanks to Tom Burke and Sean Connolly of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers Association for these pictures. Percy Harvey was taken prisoner in August 1914 when the Royal Dublin Fusiliers covered the retreat of the British Expeditionary Force from the initial German advance. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of war and returned in 1919 to a Dublin drastically changed.