A Policeman’s Lot and Murphy’s Law

DMP Inspector Campbell’s perspective on the events preceding the Bloody Sunday baton charge give an idea of what the riots looked like from the other side of the Barricades.

These documents were provided by John Kennedy of the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

1913 – A Policeman’s Lot and Murphy’s Law

Talk given at Garda Historical Society at Store Street Station, August 29^th 2013  and Dublin Castle at Police Memorabilia Exhibition, November 16^th, 2013 

The 1913 Lockout is the Cinderella of Centenaries. It does not fit easily into the dominant nationalist narrative of the independence struggle. While it was retrospectively cast as the opening shot in the struggle for freedom, it can also be regarded as the swansong of British labour in Ireland. In fact the Lockout was only possible because Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. It was the power of the British TUC that sustained the infant Irish Transport and General Workers Union of Jim Larkin and his syndicalist allies who controlled the Dublin Trades Council.

Similar struggles were taking place across Europe and in all of these the police, along with the armed forces of the state, were invariably mobilised in support of the employers. The growing power of the labour movement, particularly in its latest syndicalist variant, was seen as a growing threat to the status quo.  

Syndicalism was a quasi-revolutionary ideology that sought to unite workers in One Big Union to not alone secure better pay and conditions but overthrow capitalism through the agency of a general strike. This was to be assisted by political action when appropriate, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary. This is why trade union leaders such as Jim Larkin did not focus solely on better pay and conditions but advocated female suffrage, slum clearance, free education and public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. His support for Home Rule must be seen in this context. Like most political activists of his generation, outside Ulster, he believed it was inevitable, and that Labour’s voice must be clearly heard in the new parliament on College Green.

The revolutionary content of syndicalism depended on local conditions and leaders. While Larkin’s rhetoric was revolutionary his political practice remained on the wilder shores of social democracy. It was his principal lieutenant, James Connolly, who embraced a more thorough going brand of revolutionary socialism that was heavily influenced by the Fenian variation of Blanquism that also inspired the Bolsheviks. It was the comprehensive defeat of syndicalism in the Lockout, combined with the outbreak of the First World War that set Connolly on the path towards an alliance with militant nationalists in 1916.

The architect of defeat in 1913 was William Martin Murphy, one of the most successful businessmen of his generation and the first Catholic President of the Dublin Chamber of Commerce. Murphy belonged to the conservative wing of the Irish Party and he bankrolled the anti-Parnellites in the 1890s. For him, Larkinism, as the Dublin variant of syndicalism was quickly dubbed, represented all the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon materialism. It was vulgar and it gave the unskilled and semi-skilled workers of the city expectations far above their station. To meet the Larkinite threat Murphy created an antidote, that he christened with all due modesty, Murphyism.  If Jim Larkin’s great achievement was to bring syndicalism to Ireland and raise Dublin’s unskilled workers from their knees in pursuit of a workers commonwealth, Murphy’s was to persuade his fellow employers they could defeat the syndicalist threat of the general strike with the reality of a general lockout.

The police role

Where did the police stand in all this? Well their role was to maintain law and order which, by default, meant Murphy’s law as most workers saw it. Murphy himself called to Dublin Castle in the week preceding the tramway strike that sparked the Lockout. As a result 313 members of the RIC were drafted in to assist the 1,173 members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Another 60 DMP pensioners and five RIC pensioners living in Dublin were sworn in to perform station duties, while all leave was cancelled.

From a popular perspective the role of the police will forever be associated with Bloody Sunday. There is not enough space go into the events forensically and I made my case many years ago in Lockout: Dublin 1913. What has never been seriously denied is the severe breakdown in police management and rank and file discipline in the first week of the strike, which was brought about by the intense pressure of unexpectedly widespread social unrest. It was, I believe, not unlike the pressure under which the Royal Ulster Constabulary crumbled in 1969 when troops had to be deployed in Derry and Belfast.

British troops were deployed in Dublin in 1913, as they were in Liverpool, London, Scotland, South Wales and other trouble spots during the great industrial unrest from 1910 to 1914 across these islands. The Royal Dublin Fusiliers were among the regiments deployed in the London docks strike of 1912. However unlike some of these other situations no workers were shot by troops in Dublin. The police remained in the front line and, despite the deserved obloquy for Bloody Sunday, they averted the lethal bloodshed that sometimes occurred when workers confronted armed soldiers in other industrial conflicts.

The Other Side of the Hill

While hundreds of civilians were seriously injured in the riots that accompanied the Lockout we have to acknowledge the police also paid a high price. On the night of Saturday August 30^th and Sunday August 31^st, only hours before the baton charges on Bloody Sunday, there were 34 members of the force injured, 30 of them seriously enough to be given extended sick leave. Between the start of the tram strike on August 26^th and November 1^st there were 174 DMP and 81 RIC casualties. There was one fatality, Sergeant Morris of the DMP’s Mounted Police.

Some recent documents have come to light courtesy of John Kennedy in the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, which give us an indication from the other side of the hill, or the barricades so to speak. They include a statement from Inspector Campbell of C Division, who was at the epicentre of the rioting on Saturday, August 30^th, the eve of Bloody Sunday.

That evening he was in charge of the DMP detail on duty outside Liberty Hall where two ITGWU strike leaders, William Partridge and James Connolly had been arrested earlier. Larkin had evaded capture and crowds began to gather from late afternoon but there was no trouble until 8 pm, when Campbell sent most of his men to Store Street station ‘for refreshments’, keeping ten men on duty in Beresford Place in front of the ITGWU headquarters; those ‘refreshments’ almost certainly included alcohol as Store Street had a ‘wet canteen’.

In his report Campbell states that:

‘Shortly after the men were sent for refreshments, some of the large crowd of persons outside Liberty Hall began to boo the Police and move in the direction to where the Police were stationed. Soon after this missiles were thrown, one of which – a piece of heavy glass, struck me on the right cheek cutting it slightly. At this point I would have cleared the crowd but only having ten men at my command, which the crowd evidently thought was an opportune time for an attack on the Police I saw from the attitude and dimensions of the crowd to disperse with ten men would be an utter failure and most dangerous for the Police. I then sent to Store Street Station for two Sergeants and twenty men. On their arrival missiles continued to be thrown by the crowd, and I gave the order to the Police to disperse them. After succeeding in breaking up the crowd, the Police with drawn batons pursued them up Eden Quay, and having cleared the street I called back the Police and we were obliged to rush the people off the [Metal] bridge on several occasions. We were attacked again several times by stone throwers from Custom House Square and Eden Quay. In fact we were engaged in a constant running warfare. In dispersing the crowd I have no doubt that the Police would have suffered much more seriously at the hands of the stone throwers were it not that I invariably led the Police the double so as to frighten the crowds away, that in retreating they had not the time to throw missiles.

As the evening passed on in this fashion and after more Police arrived at Beresford Place I was detailed by the Superintendent to go to Earl Street with a party of Police. In Abbey Street and Marlborough Street there were several crowds of stone throwers, and it was only by the almost constant dispersal of them that the Police were not more seriously injured or killed and property demolished. Rioting and stone-throwing continued until I went off duty near mid-night.

Most of the ten constables were injured by missiles thrown by the crowd before the crowd dispersed, and the whole party with the exception of one were afterwards injured by the stone throwers’.

There are a number of points worth noting about this report. The obvious one is its one dimensional aspect. It only refers to injuries suffered by the police. It is undated but appears to have been written after Campbell returned to duty, by which time the number of civilian casualties would have been known, including probably the fact that two members of the ITGWU, James Nolan and John Byrne had been killed in controversial circumstances. Nolan died after being batoned on Eden Quay which was in Campbell’s area of operations. Byrne died as a result of injuries on the other side of the river on Burgh Quay. When Campbell gave evidence at Nolan’s inquest he contested civilian eye witness accounts that his men beat Nolan but even Campbell and other police witnesses could not deny that the unconscious man was left lying unattended on the quayside for at least twenty minutes until an ambulance arrived.

In fairness to Campbell and his men they must have been in almost constant action during this period, although he omits to mention that another detachment under Inspector Willoughby had also been deployed to help disperse the mobs, so that Campbell was not quite as beleaguered as his report suggests. Nor does he address the accusations made by many eyewitnesses and reported in some newspapers that constables were smelling of drink during the fighting.

One aspect of Campbell’s report that will strike modern readers is the lack of riot equipment. This helps explain the high rate of casualties with all but one of the 30 men under his command suffering injuries, including himself. Most of these appear to have been minor but there is no doubt they could have been more serious and that the situation could easily have slipped out of control, as it did next day when the military had to be deployed in aid of the civil power. The lack of defensive equipment left the police particularly susceptible to the stone throwers and left little option but to go on the offensive quickly.

Were the riots organised?

Whether by luck, or judgement, or possibly based on past experience, Campbell adopted the correct tactics in tackling the rioters. By rushing them ‘on the double’ and preventing the crowd from reforming he saved his men from further injury. He was also fortunate in that Eden Quay and the old Metal Bridge that stood where Butt Bridge is now, were narrow thoroughfares that did not allow stone throwers to regroup easily. Nor were they overlooked by tenements from which more missiles could be thrown. When the police entered the equally narrow confines of Abbey Street and Marlborough Street they appear to have suffered injury from missiles lobbed from windows and rooftops.

The breakdown of police discipline next day, Bloody Sunday, in Sackville (O’Connell) Street, is well documented. The most incredible aspect of the baton charge is that every officer on duty of the rank of inspector and above abandoned his post on the street to arrest Larkin when he appeared on the first floor balcony of the Imperial Hotel to address the crowd shortly after 1 pm, having eluded the huge police cordon. It was Sergeant Butler of the DMP who gave the fatal order to his men, DMP and RIC constables, to drive back the crowd and violent chaos ensued.

The efforts of the Dublin Trades Council to defuse the situation by organising a peaceful rally at the ITGWU recreational centre at Croyden Park were undone when thousands of trade unionists returning to the city heard what had happened in their absence. The police, in venting their rage at the constant verbal abuse, obstruction, missile throwing and long hours on duty of the previous five days brought down the wrath of the city on themselves that afternoon when cavalry had to be deployed in Sackville Street to prevent a complete collapse of law and order.   

There were no cavalry in the Liberties where Inspector White was located on Bloody Sunday. The blood of locals was up following reports of what had happened in Sackville (O’Connell) Street and White asserts that the crowds were organised. Rioters stoned the police and then fled into houses where policemen, including White, were injured when they attempted to enter in pursuit. White was hit on the wrist and ankle by a ‘geranium pot’ while trying to force an entry into 4 Lower Bridge Street.

‘I found missiles were thrown at us from almost every house in Upper Bridge Street. When I reached Cornmarket another crowd – a continuation of the one in Thomas Street was throwing stones, bottles and bricks freely, and missiles were also thrown at the Police from almost every house’. The trams, which Murphy appears to have insisted continue to run, were also targets for the rioters and two constables, a DMP man and RIC man, had to seek refuge in the Presbytery of St Audoen’s Church, where the appeals of the clergy failed to prevent several windows from being smashed before the constables were rescued.

Whether the rioting was organised it is impossible to ascertain. It seems unlikely. Dublin in 1913 was full of derelict sites and buildings where missiles were plentiful. Also there appears to have been no co-ordination between rioters in different parts of the city, with disturbances erupting sporadically in Ringsend on Saturday afternoon, the north inner city on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, the Liberties and Inchicore on Sunday afternoon, followed by Capel Street and the area around Jacob’s biscuit factory on Monday. In Inchicore it was the arrest of an ITGWU striker outside the Tramway depot for inciting the crowd to set fire to the premises that literally sparked the rioting, while disturbances on Monday in the vicinity of Jacob’s began with picketers protesting over the company’s use of strike breakers.

Police retaliation

Although the DMP and RIC suffered serious casualties they undoubtedly repaid their attackers with interest. We have no definitive figures for the number of civilians injured, or indeed killed. But we do know the casualties ran into hundreds. The police also raided workers homes. The most notorious incident was Corporation Buildings, the new purpose built complex for workers where the flats in the north block were systematically wrecked. One man, John McDonagh, a former carter who was paralysed from the waist down, was assaulted as he lay in his bed. When his wife tried to protect him she was beaten too. McDonagh died shortly afterwards in Jervis Street hospital.

Workers’ homes in Richmond Cottages, Inchicore, were also wrecked by the police, assisted by members of the West Kent Regiment acting in aid of the civil power. While the damaged wreaked on Corporation Buildings is not covered in the police reports, there is a reference by Inspector Wilkinson to the Richmond Cottages attack. His report states simply that, ‘Many panes of glass were broken’, but not by whom.

It is of course easy to portray the police as the villains of the piece. There was undoubtedly a breakdown in discipline and of police management. Nor were DMP conditions of employment particularly good, despite higher rates of pay than the RIC to reflect the cost of living in the city.

Resentment against tramway workers may have been particularly strong as they were relatively well paid compared with other unskilled and semi-skilled workers..

DUTC	Weekly Pay	DMP	Weekly
Drivers	25s 6d to 31s	Constable	23s to 30s
Conductors	22s to 28s 6d
Labourer	18s to 20s

 Constables had not received a pay increase since 1884 and there was discrimination that saw Catholics, who made up 80 per cent of rank and file members grossly under-represented from Inspector upwards. The new Commissioner, Sir John Ross, abolished competitive examinations. When a number of senior posts were filled in the four years before the Lockout, four Protestant inspectors had been promoted to Superintendent rank compared with three Catholics. The latter made up 80 per cent of the force.    

There is no doubt that the DMP emerged from the Lockout with its reputation seriously damaged and relations with the citizenry seriously compromised. The foundation of the Irish Citizen Army in November 1913 can be traced directly to police attacks on the Fintan Lalor Pipe Band, which often played ‘The Peeler and the Goat’ when passing police patrols and by clashes with pickets. Some ICA witness statements in the Bureau of Military History are quite unapologetic about shooting unarmed policeman on the basis of the treatment strikers received during the Lockout. A policeman’s lot in Dublin, enforcing Murphy’s law, would not be a happy one.