This past few months I’ve been researching the interconnections between various translators of nineteenth century Russian novels, radical Russian exiles and the birth of the socialist movement in England.

Along the way we’ve had a diversion or two, such as the unlikely story of a pair of English anarchists cycling all the way to Yasnaya Polyana to meet with Tolstoy (spoiler – they didn’t), and possible connections via the utopian side of the English socialist movement and the rather more serious business of RSDLP meeting in exile in 1907.

However, so far I havn’t really investigated a darker side of the growth of the socialist movement in the north of England.

At the end of September in 1893 a group of anarchists (which basically meant socialists and other left leaning people) started having noisy public meetings at Ardwick Green in Manchester, which annoyed the local vicar.

At first the police were conciliatory and offered them an alternative location for their meetings.

The anarchists refused and the meeting was quite violently broken up by the police led by Detective Inspector Caminada who broke his umbrella while whacking one of the anarchists.

The fight was reported in various local newspapers at the time, and while blows were certainly exchanged, it seems no worse, and no more significant than a pub fight on a Saturday night.

Various of the anarchists were arrested, who included Alf Barton, later to become associated with the Independent Labour party and the co-operative movement.

In Caminada’s account of the trial, he mentions that one of the anarchists, as well as being fined, had to pay towards the replacement of Caminada’s umbrella, likened it to the Featherstone miners having to pay for the bullets used against them.

Now I actually know Featherstone. It’s a hard scrabble former mining town in West Yorkshire on the outside of Wakefield that nowadays is principally famous for its rugby league side.

But it has a dark secret.

It’s the last town in England where the army was used to fire on striking miners.

Now you might think that this happened during the pull plug riots of the 1840s, but no, it happened much later, in September 1893.

In 1893 the price of coal collapsed due to cheap imports and an oversupply of domestically mined coal.

The mine owners sought to preserve their profits by cutting wages, reducing hours worked, and sacking miners. Needless to say, this did not play well with the miners.

In Featherstone the miners were blockading one of the pits in the town, and the police were called to disperse them and allow the coal wagons to come and go.

It turned into a fight and barrels of tar and oil were set on fire and stones were thrown at the police, who retaliated by charging the crowd, with little or no effect. The police were under strength as several officers had been transferred to Doncaster to help police the St Leger horse race.

Fearing an attempt to burn down the pit buildings the riot act was read and the army called at the request of the pit owner.

The army were supposed to fire over the heads of the strikers, but instead fired into the crowd.

Two volleys were fired, the first harmless, the second resulting in the deaths of two of the striking miners.

Strangely, the shootings seem to have been little reported at first, and treated more as a minor detail by the London press, although the local press in Yorkshire reported the shootings.

Demonstrations in solidarity with the victims were held all across the Yorkshire coal field and as far way as Glasgow.

Times had changed and the government responded by convening a public enquiry into the shootings to try and defuse things.

The enquiry claimed that all procedures had been followed correctly, including the reading of the Riot Act and the warnings issued to the strikers. The army officer responsible for issuing an order to fire was exonerated as he was only ‘doing his duty’, but in a tacit admission that things should not have turned out that way, the government offered compensation to the families of the victims.

It’s worth remembering that while women had won the right to vote in New Zealand in 1893, in England there was still a property qualification that effectively denied most working men the right to vote – most poorer families rented their houses for six or seven pounds a year and hence did not qualify as either they did not own their own homes or pay more than ten pounds a year in rent, and as for women, a limited right to vote was thirty years in the future.

This means that the miners really did not have anyone other than the trade unions to support them and that the whole system was weighted against them.

The enquiry seems to have been enough to calm matters, especially as the coal strike was settled in the mean time and the miners had gone back to work.

It wasn’t quite the end of it though, the miners of Featherstone came out on strike again in January 1894 on being denied a day’s holiday on New Year’s Day.

This time the mine owners caved in and settled the dispute in the miners’ favour.