The People's Train (4 page)

Twenty more years? she asked. I’ll be a woman of fifty-two.

A woman unburdened by age, I said, as gallantly as I could.

Apart from that she was not very interested in talking much further about her family. They were scandalised that she should wilfully insist on studying law – they were frightened about bad influences at the University of Queensland, and indeed she had been attracted to the Socialist Students Club.

I came here to look into your past, not mine, she told me then, with her wonderful smile of new-world frankness. One didn’t find a smile like that in St Petersburg. So frank, so unabashed, and so commanding.

The next day a general meeting at Trades Hall voted formally to begin the general strike, and our strike committee went into full operation. There was to be a march from the Trades Hall eastwards to Fortitude Valley. Jolly Tom Ryan argued that a clause concerning the peaceable intentions of the trade unions should be placed at the head of the strike statement. No harm done. Whether a march was to be peaceful depended on the police and the special constables and, to be honest, whether the Wobblies set a fire or whether the Irish broke the windows of Irish-Need-Not-Apply stores in Brunswick and Wickham streets. Likewise the generality of men must be prevented from attacking Chinese businesses on the suspicion that Bender might break the strike with Chinese drivers and conductors.

The wife of Mr Riley, my co-marshal, had got hold of some red material and made a sash for each of our men, including Suvarov and me. Early in the morning we met our three hundred under the thin shade of the gum trees in the park across from the Trades Hall. How different from the grimy locomotive shops of Kharkov it was! Riley was uneasy about telling the men to put themselves between any police baton and the bulk of marchers. We decided we would have on either side of the vanguard of the march twenty of our marshals marching in a straight line, well spaced but obvious. If the police charged they would be ready to move in front of the first-row dignitaries and absorb the impact. We put together a Praetorian guard of forty or so men. They had a thankless job, but Riley was cheerful and said ‘the big fellers’ were ready for it. A further two hundred and twenty of our men were to line the route of the march, while the final forty were to bring up the rear, to help people escape and to protect them if things went extremely badly.

Before we moved out Riley wanted to know did I want to speak, but I said, No, you speak. You’re an Irishman and I’m a stranger. When the time came, and Riley’s strong voice was heard through a megaphone, men to whom tobacco was a short commodity stamped out their cigarettes the better to listen to him.

He did a good job. Our marchers all have different ideas in their heads, he said. Your job is to keep them marching for one thing– unionism’s right to enter the Queensland workplace. We’re not here to fight old quarrels. Our quarrel is to do with the capitalist, and the fact he can’t permit unionism into his head. Now the publican of the Trades Hall Hotel has declared the bar open to men who can produce a union card. I’d just point out that you must have a good head to do your job today. If you walk off pissed, you disgrace the sash my wife made you. Moderation in all things, gentlemen.

Some of our constables moved away, delighted as workers often were at a rumour of free alcohol. I’m glad I don’t have time for the stuff, I told Suvarov, who was standing by in his red sash.

The procession moved off at eleven. By that hour there were twenty-five thousand marchers, and fifty thousand spectators along the streets, an army untrained but full of potential. The lines were fifteen or so abreast and the procession two miles long. The front row comprised Tom Ryan, wearing a red rosette, and other Labor parliamentarians, with Warwick O’Sullivan and his wife at the left side of the line. Near the vanguard, in the second or third row, was a battalion of young women led by the magnificent Mrs Amelia Pethick in a straw hat. Wives and children of workers had decorated their family mongrels with bands of red ribbon, and owners of small shops dependent on the earnings of workers cheered us on our way. There were red ribbons tied to telegraph poles and even some of the drays waiting for us to pass through intersections were decorated with red bunting. The office girls from the company of lawyers who did the Trades Hall work waved to us from their upstairs windows. Walter O’Sullivan began to sing in a raw tenor, and others joined in, ragged singing in this ragged nation:

Soon the procession passed occasional detachments of police, to whom the strikers called to join the march, some of our red-sashed marshals waving to this policeman or that.

On open ground at Fortitude Valley the thousands came to a stop and Kelly came forward and made a speech through a megaphone, announcing the strike and applauding the good order with which the march had taken place. He told us again about the causes and provocations that created the strike. Then, becoming practical, he explained that the committee would issue coupons that would be honoured by certain stores, a list of which had been printed and would be prominently displayed and distributed. There would be a daily bulletin. The bulletin would inform men and women of marches, for, said Kelly, repeating my own thought, we have become an army. Indeed, railway men and miners at Ipswich, and fourteen thousand cane-cutters, rail workers and miners in the far north of the huge province, had stopped work in support of us.

Tommy Ryan formally declared the support of the Labor Party for the strike. He and the other Labor men of course used the general discontent to urge everyone to vote for their party, as if doing that would bring about the promised age. It must have been politeness on the part of Kelly and other Queenslanders not to ask why the Labor prime minister of Australia, Andrew Fisher down in Melbourne, had failed to produce a working man’s paradise in either of his two prime ministerships, even though he made much of the fact that he had started at the coalface in Scotland at the age of ten. Tom Ryan pointed to Fisher’s recent law to create a people’s bank, the Commonwealth Bank, as if it were yet another step on the path to heaven. Fisher himself was a Queenslander by immigration, had been a miner at Gympie, and Kelly hoped for practical favours from him. If the workers were attacked by the police, surely Fisher would offer Australian troops to keep the peace.

From my position behind the vanguard of our men I noticed that Commissioner Urquhart’s police cavalry, the Queensland Cossacks, had gathered up ahead of us and on our flanks and were looking on. To me, they didn’t seem too troubled by the thought of federal troops.

But that first march was allowed to go off well. Even the daily press praised the good order of the marchers, though it understated the numbers involved. Police permission was sought for smaller processions on the following days. It was interesting, this business of seeking permission, and Urquhart’s lieutenant, Deputy Commissioner Geoffrey Cahill, gave permission – perhaps because the press had suggested it was better to have us marching than looting like some gang of Russian revolutionaries!

It was at the end of the second day of the strike that the strike committee met at Trades Hall, and I saw Hope and Amelia once more. The weather was torrid and Amelia looked exhausted. I thought that in the wake of our successful march I could take the Samarkand option again. I made my way to her after the meeting and said, Come with me now, Mrs Pethick. I will find a car to take us to South Brisbane and I’ll make you better with Russian tea.

She said, Oh, that would be nice! But ask Hope too. For I need a chaperone, you know.

There were a few trams running, crewed clumsily by special constables, but Amelia Pethick’s principles would not permit her to catch them. We did find a man from the Clerks’ Union to drive us to the Samarkand. We invited him in with us, but he told us he’d rather park in the shade of a nearby banyan tree and sleep – despite the falling pods and the bird droppings, he said.

Once we were seated in the teahouse, Amelia drank thirstily of the tea.

Oh, you have revived me, Mr Samsurov, I was ready to wilt. You know, I have been here in Brisbane since I was twenty-eight years old but have never got used to this terrible heat. My late husband had no problems with it. He was a muscular man, like you.

And she went straight from this reflection about heat, as if she remembered similar descriptions of Russian heat mirages from novels, to raise a question about my country, the one everyone seemed to raise first.

Surely your tsar cannot last much longer?

I’m afraid the liberals and the gentry have grown fond of him again. The ordinary people they used to admire have proved too unwashed to be good company.

Yes, said Amelia, most bourgeois people are so delicate in the nostril. But I married a stevedore, so I know about sweat.

For a second, I could see a passionate young woman behind the older and sturdy one – running away with her lover from London to the colonies.

I explained that in 1905 and even later there had been a lot of fighting in the streets and glass was broken, and the liberal press, initially sympathetic to the strikers, now began to lay the blame entirely at their door. I did not go on to explain that where opinion did not work to blacken the rebels, the army brought in the artillery, as in engineering shed No. 5 at Kharkov, where I was flattened to the floor by a shell burst and woke to find someone’s entire naked leg seeping by my cheek, like one of the carcases I later toted at the Brisbane meatworks.

I am sure, said Amelia, that our beloved premier, Mr Digby Denham, would follow if possible the same principles as your tsar, because power, like water the world over, always finds the same level.

Hope mentioned that her husband, who knew Mr Denham, said there would be militia corps sent out to deal with us.

Chocolate soldiers and little chocolate gods! said Amelia. How easy it is to buy people with the smallest morsel of authority.

A Trades Council car was waiting for us outside, but Amelia decided not to get into the machine. I don’t need a ride from here, Hope. Let Tom walk me back home over the bridge. It’s a lovely evening.

Hope argued and argued with her but Amelia would not be moved and said she was thoroughly revived. Amelia and I set off down the street and up onto the bridge footway. The evening had turned cool and windy; women crossing towards us from the direction of the city were hanging onto their hats.

I am sorry you must escort an old lady, Tom, Amelia told me, her own hat turned down against the strong, cleansing wind.

I told her I was honoured.

Hope would rather be here. You would probably rather she was. That’s normal.

I told her, I don’t quite understand Mrs Mockridge. I don’t understand her motives or her class.

Oh, her class is nothing to her. You are not confused by me and I’m the daughter of a baronet.

I looked at her. The wind cut at her fine features.

Yes, and married a socialist stevedore and would do it again. Certainly. Again. I have had a wonderful life here, she said. And it is not over. But I miss my husband. He was a man of true courage, true force. We lived like a pair of gardeners in our little cottage, as happy as Roman philosophers. And we believed this was the crucial age. When everything would be broken and re-made, as we had broken and remade everything in our marriage.

I stared at her like a rural oaf. She had been happy in a way I found it hard to be. I had never quite got the two things together, the revolutionary self and what one might call, inaccurately maybe, the soul – the place where the trembling spirit lives.

Amelia said, Hope is married to a powerful man, Mr Samsurov, here in Queensland. A man of powerful connections. His friends blame him for not keeping his wife ‘under control’. May I say this straight out, Tom, without any shadow play? She is an innocent. You can see that by the way she grills you about Russia, surely? I wanted to tell you that. She married an older man when he was very charming and amused by her radicalism, as if her opinions were a dew that would soon evaporate. They didn’t. Now she has been quite ill at times ... I’m babbling ... She has been quite ill. She stays with her husband because that’s what’s done. But she might equally run off with a revolutionary because that’s also what’s done. You understand.

She looked at me again as wavelets came cresting up the river. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t want you to misread her. If you were thinking of ... well, of some socialist romance, it shouldn’t happen, Tom. She’s not well enough. I tell you for your own good.

I said I understood.

I feel like a foolish old woman, she said.

And we did not talk much on the second half of our walk. I thought there was no escaping the reality. With women, the intimate and the political were all one thing. I had learned that from my fine mother.

Even more people came to Brisbane, attracted by our strike. In the Trades Hall Hotel one day, Kelly introduced me to a small red-headed man of about my own age named Paddy Dykes who had come all the way from the far-off silver and iron-ore fields of Broken Hill in New South Wales.

You’re the first Russian I’ve met, he told me, raising up his wrinkled face. We don’t have many Russians in Broken Hill.

I noticed that like me he drank lemonade.

Paddy’s a journalist, Kelly told me.

I wouldn’t put it so high as that, said the little man. I’m writing pieces though. The
Australian Worker.
It really wants to know what’s happening up here. I’ll be at Friday’s march.

Strangely, he said it as if he was guaranteeing my safety. I liked him at once, this rugged little gnome from the Australian desert, though I could not foresee how closely we would in time be bound.

But our application for a march on the first Friday of February 1912 was refused by Police Commissioner Urquhart and his lieutenant, Cahill. Riley and I got together again with our marshals. Some of the Labor men had absented themselves – citing their respect for law and order. Just the same, most of our marshals and fifteen thousand unionists arrived at Market Square and rallied in good order. Amelia’s young women were still with us in numbers and made sure the other unionists saw them by getting to Market Square early in the day and waiting there with their banners, patient despite the heat and humidity. Directed by the marshals, we moved off and weaved among the city buildings into Market Street. Ahead was a line of unmounted police. I thought at once, The cavalry will come from the flanks, just as in Russia.

In front of us an inspector began reading the riot act as we marched towards him. The police now stepped forward to meet our front line, where, among others, Walter O’Sullivan and his recording angel of a wife were again marching. At first our people pushed forward, absorbing blows as the police wielded their batons. I was with our sashed marshals near the head of the procession and could hear men and women calling to the troopers, the Queensland Cossacks, with their splendid mounts and pipe-clayed helmets who now rode in, Join us, mates! Come on, workers, join your cobbers. Mounted troopers were waiting in ambush in Ann Street. Voices pleaded with them too, because once removed from their saddles and pipe-clayed leather, they too had little enough to go home to. I saw Mrs O’Sullivan advancing blindly while still writing, her head tucked in towards her husband’s shoulder.

Special constables, sworn-in gentlemen, were waiting on foot behind the cavalry and also advanced now from the riverside of Ann Street, delighted to be licensed to teach the trade unions a lesson. The chief charge of the mounted police came from Eagle Street and was led against the front of the procession and its leading flanks by Deputy Commissioner Cahill on his bay horse. As he spurred forward I could hear him bellow, Give it to them, boys! Into them!

When the charging horse and foot police and special constables found the ranks of the unionists at front too dense, they moved onto the pavement and down our flanks. I could feel the heat of horseflesh bearing down. Special constables also swarmed onto the footpaths on either side of Market Street, pursuing spectators and even the wives of workers, bludgeoning them with batons. I saw one special beating an old man, a mere onlooker. They were more vicious than the true police; they were fighting for their world order.

I found myself face to face with three real enough professional policemen, batons in hand.

Please, I said. Gentlemen, I am one of the chief marshals to keep order. Please let me speak to the commissioner.

Somehow I was not surprised when all three said to me such things as Fuck you for a foreign troublemaker, and began laying into me. I raised my hands but started to lose my footing. As I went to the ground with a whack on the temple, I had a sepia vision, like a sickly photograph, of troopers wading in among Amelia’s typists. Amelia, a little old stick of a woman, lunged at Deputy Commissioner Cahill, running her hatpin through his upper leg and withdrawing it. A policeman grabbed her wrist from behind, another wrapped his arms around her frail waist and lifted her off her feet. Rising again, with bile in my mouth, I tried to go to Amelia. But I could not see her. All was chaos and our marchers were teeming back through Market Square, looking for safety in the streets behind it. Then there was Paddy Dykes the silver miner. Take my arm, Tom, he yelled. I was happy to do so.

Supporting me, the silver miner was also surrounded. I ought to tell you I am writing for the
Australian Worker
newspaper, he informed the police. I am a journalist.

They actually paused to listen to this little bantam. A special constable moved in to swipe him with a baton. But he cried, Do you want to be named and shamed in the press? I have your number.

Even though that was not the truth, the baton-wielder backed off. He had extraordinary authority, this little red-headed fellow from Broken Hill.

More constables arrived and dragged me away from Paddy to an area where horse-drawn wagons waited to convey us to magistrates. Inside the dark wagon were Suvarov and also Rybakov. My head throbbed and I heard my voice from a distance as I told Rybakov he should not have marched. The others compared bruises and cursed the special constables as prize bastards.

Beneath the main police station, I now had my first experience of an Australian holding cell, but it was not an extended stay. We were taken upstairs in groups to appear before a bench of three magistrates. Some of my marshals were in my group. The magistrates looking down on us had a severity in their faces they had probably got too jaded to use against burglars and vagrants, their normal diet.

I was astonished to see Hope appear in a wig and a black robe. She was wonderful to see, and angelic beside the magistrates.

The chief magistrate called on her in a tight voice. You represent these men, Mrs Mockridge?

She said she did. She began our defence. Hardly any of the marchers knew that permission had not been given for the march, she argued. Even the organisers did not know, since the commissioner’s refusal had come so late. These men, said Hope (how well named she was), these men marched in innocent good order, unaware of the denial of a licence for the procession.

In the gallery, with other men of the press, Paddy Dykes sat recording events for the
Australian Worker.

I indicated to Hope in sign language that I wanted to speak for my marshals. She frowned, then told their worships that one of the defendants, an emigrant unfamiliar with Queensland law, wanted to make a statement. The magistrates turned their gaze my way. I said that I was one of the leaders of the strike marshals whose job it was to keep order on the march. If it had been left to us, order there would have been, imposed by men the strikers respected. As it was, the sudden baton charge gave us no time to tell the marchers to withdraw.

Thank you, said the magistrate in a voice empty of gratitude.

We were fined ten pounds each and threatened with jail at our next offence.

Rybakov, Suvarov and I were held back for a special talking to by the chief magistrate. The sovereign state of Queensland was kind enough to welcome energetic immigrants, we were told, but not rioters of foreign anarchist backgrounds.

This upset Rybakov very much and caused him to wheeze aloud at the magistrate, We are not anarchists. Anarchists are children.

I would find out the next morning that an array of charges were levelled at Amelia Pethick when she was brought into court on her own as an especial offender, charged with causing grievous bodily harm to Deputy Commissioner Geoffrey Cahill and the damage of a police horse.

A policeman produced in court the bloodied hatpin he had found on the ground near the affray. Hope, who was defending her, asked the bench whether it was credible that a woman of the scale of Mrs Pethick posed a threat to a big man like Cahill, especially if he sat atop a police mare. And yet Commissioner Cahill wanted us to believe that this woman of five feet two inches had been able to reach the Commissioner’s upper thigh with a hatpin! Perhaps, she suggested, Mr Cahill should enter the court on his seventeen-hands mare and we could find out whether Mrs Pethick could reach his stirrups, let alone his thigh.

In the court people laughed, but the magistrates did not. Amelia confused things by saying she had been charged down, and that she was ashamed of her actions since she intended only to wound Cahill, her assailant, not the poor brute who carried him.

She was remanded for trial and bail was set at one hundred pounds, which the Trades Hall officials meanly decided she should meet herself and out of her Typists and Secretarial Services Union’s fees. (It was Hope Mockridge, in fact, who put up the money.)

Premier Digby Denham praised the firm but just action of the police and declared
respectable Queensland
had rejected us. Hope’s husband Mr Mockridge KC now chose, like much of Brisbane’s bourgeoisie, to be alienated from the strikers by the events of Baton Friday, as we would call it. Hope wondered why blows delivered by the police, together with the resistance of the most inoffensive of strikers, Amelia Pethick, had suddenly made the strikers unworthy and dangerous to society.

I found out later from Hope that something like this discourse took place:

Mr Mockridge emerged from his study the Sunday following the march and asked his wife where she was going on the Sabbath. A good roast was cooking downstairs, he told her.

I’ll be at Trades Hall most of the day, she told him.

There is work to do on a Sunday? I thought that the point of a strike was no work.

Hope asked her husband, You wouldn’t be free for some
pro bono
work, would you, Edgar?

If your people had had a permit to march, I would make myself available.

The permit system is unjust. Some judge, with the right nudging, might overthrow it in favour of freedom of assembly. Freedom of assembly subject to a permit is not freedom.

Mr Mockridge returned to his study. Things had happened between them which would have made it too painful for him to be angry or to prohibit. But before closing the door he noted that Bender was keeping his personal special tram going.

Tomorrow, he said, I intend to ride on Freeman’s Palace special. I have told him as much.

So he made his public stand for the opposition, with the clear hope that she would quit the strikers or else suffer an intensified shame among her own kind of people. So, for principle, he was willing to make the surmised rift in his marriage more public still.