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Fighting perhaps for their lives, certainly for King and Country, burly bobbies used their truncheons with just one idea, to crack as many crowns as possible. "This correspondent saw one ragged, emaciated man beaten over the head until he was unconscious," cabled United Pressman Herbert Moore. "When he, an old man with a grey beard, was taken to a hospital, doctors said he had concussion of the brain and might not live."
The Admiralty Arch and its iron gates (which prudent bobbies had locked) stood like Gibraltar while Admiral Nelson looked down from his Trafalgar Column and saw the line of bobbies hold. A second mob, however, had rushed down Whitehall, 5,000 strong, heading for No. 10 Downing St., the residence of Prime Minister MacDonald. This mob was briefly checked, until police reserves could rush up and beat it back, by a thin line of ornate, scarlet-coated heroes, the Royal Horse Guards—erroneously supposed by tourists to be good for nothing but the ceremony of "changing the guard.''
On the day appointed for the march on the House of Commons, uniformed police and plainclothesmen from Scotland Yard quietly converged upon the Workers' Movement headquarters in Russell Square near the British Museum. The detectives entered the dingy headquarters building, burst in upon "Wal" Hannington who was talking with a newshawk. Unresisting, Hannington submitted to arrest for inciting a mutiny, was jailed without bail in Bow Street station.
Saddest and strangest sight of the week was a hunger marchers' Women's Brigade whose cheer leader, Mrs. Harriet Paisley, is a 62-year-old Lancashire grandmother. Clattering along on thick-soled Lancashire clogs, these hard-faced women grimly entered and marched about London solemnly blowing rubber razzberries at well-dressed citizens, bobbies and Royal Horse Guards.
Most ominous was the reception which working class audiences in London's East End gave the night of the Trafalgar trouble to such once popular Laborites as John Joseph ("Jumping Jack") Jones, Will Thorne and the Labor Party's present leader Old George Lansbury. At different meetings they were all booed and shouted down with such sarcastic cries as "We want bread not tome!" and "Tell us the old, old story!"
Leader Lansbury, when booed at a dockside meeting which seemed to want to sing "The Internationale," tried to restore order by joining in the song, managed to lead it and figured that afterward he would get a chance to speak. Instead he was booed out of the hall.
In Lancashire some 200,000 cotton spinners walked out on strike, shutting down most of the mills. The operators had cut wages 5 to 8%. Labor leaders met with the operators, reached a compromise which the workers promptly rejected.