Andy Wastling's Response to Chris Draper's Post

Response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices , Guess Who Is Reading Your Census ? by Andrew Wastling

IN response to Chris Drapers recent and extremely timely article on Northern Voices 'Guess Who Is Reading Your Census?'

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Readers might also like to have a read of 'Demilitarise the 2021 census' in Peace News: Demilitarise the 2021 census Peace News

There is also an extremely helpful template PRESS RELEASE for campaigners to send to their local media to explain why they are taking such action - though as we know unfortunately the likelihood of such a letter being published locally is indeed slim!

Milan Rai, editor of Peace News, which is circulating a guide to creative resistance to the census, commented: ‘Lots of British people are likely to feel uncomfortable adding to the profits of a giant US arms company developing weapons of death and providing IT services to those who’ve been waging war in Afghanistan and around the world for decades.’

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NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 2

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPER

CONDEMNED to death, in November 1897 anarchist Samuel Fielden of Todmorden sat alone in a Chicago prison cell awaiting execution on the 11th of the month. On 2 November the United States Supreme Court ruled there were no federal issues involved and it would not intervene. Only an act of clemency by State Governor Robert Oglesby might stay the executioner’s hand.

LIBERTY or DEATH?

THE political prosecution of Fielden and his comrades disabused radicals around the world of any lingering belief in the United States as the embodiment of liberty. The socialist historian Edward Thompson judged this state-sponsored prosecution the decisive factor in turning Britain’s Socialist League (SL) in an anarchist direction. William Morris (founder of the SL) excoriated the USA as “a society corrupt to the core and at this moment suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Czar of all the Russias.”

OGLESBY DECIDES

AT 9am on the eve of execution one of Fielden’s comrades cheated the hangman, ignited an explosive cartridge in his mouth and blew himself to pieces. Eight hours later Governor Oglesby intervened, commuting Fielden’s death sentence to life imprisonment but four of Sam’s five condemned comrades would still be hanged the following morning.

On Saturday 12 November Fielden was taken from Cooke County Jail to serve his sentence at Joliet, 30 miles south-west of the city of Chicago. At Joliet, Sam could leave his cell, exercise in the open air and resume his old work, labouring in the prison’s stone yard. Visits from family continued although little Alice no longer searched Sam’s cell as she initially did at Cooke County, looking for the candies her father, in happier days, hid around the house for her to triumphantly discover.

In 1890 a recently released prisoner, Thomas Broderick, claimed Sam was being singled out for harsh treatment, “Fielden, the English anarchist, shows the most marked fortitude and faces his dreary fate with wonderful patience and resignation. This has called down upon him the hatred of his guards. I have frequently seen the unfortunate man treated with great cruelty. Once I saw him chained to the wall for several hours and during that time all sorts of epithets were directed towards him by one of the guards and he was abused as though he had been the worst convict in the prison instead of one of the best.”

UNFOGOTTEN

“HAYMARKET MARTYRs” commemorations were organised around the world every eleventh of November and campaigning continued everywhere to secure the release of the remaining prisoners. After enduring seven years long years in jail hopes were raised in January 1893 with the inauguration of a new liberal State Governor, John Peter Altgeld who agreed to review the original prosecution. Confidence in Chicago’s police and judiciary had been severely eroded in the intervening years by a series of shocking discoveries. In January 1889, it was revealed that Inspector Bonfield, who’d led the police assault on the Haymarket meeting, “had for some time been receiving payments from saloon-keepers, prostitutes and thieves and had been trafficking in stolen goods”. Personal items stolen from one of the dead anarchists were subsequently found at the home of Detective Jacob Loewenstein.

On 25 June 1893 a magnificent “Haymarket Martyrs” monument was unveiled at Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery, where years before Sam, the teamster, had regularly delivered decorative stonework. On 26 June Governor Altgeld formally ended Sam’s imprisonment with a report that rubbished the entire prosecution process that had in 1886 condemned him and his comrades to death. Altgeld emphasised this was no merciful pardon but a public declaration that Sam and his fellow Haymarket anarchists were falsely convicted and entirely innocent.

RELEASE

AT 4.20pm on 26 June 1893 Samuel Fielden, wearing a striped uniform distinguished only by his prison number, “8526”, was summoned to the office of Joliet’s Chief Warder. A special messenger, “Mr Dreyer”, handed Sam an engrossed document authorising his release. “Fielden took his pardon and folding it up carefully placed it under the brown and white striped jacket, worn black with long service, and without saying a word he reached out and grasped Mr Dreyer by the hand and then turning shook the warden’s hand fervidly.” The warden advised Sam, “If you call on Stewart Leland he will fit you out with the best suit of clothes that can be purchased outside of the World’s Fair City…Governor Altgeld has pardoned you and I can congratulate you and feel glad for I believe it is only your just dues.”

HOMECOMING

ARMED only with a rail permit and some pocket money, Sam, smoking a big cigar, left Joliet by the 6.15pm train for Chicago. He reached home, 117 West Polk Street, at 8.45pm where he was received by a large crowd. “His wife had been at the windows of their apartment on the second floor every few minutes on the lookout for him. Their little children, Alice who is 8 years of age and Harry who is nearly 7 were on the steps of the house ready to welcome their father while beside them were many of their father’s old associates…The meeting between the long separated husband and wife was tender though not demonstrative. They embraced each other for a moment and kissed each other for a moment and kissed each other tenderly. The wife murmured a welcome but the husband remained silent. He evidently desired to be stoical and did not want to give any indication of deeper feelings than a quiet sort of pleasure in returning home.”

POSTMAN BEN

THAT summer the Fieldens met old acquaintance, Benjamin Butterworth, the Walsden postman who’d come to Chicago to see the World’s Fair. In fact Butterworth made two visits, arriving first on Sunday 20 August, he returned the following Tuesday. “Glad that he had been permitted to shake hands with an old school fellow so far away from Todmorden, he heartily congratulated Mr Fielden on regaining his liberty after seven long years in Joliet.” For his part, Sam presented Benjamin with two “Haymarket” books, a sympathetic account compiled by lawyer Matthew Trumbull who’d been a Chartist in his youth in England, the other volume was Governor Altgeld’s justification for quashing Sam’s prosecution.

WORK

FIELDEN resumed his stone-hauling business, occasionally supplemented by driving a beer wagon. When he hadn’t returned to rabble rousing, after a year or so he was briefly pursued by reporters keen to depict a disillusioned anarchist but Sam wouldn’t oblige. “I will not change my mind on economic and social questions but I have not spoken at a public meeting for a long time and do not expect to.” When pressed on the matter Samuel revealed himself to be older and wiser. In the heady days of 1886 Chicago’s anarchists had convinced themselves they stood on the rim of a revolutionary cauldron; one more fiery speech and the workforce would erupt, overwhelm the plutocracy and wrest control. In reality the anarchists’ driving class consciousness ran far ahead of the everyday concerns of their fellow labourers. The anarchists provoked the tiger without the means to strike it dead. Now, on Sam’s release “He thinks the people too patient to effect any great reform in his lifetime”. He hadn’t abandoned his former aims or values but had emerged from prison with a more mature, considered anarchist philosophy which involved reconnecting with his family, nature and the land. He informed reporters he’d saved a bit of money and was looking for a farm.

SHOESTRING RANCH

IN April 1895 the Fieldens bought a small ranch situated high up in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, fifty miles south-west of Denver and a thousand miles away from the mean streets of Chicago. City newspapers lost interest in Sam although his arrival in the Rockies was warmly received by local reporters, with this particular October 1895 account republished in Todmorden:

“Up towards the western extremity of the beautiful La Veta valley where the ground begins to rise to form the might range of which La Veta pass is a gateway lies a lonely ranch…It stretches along the winding, tumbling, sparkling stream called Indian Creek… and in the vernacular of the western is called a 'shoestring ranch'. Great, graceful trees border the creek and lofty hills rise clothed in the richest verdure on either side. Westwards the huge mountains themselves tower above it. It is a romantic spot, looking secluded and peaceful enough to satisfy the most weary soul imaginable. It is the home of a man whose name has probably been spoken in every civilised country in the world and whose existence cannot but hold some interest for every working man the class whose cause he zealously advocated and risked his life for.

“He looks the typical ranchman already with his sunburned face, flowing beard, unclipped hair, wide hat and dusty farmer’s suit. He seems perfectly at home holding the halters of his horses and expiating on the good points of the meek brown cow which he had just purchased…He feels the wrongs of the people as deeply as ever but as a public figure his part has been acted…Only those who seek him with sympathetic hearts and congenial minds will hear his thoughts expressed. He keeps in touch with the radical world by reading the papers and pamphlets printed by the workers…His bright children whom he takes to their country school nearly three miles away; his faithful wife…his picturesque home, his domestic animals, the state of his crops and the prevailing market prices will now occupy all his energies.”

FRIENDS & NEIGHBOURS

FAR from the madding crowd the Fieldens were widely respected throughout this scattered, self-sufficient but close knit community. When Mr Butler, a neighbour, dropped by in June 1897 he expressed admiration for Sam’s agricultural achievements; his recently completed system for irrigating crop fields, his select herd of eighteen cattle, plus a few hogs and when Butler departed he was accompanied by several choice pigs he’d purchased to stock his own ranch.

In 1898 a few Colorado friends, led by the radical Rev. Myron W Reed, who chaired the event, organised a Denver “Haymarket Commemoration”. At this now rare public expression of his sustained solidarity, Sam “seemed imbued with much of his old-time spirit and fire… his body swayed with emotion, he gesticulated freely and his voice rang with indignation against the robbers and oppressors of the poor.” The event drew an unexpectedly hostile response from the Salida Mail, which doubted the validity of the Governor’s pardon; “Samuel Fielden, one of the anarchists who escaped the noose and was given a life sentence was present. It will be recalled that the arch sympathiser with anarchy, Governor Altgeld pardoned this man…sentenced for the awful murder at Haymarket square.”

William Holmes, a fellow Englishman and fellow anarchist, who visited the Fieldens’ the same year, reflected the other side of the Governor’s action, “(Sam) is happily in possession of good health and spirits and looks back upon his long years of imprisonment as upon a frightful dream…his soul is filled with eternal gratitude for his brave deliverer – John P Altgeld”.

Another old anarchist buddy, William J Lloyd dropped by in 1903 and as they talked, Lloyd observed that despite his rocky isolation Sam was “up to date on all passing questions”. One evening after dinner, reminiscing as they rode together along Indian Creek, Sam confided, “there was no conspiracy and none of the leaders knew of the bomb thrower or his intentions and so little did they anticipate violence that they brought their wives and little children to the meeting.”

LIFE ALONG INDIAN CREEK

IN 1905 when “little Alice” turned twenty-one she was struck down by typhoid but after eight weeks at death’s door made a full recovery. The four Fieldens lived, worked and prospered together and in 1909 added Benton Vories’ ranch to their holding, after paying him $4,200 so he could take up an appointment as the local District Water Commissioner. Sadly Sam’s wife Sarah didn’t have much opportunity to enjoy their newly acquired land as she passed away two years later. As Sam’s labouring life began to take its toll, Harry made more of the major decisions on the farm, assisted by his invalid father.

In January 1915, the local paper reported that the area’s farmers had collectively shipped 16 carloads of cattle from La Veta for sale at Denver, and was impressed by prices achieved by Harry Fielden’s 66 calves. Investing for the future, in 1916 the Huefano County News reported that “the Fielden ranch has been improved with the erection of a 20 by 100 foot barn.” As the years slipped by along Indian Creek, Sam’s children remained on the ranch, unmarried, until Harry died 2nd July 1972 followed by Alice on 11th March 1975. Samuel Fielden had passed away half a century earlier on 7th February 1922, just a couple of weeks short of his 75th birthday. All four Fieldens lie together in the simple, small, enclosed La Veta cemetery.

(Part one of this story along with many other fascinating episodes of radical history are archived and easily accessible on this NV website – CD 2021)

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NORTHERN ANARCHIST on Death Row Part 1

by CHRISTOPHER DRAPERr

ON 20 August 1887 a Chicago jury condemned a Todmorden man to be hanged for a bomb-throwing incident that killed eight policemen and injured sixty more. As the turning point in Chicago’s bloody class war this sensational case was reported around the world. Back home in England, when Samuel Fielden’s invalid father was informed of his son’s death sentence he became another victim and expired within the week. Details of the bombing and trial were comprehensively recorded at the time but Samuel Fielden’s lifestory has never before been fully told.

A Northern Childhood

Samuel Fielden was born on 25 February 1847 in Walsden, on the Lancashire side of Todmorden. There’ve always been Fieldens in Todmorden and Samuel’s father, Abraham (1816-1886) worked as an overlooker at the town’s enormous Fielden Mill, though Sam’s family occupied a much lower social level than millowner, John Fielden MP (1784-1849) whose statue graces the town’s Vale Park. Sam’s mother, Alice bore Abraham seven children although only four survived into adulthood. She’d endured an impoverished childhood selling polishing sand door-to-door. Abraham first met her as she hawked her wares around the houses in the bitterest of winters, trudging through snow in bare feet.

Sam learnt nothing of anarchism or socialism in his youth but acquired an overwhelming ethical sense from the non-conformist religion and politics of his parents. Tragically, Sam’s mother died in 1858 when he was just eleven. He inherited a basic understanding of politics from Abraham who campaigned on many social issues of the day, Chartism, the ten-hour day, the co-operative movement and much more besides. When Sam was six or seven, he learned to read by attending a local dame school for six months.

Work

Aged eight, Sam started work at Fielden’s Mill. His first job was to race along the machines removing empty bobbins, taking care to keep fingers safe from the moving parts. After a couple of years he was promoted to the heavier task of taking full spools to the weavers. At this stage Sam was a statutory “half-timer”, required to attend the factory school for half of his time at the mill. He became a “full-timer” at the tender age of thirteen when he transferred to working in the factory’s warehouse. After a couple of years he learned to weave and laboured at that until he was twenty one when he’d resolved to seek his fortune in America.

Awakening

Several incidents in Sam’s youth came to shape the character that was so forcefully emerged in later life. In 1860, at the conclusion of Sam’s factory schooling, Mr Harrison, his teacher was accused by a local Methodist of brainwashing his pupils with Unitarian heresy. When Harrison sued for libel Sam was required to give witness at a Liverpool Court hearing. He was overjoyed at the prospect. Not only did he get to spend a week away from home but visited the new Menai Bridge and at Liverpool docks Sam was thrilled by the tall ships bound for America. His imagination was stimulated by the “dime novels” he brought back from Liverpool and with the outbreak of Civil War in 1861, everyone in Todmorden’s thoughts turned to events in America as supplies of mill cotton from the Southern States slowed to a trickle. Initially Fielden’s mill supplemented the raw material with inferior Surat cotton from India but this so clogged the machines that production ground to a halt. Until hostilities ceased in 1865 milling resumed only intermittently and in the interim Sam carried tiles for workmen laying drainage for the ground on which the millowner’s magnificent new Dobroyd Castle would soon arise.

Sam learned of the cultivators of that Southern cotton when escaped slave Henry Box Brown visited Todmorden in 1861 and told of how, with the assistance of abolitionists, he’d gained his freedom concealed in a crate posted away from the plantation as a parcel. Sam’s inherent disrespect for elitism was reinforced when William, his older brother, who worked as a gardener for the Fieldens, was dismissed for showing insufficient deference. Sam’s oratorical skills which came to be recognised as his political strong suit were nurtured in the chapels of Todmorden’s Methodist circuit where from 1865 until 1868 he was admired as a fervent “exhorter” well on his way to becoming a full-blown religious minister but it was not to be.

Wanderlust

Drawn by tales of the “Wild West” Sam longed to leave home but obeyed his father’s wish to remain until he was twenty-one. He’d also given his word to marry Sarah Gill, a weaver at the factory. When Sarah promised to wait for him until he was established in America, he booked his passage and in July 1868 sailed from Liverpool. His first job on landing in New York was at Prentice’s Brooklyn hat factory, but he didn’t like the work or the wages and left after only two days. Moving north to Providence, he returned to his old trade of millwork before in March 1869 starting out West. He reached Chicago in August, by way of a bit of sightseeing at Niagara Falls. Coincidentally, the very first building he entered on reaching the city belonged to John Still and his brother who ran a plumbers business and originated from Todmorden where Sam had known some of their relatives. Less happily, it was outside this building that seventeen years later the bombing occurred that led to Sam’s death sentence.

That autumn of 1869 Fielden worked on John Wentworth’s farm and the following spring laboured at dredging the Illinois & Michigan canal. His religious fervour continued to diminish as his political awareness grew. As a deck passenger on a Mississippi steamboat, in spring 1870, he embarked on a working tour of the southern states that enlightened him on the falsity of “abolition”. The “liberated” blacks continued to be dispossessed and exploited by a myriad of sophisticated social and economic measures.

Chicago Again

On returning to Chicago in May 1871 Sam laboured around the region on a variety of navvying tasks until, after a year or so, he settled into heavy haulage work serving the city’s stone yards. Belying his big, rough, burly appearance Sam never neglected his intellectual development, spending every free hour at lectures or reading in Chicago’s public library. He returned to Todmorden in the autumn of 1879 for the first and only time. After embracing his aged father who was no longer the vigorous patriarch of memory, Sam visited the overgrown grave of his mother. He also fulfilled the pledge of two decades before and married Sarah, his childhood sweetheart. The pair sailed from Liverpool on the Germanic, arriving in New York harbour on 26 January 1880 eager to start their new life together in the “Land of the Free”.

Teamwork and Anarchy

Having saved his wages over the years, on his return to Chicago Sam bought his own team of heavy horses and worked for himself in the thriving stone haulage business. After starting a teamsters union Sam was duly elected Vice President. In the autumn of 1880 he helped reorganise Chicago’s Liberal League which existed to ensure the total separation of church and state. Over time he successively served as the organisation’s secretary, vice president and conference delegate and this involvement served to enhance his growing intellectual development, confidence and political awareness.

By 1883 his involvement with the Chicago labor movement brought him to socialism which evolved into anarchism. The following year he joined the International Working People’s Association with divisions organised on the basis of language; Fielden joined the English-language “American Group”. Confronted by a corrupt oligarchy of employers and politicians intent on smashing organised labor, Chicago IWPA was defiantly militant. Sam Fielden subsequently recalled, “I wish to say (we) were all anarchists at that time.”

Chicago’s May Days

On 3 May 1886 an “army” of Pinkerton thugs and city police opened fire on striking workers at Chicago’s McCormick Reaper Works, killing two and injuring many more. In response, Chicago IWPA organised a mass protest for the next day at 7.30pm, 4 May at “Haymarket”. There were to be three speakers with Samuel Fielden to close the event. The meeting was peaceful but as Sam was ending his speech two hundred armed police officers led by Inspector Bonfield rushed from an adjacent building, panicking the crowd. Fielden was ordered to cease immediately and assist in dispersing his audience. As Sam remonstrated a bomb arced through the air and exploded amidst the police, who responded by shooting indiscriminately, injuring officers and workers alike. Fielden was shot in the knee and when records were compiled there were eight dead policemen, another sixty seriously injured and probably similar casualties amongst the workers though, understandably, few of these injuries were reported to the authorities.

Judicial Murder

Fielden managed to limp home and the next morning, police, without warrants, searched the house, found nothing but arrested him anyway. At the police station Sam was sworn at by Lieutenant Shea and ordered to remove his bandage and expose his leg wound. Police Chief Ebersold pointing at Sam’s forehead said, “it ought to have gone in here!”

The authorities never claimed that any named individual made, threw or had prior knowledge of the bomb. No relevant evidence tying any suspect to the bomb was ever presented in court yet Sam, along with seven other anarchists, was charged with murder. Evidence wasn’t required, for the judge, prosecutor and jury were hand-picked and the verdict a foregone conclusion.

Verdict

The verdict was delivered shortly after 10am August 20 1896. Mr Osborn, the foreman intoned, “We, the jury, find Samuel Fielden (and comrades)… guilty of murder in manner and form as charged in the indictment and fix the penalty at death.” Samuel Fielden responded from the dock: “Today as the beautiful autumn sun kisses with balmy breeze the cheek of every free man I stand here never to bathe my head in its rays again. I have loved my fellow man as I have loved myself. I have hated trickery, dishonesty and injustice. The nineteenth century commits the crime of killing its best friend but as I have said before if it will do any good I freely give myself up. I trust the time will come when there will be a better understanding, more intelligence; and above the mountains of iniquity, wrong and corruption, I hope the sun of righteousness and truth and justice will come to bathe in its balmy light an emancipated world.”

“Murderers’ Row”

Fielden was imprisoned in Cook County Jail in a stone cell measuring 6ft by 8ft, reached by a flight of iron steps. In front of the cell ran a narrow footway. Sam occupied “Cell 31” in this section known as “Murderers’ Row”. Awaiting execution he was visited by his wife Sarah and their two children, Alice and Sam junior. He’d never seen his son before as the boy was born on 1 November 1886, six months after Fielden was imprisoned and, ironically, four days after the unveiling of a giant statue in New York harbour; “Liberty Enlightening the Word”!

Despite continuing world-wide protests and a further 1½ years of legal wrangling, it was confirmed that Samuel Fielden would be hanged at 12 noon, 11 November 1887, but this isn’t quite the end of the story….

(The concluding part of this story will be posted on NV in 3 weeks. Search our archive for more of CD’s articles of Northern Radical History)

I SUED SHEARINGS – and guess who won?

by Christopher Draper

I’VE just returned from a North Wales Courtroom where I was the litigant in a Breach of Contract legal action and “Shearings Holidays Ltd”, the defendant. If you are one of the few people in Britain who’ve never enjoyed a Shearings coach holiday you must be very young or a southern snob (or possibly both) and when the Wigan-based business celebrated its centenary last year it was described as the biggest and most successful coach holiday company in Europe, carrying over a million holidaymakers every year but all was not as it appeared.

Herbert’s Story

The Company was started in Oldham, in 1919 by pioneering motor mechanic Herbert Shearing, who’d six years earlier been fined a pound for barrelling along Manchester Road at a speed in excess of the legal limit of 5 mph! Herbert began by taking coachloads of Oldham working folk down to Devon for their annual week-long holiday. While other coach touring companies stayed at different hotels every night Herbert used a Torquay hotel as a base for daily trips out. His bargain-basement prices soon attracted customers from across the Pennines and this prompted him to start a “feeder-service” bringing Yorkshire-based customers to his Oldham depot but his enterprise wasn’t appreciated by rival proprietors. When Herbert, in 1934, advertised a feeder-service from Halifax he first had to overcome objections from Leeds-based, Wallace-Arnold Coaches. As his network expanded by 1936, he offered Liverpool customers, “a ten day all-in holiday in Scotland for £8.40 or nine days in Devon for £6.50”. “Shearings” thrived after the war although Herbert himself retired to Torquay where he died on 14 July 1945.

Post-War Shearings

Shearings prospered under a series of different owners and in 2005 even swallowed up its old Yorkshire rival “Wallace-Arnold”. By 2015, the company owned and operated over 200 coaches, 52 hotels and annually conveyed a total of 1.1m passengers by coach, rail, air and ship to over 170 destinations worldwide. In 2016 Shearings was acquired by Lone Star Funds, a private equity company and although a positive spin was put on this takeover at the time “to fund expansion plans etc” in reality it was extremely bad news.

Lone Star or Black Hole?

Texas based Lone Star is more “Vulture capital” than “Venture capital”, specialising in buying up “distressed assets” and sucking the life and value out of them. Founded, owned and controlled by 64 year old John Grayken, Lone Star manages over seventy billion dollars of assets, with Grayken’s personal fortune valued at 7.4 billion dollars, making him the 196th richest person on the planet. Born in Boston, Grayken is an Irish citizen, having renounced his U.S. nationality for tax purposes and according to Forbes magazine, “Amongst the robber barons of the new-millenium, few are as secretive – or as loathed”. Despite his American birthplace, Irish citizenship and Dallas HQ this modern day robber baron naturally lives in London, the tax-avoiding plutocrat’s domicile of choice. His seventy million dollar

Chelsea mansion is equipped with a glass elevator, basement pool, cinema and Japanese water garden and was purchased through a Bermudan company. Grayken also owns Pyrford Court, a fifteen-bedroomed Surrey manor house with a twenty-one acre garden and La Bergerie, an extensive Swiss estate overlooking Lake Geneva though he prefers to spend summers in Massachusetts where he owns the exclusive White Head Island.

Ruthless Economy

I missed Herbert’s era but over the last forty years I’ve enjoyed many Shearings holidays and until recent times the company maintained decent, old-fashioned business ethics. After Lone Star took over Shearings adopted a ruthless, Ryan Air style business approach. “Dynamic pricing” was introduced with an emphasis on online sales, hotel prices were segmented into all sorts of price levels with supplementary charges, higher payment was demanded for sitting on the front seat of coaches and an extra cost levied for using feeder-coaches. Petty economies extended to withdrawing bread rolls from meal times and charging for post-dinner coffee. Years ago when Shearings failed to attract enough passengers on a trip I’d booked they generously offered me a longer alternative holiday at no extra cost. This sharply contrasts with my recent experience.

Last Tango to Harrogate

For the last few years my partner and I enjoyed annual coach holidays in Harrogate, staying at Shearings’ St George Hotel (their best by far). In July 2019 I booked and paid a deposit to return the following January (2020) only to receive a phone call, six weeks later, informing me that Shearings no longer intended to honour the booking and wouldn’t run a coach to Harrogate for unexplained “operational reasons”. I offered to make our own way to and from the hotel if the company agreed to cover rail costs but they adamantly refused. Initially unable to specify which provision of our binding contract the company relied upon to legitimate this cancellation, Shearings eventually cited “clause 9” which states that “As we plan your holiday arrangements many months in advance we may occasionally have to make changes or cancel your booking and we reserve the right to do so at any time.” I pointed out the significance of the words “have to make changes”, meaning that for any cancellation to be legitimate it must be forced upon the company by external circumstances (such as the hotel having burnt down), NOT simply the company’s whim. On the internet I discovered Shearings were marketing the same category of room and meals at the St George for the identical four day period at three times the price contracted to me and “coincidentally” Harrogate was that week hosting a Sales Convention at the Conference Centre opposite the hotel. On the face of it, Shearings appeared to be cynically selling our contracted rooms at a much higher rate to incoming sales reps. I printed off this page and when I checked a few days later all these rooms had been sold, presumably at this higher price.

Terminological Inexactitude

In a letter dated 11.9.2019 Shearings’ “Customer Relations Manager” Angela Fowler re-stated the company’s position - “we may occasionally have to make changes” and “we are not able to agree to any of the choices that you have given us” (my emphasis). Instead of addressing the critical distinction between forced changes and voluntary choices Ms Fowler claimed a similar inability to finance alternative transport. I realised that ultimately Grayken’s ruthless regime was pushing Shearings’ minions into screwing customers like me but I wasn’t intimidated and decided to sue for “Breach of Contract”.

Justice Delayed

After essential pre-action exchanges of letters I filed formal court papers on 3.10.2019. You don’t need a barrister, solicitor or horsehair wig, just £35 (less online). I claimed £257.60, the cost of two ordinary return rail fares from my home in Llandudno to Harrogate. Shearings’ defence amounted to no more than a restatement of Angela Fowler’s previously quoted letter. I was duly informed that the case would be heard on 20.3.2020, unfortunately Covid intervened and the hearing was twice postponed until on Friday 6th November 2020 at 2pm I was finally called into Prestatyn’s Court Number Three for a hearing before Deputy District Judge Morris.

Justice Denied

The judge ruled against Shearings’ defence that the contract gave carte blanche for the company to amend or cancel at will. I was awarded my original claim plus costs, amounting to £317.60. Unfortunately in the interval between launching the claim in 2019 and this November 2020 judgement Shearings went bust.

It’s difficult to calculate how much wealth Lone Star extracted before eventually driving Herbert Shearing’s century-old company over the edge. E & Y (previously “Ernest & Young”) will certainly make a fortune from their dismemberment (“Administration”) of the company’s residual assets as they’re legally entitled to feast on the carcase before lowly “unsecured creditors” like me get a look in. Leger Travel bought the Shearings trading name and customer-list but none of its liabilities, 2,500 employees lost their jobs while innumerable suppliers were left with unpaid invoices. Although I don’t expect to get my £317.60 I’d still encourage people not to submit to big company bullying. If all else fails, suing isn’t difficult or expensive and authority everywhere relies on deferential, fearful compliance. As I write John Grayken’s Lone Star has just sunk its fangs into another well-known “distressed asset”, so if you’re contemplating moving into a McCarthy & Stone retirement home, think again.

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A Gradely Book for Gradely Folk!

BOOK REVIEW by Christopher Draper

FOR anyone who imagines Sir Keir Starmer, a sharp-suited, Cambridge-educated lawyer and Knight of the Realm, is the embodiment of Socialism, Paul Salveson’s newly published evocation of the writings and cultural milieu of a pioneering Bolton socialist will prove a revelation.

“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” celebrates, revisits and re-enacts a classic text (“Moorland & Memories”) published a century ago by Allen Clarke (1863-1935), an astonishingly prolific and wide-ranging radical journalist familiar to his contemporaries as the proprietor, editor and chief writer of such popular Northern newspapers as, “Teddy Ashton’s Journal – a Gradely Paper for Gradely Folk”. Clarke wrote poetry, short stories, social and political commentaries and philosophical essays. Although he was an exceptional talent, the popularity of Clarke’s writings with working folk is indicative of the vivacity and cultural diversity of the North’s pioneering socialist and labour movement before it fell beneath the wheels of electioneering and concentrated on getting careerists and snake oil salesmen into Parliament.

Salveson describes Clarke’s politics as, “Libertarian Socialist” but notes that “quite a big part of him leant towards anarchism of the non-violent Tolstoyan sort”. That’s how I first came across Clarke, whilst researching the street-level origins of British anarchism and John Tamlyn, a Burnley-based libertarian whose stories were published in “Teddy Ashton’s Journal”. Much of this very warp and weft of the everyday lives, political networks and cultural milieu of pioneering Northern socialists is still missed by London-centric historians and ivory-towered academics. In contrast Salveson digs down into his home turf and maintains living links with the people, places and politics he writes about. Through a hundred and eighty pages and twenty-eight profusely illustrated chapters, “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” meanders around Clarke’s Lancashire homeland on foot, by bike and rail, teasing out the many and varied threads running through Clarke’s original 1920 volume. (If only Salveson had included an index readers would be spared page-turning meanderings in attempting to locate particular topics!).

Firstly we get an introduction to the man himself. Clarke was the son of cotton workers and he joined them as a “little piecer” employed in the mill when he was only eleven but the family were far from passive, ignorant victims of poverty. His father was a union activist, blacklisted for his beliefs and the family were avid readers interested in a range of intellectual topics. Appalled by the working conditions he experienced in the factories Allen turned to writing. Employed as a journalist by a series of Northern newspapers he also experimented as a newspaper proprietor and with publication of “Teddy Ashton’s Journal” hit upon a winning formula, which at its peak in the 1890’s attracted a readership of 50,000 every week.

The paper’s letters column, bulging with missives from weavers, minders and railwaymen, shows his readership was overwhelmingly working class. Clarke considered himself part of that great Northern industrial working class and his stories, both serious and comic, featured ordinary people’s lives in the mills, weaving sheds and mines. His political vision, though, extended way beyond the factories he thought so damaged the beloved landscape as well as workers lives. He delighted in nature and the wild places of the North. Salveson clearly shares Clarke’s wider vision of how socialism should and can offer so much more than higher wages and in tracing the threads of Clarke’s writings Salveson re-enacts some of Clarke’s original geographical and philosophical rambles.

Tolstoy, Gandhi, Whitman, Edward Carpenter and Michael Davitt all appear in “Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” as well as trams, windmills and steam engines. Besides the richness of detailed local history perhaps the ultimate value of this book is as a model and inspiration to readers to dig into their own home turf and rediscover the rich radical networks of mutual aid that thrived before our political vision grew dim. As Clarke recalled in “Teddy Ashton’s Lancashire Annual (1908)”:

“I remember Pendle,

Where in days gone by

Crowds of comrades gathered

‘Neath the moor top sky;

Oh the friendly greetings,

When our hearts were jolly bowls

With fellowship o’er flowing,

And the vision in our souls!”

(“Moorlands, Memories and Reflections” – priced £21 – is available at all good bookshops and WH Smith, or direct from the author at paul.salveson@myphone.coop)

A PARCEL of ROGUES! by Christopher Draper

YOU CAN tell what God thinks of money when you look at the sort of people he gives it to - he has a similar opinion of Britain’s Honours System and its recipients…

1) Jimmy Savile – Officer of the Order of British Empire (OBE) 1972, Knighthood 1990 – from the 1950’s many people complained of Savile’s vile sexual abuse of victims aged from 5 to 75 (including corpses) but his money and social connections protected him until his death in 2011. Feeling increasingly threatened by gossip, in 1990 Savile confided to journalist Lynn Banks, “It was a gi-normous relief when I got the knighthood because it got me off the hook.”

2) Benito Mussolini – Knighthood 1923 – Funded from 1917 by Britain’s MI5, in 1919 Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist Party. Backed by blackshirted thugs, from 1922 Mussolini headed Italy’s terror regime. His dictatorship received the British seal of approval in 1923 with an Official Visit from King George Fifth who rewarded Il Duce with a Knighthood.

3) Harvey Weinstein – Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) 2004 – currently serving 23 years imprisonment for numerous sexual assaults including rape.

4) Robert Mugabe – Knighthood 1994 – anti-colonial guerrilla leader turned murderous, homophobic dictator, responsible for genocide of 20,000 residents of Matabele land in the early 1980’s.

5) Jean Else – Dame 2001 – “Labour Luvvie” honoured as “Super Head” of Manchester’s “Whalley Range High School”. In 2004 Dame Jean Else was suspended and subsequently found guilty of making unauthorised payments and nepotism, which included promoting her twin sister from part-time clerical assistant to deputy head! Sacked and banned by the General Teaching Council.

6) Anthony Blunt – Knighthood – spied for Stalin from 1935-51. Although the authorities were tipped off as early as 1950 and Blunt confessed in 1964, as a pillar of the establishment – distantly related to the Queen, educated at Marlborough Public School and Trinity College, Cambridge, member of the British Secret Service and “Surveyor of the King/Queen’s Pictures” Blunt was honoured and the truth concealed.

7) Vidkun Quisling – CBE 1929 – founder of the Norwegian Fascist Party and Nazi collaborator honoured by George V for his murky role in “representing British interests” in the 1920’s as a rabid anti-communist member of the Norwegian Legation in Moscow.

8) Fred Goodwin – Knighthood 2004 – as CEO of Royal Bank of Scotland, Goodwin was honoured “for services to the banking industry”. He had no banking qualifications, gambled on a reckless policy of acquisitions and expansion and four years later RBS spectacularly collapsed forcing an unprecedented government bailout. While ordinary citizens continue to bear the costs Goodwin ensured that he walked away with an RBS lifetime pension of £703,000 a year.

9) Nicolae Caeusescu – Knighthood 1978 – Following the 1978 honours ceremony at Buckingham Palace the Queen gave the Romanian dictator “a rifle with a telescopic sight, his wife, Elena, received a gold and diamond brooch”. After the pair were executed in 1989 by firing squad during a popular uprising the Queen sent back the “Star of the Socialist Republic of Romania – First Class” awarded to her by Caeusescu but pleaded in vain for return of the Knight’s regalia she’d given him, “a purple mantle with a silver star and collar with gold roses and sapphires. The collar is estimated to be worth £15,000.”

10) Rolf Harris – Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) 1968, OBE 1977, CBE 2009 – Broadcaster initially famous for singing about “Two Little Boys” and tying down kangaroos, later infamous for sexually assaulting little girls including his daughter’s thirteen year old friend. In 2005 the Queen sat for Harris at Buckingham Palace whilst he painted her official 80th birthday portrait and in 2012 he performed outside the Palace for her Jubilee Concert. Two year later he was found guilty of 12 counts of indecent assault and sentenced to 5 years and 9 months in prison.

Britain’s Honours System is a tawdry confection, impressing naught but fools and narcissists. The above list of crooks, conmen, killers and paedophiles is merely the tip of the dung heap. Next on Northern Voices I’ll identify ten “Honourable Hypocrites” who broadcast their anti-establishment credentials whilst brown-nosing their way onto the Honours List.

CD 2020

“We’re all in it together!” by Christopher Draper

ASDA was packed today – the woman on the till reckons it’s because we’re about to get the full lockdown treatment in Wales – “but at least we’re all in it together”. I beg to differ…

1) April 2020, Dominic Cummings visited Barnard Castle despite lockdown regulations

2) September, Tony Blair photographed leaving Mayfair restaurant in breach of compulsory 14-day quarantine on return from trip to USA

3) September, SNP Rutherglen MP Margaret Ferrier travelled from Scotland and back on public transport to speak in Parliament despite having covid. She also preached in St Mungo’s Church, Glasgow

4) March, Stephen Kinnock, Labour MP for Aberavon journeyed to father’s birthday party despite ban on all but essential travel

5) September, Jeremy Corbyn MP defied “rule of six” to attend larger dinner party

6) July, The Prime Minister’s father (and former MEP) Stanley Johnson defied travel ban to visit his holiday home in Greece. On return to England photographed entering shops without wearing mask

7) October 5th Parliamentary authorities confirm that MP’s (allegedly including Matt Hancock) continued drinking alcohol in Parliament bar after the 10pm deadline imposed on the rest of us. Parliament refuses to identify the guilty individuals.

8) April, Government Housing Minister, Robert Jenrick MP, defied lockdown and travelled 150 miles to his parents’ Herefordshire home

9) April, Dr Catherine Calderwood, Scotland’s Chief Medical Officer, ignored lockdown regulations and on two weekends travelled from Edinburgh to her Earlsferry holiday home

10) August 19th, EU Commissioner, Phil Hogan, defied ban on group meetings by attending a golf dinner in County Galway, along with other politicians and an Irish Supreme Court judge

None of the above individuals were prosecuted although tens of thousands of ordinary folk have been fined and on October 4th five Doncaster welders authorised to work on the Isle of Man Electric Railway were imprisoned for two weeks because they unwittingly breached regulations by visiting Tesco on their brief journey from the ferry to their hotel. Ironically they were singled out because they wore masks which aren’t required on the IOM.

As far as our political class are concerned, “Laws are evidently for the Little People!”

Christopher Draper, Llandudno

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Forget Slavery – Have a Scone!

by  Christopher Draper

THE downfall of Edward Colston sent shock waves through the massed ranks of NATIONAL TRUST top brass.  Founded in 1895 primarily to protect threatened landscapes, over succeeding decades NT has increasingly focussed on acquiring, conserving and celebrating the legacy of the genocidal colonial adventurers, aristocratic land grabbers and grubby financiers that created Britain’s despicable slave trade. These blood money palaces, stately homes and grand gardens were designed to flaunt their patron’s social standing and aesthetic good taste and camouflage the barbaric reality.  It was myth-making on a grand scale and it’s a tradition the NATIONAL TRUST has assiduously maintained and enhanced.

Rattling the Tea Cups

Suddenly the hierarchy feel exposed and vulnerable – Colston’s statue was pulled down on the 7^th June 2020 and within four days NT bosses had spirited away and hidden the “Kneeling Slave” statue that formerly greeted visitors to Dunham Massey Hall, Altrincham.  Visitors had long questioned the Trust’s failure to explain and justify the prominent exhibition of this racially demeaning icon and in response NT bosses defended the racist imagery with an outrageous lie…

Whitewash

NT management refuse to admit any failure of moral or historical judgement and instead claim they belatedly acted solely out of concern for visitors’ emotions;

“The statue has caused upset and distress because of the way it depicts a black person and because of its prominence at the front of the house”

Typical NT weasel words, in truth it acted to pre-empt the embarrassment of a public toppling in a Black-Lives-Matter related incident.  This is evident from NT’s application to the planning authorities for retroactive “listed structure” consent for the statue’s removal.  A spokesman for Trafford Council confirms that,

“The NATIONAL TRUST have written to the council’s planning service to advise that the statue was removed in order to preserve the structure”!

NT continue to claim,

“We don’t want to censor or deny the way colonial histories are woven into the fabric of our buildings…”

But this is precisely the reverse of the truth…

The BIG LIE!

In response to visitors’ critical enquiries, a decade ago NT erected an “interpretive” plaque alongside the Dunham Massey statue,

“This sundial is in the style of one commissioned by King William III. It represents Africa, one of four continents known at the time.  The figure depicts a Moor, not a slave…”!

No-one, apart from the NATIONAL TRUST, has ever made such an absurdly dishonest claim. Academics routinely refer to this and similar statues as “Kneeling Slaves”, sometimes as “Blackamoors”, never a Moor and always acknowledging the servile pose and colonial context.  A 1725 inventory details the figure as, “A negro Slave kneeling on one knee and bearing a Sun Dyall on his head” (sic).   The slave’s bent, kneeling posture bearing the full weight of a stone sundial for the benefit of aristocratic observers (and latterly modern visitors) offends everyone but the NATIONAL TRUST for as Madge Dresser emphasises, “The Blackamoor’s humanity is subsumed by his utilitarian function”.

The NT is structurally and philosophically wedded to a White Supremacist version of history.  It polishes, maintains and reproduces the reactionary views of a politico-cultural elite and denies the life histories of the exploited.  Despite being a mass membership organisation the NT is essentially a rich, powerful corporation that makes only occasional, spasmodic efforts to portray the lives of the lower orders.  The organisation eschews vital historical analysis preferring to retail romanticism, infotainment, refreshments and pseudo-historical nick-knackery – enter through the car-park and exit through the gift shop.

I’ll tackle more aspects of NT racism, greenwash and assorted flummery in future posts but focus here on the iconography of the “Kneeling Slave” and there’s another one on the other side of the Pennines…

A Telling Alternative

Wentworth Castle near Barnsley was built by a notorious slave trading family whose “Blackamoor” statue is now housed in the conservatory, which, along with extensive parklands is administered by the NATIONAL TRUST.  It’s a similar “Kneeling Slave” bearing a stone sundial, although it’s slightly earlier c.1720 rather than Dunham’s c.1735, it’s in much better condition.  This is not simply because it’s now kept indoors but because it was sensitively restored in 2011 by conservators who took great care to create a realistic black skin tone. When installed in the conservatory further scrupulous work was undertaken to research the context and historical significance of the figure most notably by Patrick Eyres.  Eyres subsequently led public walks around the grounds explaining the politico-historical context of the house and gardens and the particular significance of the “Blackamoor”.  These researches culminated in publication of his (highly recommended) book “Blackamoors in the Georgian Garden” (New Arcadian Press) and the erection of accurate and insightful interpretive signage at Wentworth, eg;

“Sir Thomas Wentworth helped to negotiate the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. This international treaty confirmed Britain as the most important commercial power in Europe. It included a lucrative monopoly over the Atlantic slave trade. Wentworth represented this in his house and gardens, including a statue of a kneeling African man supporting a sundial that now stands in the conservatory. Like many of his contemporaries, Wentworth made a great deal of money from the sale and labour of enslaved Africans. This human misery helped pay for the house and gardens he built.”

Exception Proves the Rule

Wentworth’s enlightened admissions contrast sharply with Dunham Massey’s denial and the explanation isn’t hard to find for NT only gained control of Wentworth Castle Gardens a year ago.  Wentworth’s admirable research and restoration had already been completed by volunteers who formed a community “Heritage Trust” that administered the gardens for two decades until shortage of funds forced them to hand over to NT in 2019.  The community trust recognised the Blackamoor as an icon of colonial exploitation that if exhibited unexplained would embody and perpetuate a racist world-view but when sensitively restored and contextualised offered enormous potential for critical re-evaluation of imperial history.  It’s imperative that the local trust’s interpretation endures and that visitors monitor the possible “re-interpretation” of the “Kneeling Slave” under NT stewardship.

“Not Another One!”

“Kneeling Slaves” were the eighteenth century’s best selling lead garden statues after William III, who owned both house and plantation slaves, commissioned a couple from Van Nost in 1701 for his Hampton Court Garden.  Supply and demand collapsed with the demise of the last London manufacturer, John Cheere in 1787, the year the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade was formed. Rather than boast of personal involvement in the slave trade, stately home owners grew embarrassed by the origins of their wealth and “Blackamoors” disappeared from grand gardens to be sold on, hidden away or melted down. Now only eight “Kneeling Slaves” continue to occupy their original garden, including our two NT examples but if the celebrated “Brenda of Bristol” were to visit her local NT property, she might well utter her famous catchphrase, “Oh no, not another one!”

Unbelievably a bedroom on show at the NATIONAL TRUST’s Dyrham Park “boasts” not just one but two “Kneeling Slaves”!  As house rather than garden slave, they’re borne down by the weight of huge exotic seashells rather than stone sundials but the pose is identical and leaving absolutely no scope for denial their servility is emphasised by their shackling with slave collar and chains.

Wilful Ignorance or Worse?

Wentworth’s sensitive restoration, display and interpretation exemplifies how these figures can be properly exhibited but distortion, denial and obfuscation more typically characterises NT’s approach.  Although NT received a copy of Eyres’ research it continued to exhibit the Dunham and Dyrham “Blackamoors” in the de-contextualised aesthetic fashion favoured by their original aristocratic owners.  In February 2018 a visitor was so shocked by Dyrham’s “Blackamoors” display that they complained on TRIPADVISOR;

“I was deeply disturbed during my visit to Dyrham Hall when I witnessed chained depictions of enslaved human beings in subservient positions casually being displayed as ornamental features…there was no explanation of these artefacts in the room or in the interpretation leaflets (there was only information about paintings and pottery)…”

Another post registered “revulsion” at the racist display.  Six months later Dyrham Park’s “Public Relations Manager” responded by insisting there are,“information leaflets on display next to the stands which put them into context”. However, no leaflets or info boards are apparent in extant photographs and although NT did recently supply me with an undated copy of a leaflet contextualising the “Blackamoor Stands” its value is academic as NT have now removed both Dyrham’s “Chained Slaves” from public view.

As I write, visitors can still gain sight of Wentworth’s “Blackamoor” through the windows of a locked conservatory but the Dunham and Dyrham “slaves” have been hidden away and their images removed from the NT website.  In future posts I’ll explain further how black lives don’t matter much to NT, and neither do white working class lives, nor internal democracy but in the meantime Northern Voices would appreciate readers’ feedback on your opinions and experiences of the NATIONAL TRUST.

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STALIN’S HOLOCAUST

  & 'the Falsifiers of History'

 by Christopher Draper

CLICK ON PHOTOs & ENLARGE IMAGEs

HAVING recently reviewed the film 'Mr Jones' for NV I’d now like to examine the 'Holodomor' that forms the backdrop to Agnieszka Holland’s work.  In 1953 Ralph Lemkin, the man who coined the term “genocide”, described Stalin’s Ukrainian famine as 'not simply a case of mass murder' but 'a case of genocide, of mass destruction, not of individuals only but of a culture and a nation'.  For Stalin, starving the Ukraine was the completion of unfinished business, his final solution.

Uppity Peasants

From the outbreak of the Russian revolution Ukrainian peasants fought to not only free themselves from landlords but also from domination by either Austrian troops or Bolshevik commissars.  Armed bands of guerrillas effectively liberated and defended their villages for prolonged periods with the most successful led by anarchist Nestor Makhno.  From 1917 until 1921 the Ukraine maintained its effective independence until finally overwhelmed by Trotsky’s Red Army.

Despite the Bolsheviks’ military victory they never captured the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian peasants who continued to resist forced Soviet collectivization. Determined to industrialise his Russian empire, in 1932-33 Stalin ruthlessly 'appropriated' Ukrainian grain to sell abroad in exchange for machinery.  The 'beauty' of Stalin’s Holodomor campaign was that it killed several million birds with one policy; it earned hard currency, it 'encouraged' peasants to submissively join collective farms in the faint hope of receiving basic sustenance and it offered the prospect of eradicating the last vestiges of independent Ukrainian cultural and political identity.

Saints and Sycophants

Two British journalists, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge, reported that millions of Ukrainians were being starved to death but most of their press colleagues looked the other way, gazing in admiration at Stalin’s imaginary achievements.  'Useful idiot'  Bernard Shaw celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday at a banquet in Moscow, ridiculing those who’d given him tins of food as he left England, 'They thought Russia was starving but I threw all of the food out the window in Poland before I reached the Soviet frontier'.  As a consequence of Shaw’s pro-Soviet sycophancy, as Gareth Jones noted, 'After Stalin the most hated man in Russia is Bernard Shaw'.

Malcolm Muggeridge reported from Russia in 1932-3 as correspondent of the Manchester Guardian and after witnessing first-hand the starvation of the Ukraine, in March 1933 he contributed three damning articles on the famine. Jones’ reporting promptly echoed and magnified Muggeridge’s observations which provoked the wrath of Stalin’s apologists, led by celebrated New York Times correspondent, Walter Duranty.

Curiously Anne Applebaum in her recent magisterial tome, 'Stalin’s War on Ukraine' (page 324) insists, '…nobody came to Jones’ defence, not even Muggeridge' yet in April 1933 Muggeridge wrote to Duranty’s newspaper challenging his claims and unequivocally backing Gareth Jones.  Muggeridge’s New York Times intervention was subsequently reported in the Western Mail & South Wales News on 10 May 1933 under the headline, 'The Raging Famine in Russia'. Muggeridge couldn’t have been more explicit or outspoken, '…my own observations of the state of affairs outside Moscow…led me to come to precisely the same conclusions as Mr Gareth Jones.'  In his autobiography Muggeridge described Duranty as, 'the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.'

Duranty’s Dad?

Duranty’s coverage of Stalin’s Five Year Plan gained him a Pulitzer Prize and the enduring gratitude of the Soviet regtime. His shady version of events is still occasionally taken at face value by modern biographers; James William Cowl ('Angels in Stalin’s Paradise') swallows Duranty’s absurd claim that he was orphaned as a child when both his parents were killed in a train crash.  Sally J Taylor ('Stalin’s Apologist') is less credulous yet writes that, in 1899 Duranty was suddenly transferred from Harrow public school to Bedford Grammar, 'for reasons never made clear, his father dropped from sight entirely, leaving his mother to take up modest lodgings on her own'(pg 20) 'His father had simply disappeared'(pg 26).  Duranty’s Wikipaedia entry explains, 'He studied at Harrow, one of Britain’s most prestigious public schools but a sudden collapse in the family business led to his transfer to Bedford College.'   

Like Duranty’s press colleagues, his biographers overlooked the elephant in the room.  The truth is that Duranty was no orphan and his father’s disappearance no mystery - on Thursday 27 July 1899 William S. Duranty, aged 52, was convicted of fraud at Liverpool Crown Court and sentenced to 'four years penal servitude', whence prisoner Z.285 was transferred to Parkhurst Prison.  It is a curious irony of Walter’s affection for Stalin, that his father’s middle name was recorded as “Steel”.

A Bed-Full of Liars

Many shared the liars’ bed alongside Duranty and Shaw. Both the British and American governments received secret intelligence of the Holodomor but kept quite, preferring to collude with Stalin for strategic and commercial advantage. Both The Economist and The Times broke undertakings to publish Gareth Jones’ Ukrainian reports.  Jones and Muggeridge were cold-shouldered by colleagues and banned from returning to Russia.  Muggeridge went off to work in India whilst Jones reported first from Germany and then the Far East where he was killed.

Murder!

On 11 July 1935 Gareth Jones ventured north from Bejing into Inner Mongolia on a trip arranged with the help of two locally based Westerners, Adam Purpis and Herbert Muller.  Muller was the North China & Mongolia correspondent of the official German news agency whilst Purpis was local director of 'WOSTWAG', a German trading company, whose firm supplied the two pressmen with a vehicle and Russian driver, Anatoli Petrewschtschew, for their long journey along a route arranged by Muller.

On 25 July they met up with Purpis at a Mongolian trading post where (according to a report Muller despatched to his press agency), 'We were to be the guests of Mr Purpis, a Latvian, “the King of Kalgan” who is the chief trader in inner Mongolia'. 

After enjoying Purpis’ hospitality Jones and Muller continued on their quest until sometime before the end of July they were captured by 'bandits' about eighty-three miles north east of Kalgan, near Paochang. After that, reliable evidence is hard to come by but curiously after a couple of days captivity Muller and the driver were both released, allegedly so they could raise a ransom for Jones’ return, however when a ransom was offered it was refused.  On 16 August Jones’s discarded corpse was discovered by Chinese troops, he’d died from two bullet wounds to the torso and another in the back of the head, the classic assassin’s coup de grace.

The Homodor’s Final Victim?

Newspapers speculated on the reasons for Gareth’s killing but recently released British intelligence files indicate a sinister truth. Jones’ associates were not as they appeared, both Herbert Muller and Adam Purpis were identified by MI5 as Russian agents and WOSTWAG was a Red Army trading vehicle organised to obtain hard currency for the purchase of armaments and also provide cover for Soviet secret agents.  It is not difficult to detect Stalin’s murderous hand in Gareth Jones’ execution but for the sake of balance I would like to conclude by noting that “The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist)” have recently published their own review of the Agnieszka Holland’s film 'Mr Jones' and arrived at rather different conclusions;

“Far from exposing the crimes of Stalin and the USSR, the new film Mr Jones exposes the utter bankruptcy of modern western cinema and the thoughtless, prejudiced, virulently anticommunist propagandists who fill positions at the Guardian and other such institutions.  These real falsifiers of history need to be exposed and confronted for the barefaced liars that they are.”

Gareth died but Stalin lives on!

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Pastor NIEMOLLER for OUR TIME

“First they came for the Communists
 And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews

And I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then the Jews came for the Palestinians

And I didn’t speak out, afraid of being labelled “Anti-Semite””.

 

Christopher Draper, 2019

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Northern Zionists Score Spectacular Own Goal!

by Chris Draper

WHEN “North-West Friends of Israel” (NWFOI) and other assorted Zionists tried to provoke a city-wide boycott of an “Interfaith Conference for Palestine” they got more than they bargained for when their bigoted and abusive behaviour was exposed and denounced by Chester community leader Roderick Heather MBE.

The free entry, open-to-all conference was due to begin at St Columba’s Church, Chester on 1^st November 2019 but forty-eight hours before it convened a wolfpack spearheaded by NWFOI and led by Anthony Dennison and Raphi Bloom, bombarded Chester’s numerous church halls and community venues with telephone calls, emails and social media messaging all warning them not to host this conclave of “Anti-Semites, Holocaust Deniers and Hate-Speakers”.  Unfortunately for the bigots after they succeeded in bullying the Bishop of Shrewsbury into cancelling the church booking the Conference found an ideal alternative at Hoole Community Centre where the Chairman of the Trustees, Roderick Heather courageously withstood a barrage of intimidatory NWFOI communications.

Unlike the local Labour MP Chris Matheson who ignorantly obliged local reporters with prejudiced and ill-informed comments of the “We don’t want holocaust deniers in our town” type, Roderick Heather actually took the trouble to attend the conference as an observer and judge for himself whether this was indeed an anti-semitic event or rather, a free, open-minded conference which included criticism of Israeli State policy.

After spending a day at the Conference, Mr Heather informed those attending that he was very impressed by the content of speeches, quality of discussion and conduct of the meeting and assured everyone present that they would always be welcome to return to the Hoole Centre.  This contrasted with his conclusions about the behaviour of the NWFOI and to them he addressed the following message;

“Your intervention (and the various other coordinated extreme ones we received today) did nothing to help foster good community relations here in Chester or to improve the understanding and sympathy for the Jewish cause nationally in the UK.  The ill-informed and bigoted telephone and social media campaign that we have witnessed today is a disgrace.  It was unfounded and unnecessary and has done your cause much harm. Be aware that I am ensuring that as many people as possible (locally and nationally) are made aware of the vitriolic, verbal bullying we have been subjected to today.”

Roderick Heather MBE

Chairman Hoole Community Trust

The North’s Zionist lobby is demonstrably determined to intimidate anyone who sticks their head above the parapet and criticises Israel.  The tactic is to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. Jews who criticise Israel (like those who attended the Chester conference) are branded “self-hating Jews” and dismissed. Archbishop Tutu describes Israel as an apartheid state but merely to agree with him is sufficient grounds for anyone to be expelled from the Labour Party.  Free speech is a precious commodity that’s found a friend in Mr Heather and sinister enemies in NWFOI.  Perhaps Mr Dennison, Mr Bloom,  Mr Matheson or the Bishop of Shrewsbury would care to reply and offer a justification for their appalling behaviour but I rather think not for they evidently fear quiet, honest, open, reasoned debate.

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Justifying Reviews on the NV Blog

We have taken the unusual step of publishing two reviews of the controversial booklet 'Shit Wigs and Steroids: Anarchism's (and the left's) Tolerance of Delusion'.  We have done this because in the current climate we believe this publication, whatever its flaws, offers a valuable insight into developments on the strange shores of the British political left and beyond.  It needs to be read, because too many people are what we would call 'skedaddlers', ducking and dodging all requirements for moral compass in a social context like the current trends and fashions encouraged by the Gender Recognition Act.

The authors of the two reviews on this Blog offer different perspectives in their approach to the text.  Both are experienced reviewers; Les May reviewed 'Smile for the Camera: The Double Life of Cyril Smith'* and Chris Draper wrote 'Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history'**.  

In the past Freedom newspaper would have had the courage to run alternative assessments together with follow-up correspondence, always encouraging controversy.  Nowadays, Freedom in all its forms offers a less challenging body of work both intellectually and in propaganda terms.  One might have thought that Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News, who was at the Liverpool Bookfair when the incident described in the book occured, and its author was accosted, detained and roughly expelled, would be willing to review it, and certainly it might be expected that it would be a worthy subject of debate on a thread on Libcom?

Any problems in the contents ought to be left to the readers to access its value.  Whatever it shouldn't be censored by the supercillious southern anarchists who think they can decide what is suitable for us northerners to consume.

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* 

N.V. Review of 'Smile for the Camer - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/2015/10/nv-review-of-smile-for-camera.html

**  Who Killed Freedom?: an unauthorised history 4. - Northern Voices

northernvoicesmag.blogspot.com/.../who-killed-freedom-unauthorised-history_7.html