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The Walsall Anarchists were a group of anarchists arrested on explosive charges in Walsall, present-day West Midlands, England in 1892. [1]
Recent research into police files has revealed that the bombings were instigated by Auguste Coulon, an agent provocateur of Special Branch Inspector William Melville, who would go on to become an early official of what became MI5. [2]
On 6 January 1892, an anarchist from Walsall named Joe Deakin was arrested on Tottenham Court Road, London, and the next day was charged with manufacturing bombs at the Great Marlborough Street Magistrates Court. Following the trial, a number of other anarchists including Victor Cails, Fred Charles, William Ditchfield, John Westley and Jean Battola, were also arrested and jointly charged with manufacturing explosives. When they first appeared at the police court in Walsall, the prosecution asked for the defendants to be remanded for a week, claiming that "[t]he authorities both in Walsall and London had received very important information with reference to what he might call a widespread conspiracy throughout the country." [1]
The evidence that was presented by the prosecution included a number of allegations that the defendants possessed materials for the construction of explosives: [3]
All six were remanded in custody, although no explosives were actually found and there was no evidence as regards the other three defendants.
Under the false belief that Charles was an informant, Deakin made a confession. [4] However, his confession also implicated Auguste Coulon, a French anarchist, who worked as an assistant in the school set up by Louise Michel in order to educate foreign socialists' children in London. [5] He was also involved in trying to organise chemistry classes and translating and circulating information about bomb making. [6] The police also arrested a Swiss inventor called Cavargna, the inventor of a number of small explosives that were used to exterminate rabbits in Australia, who was released from jail after two days. [7] A further person named McCormack, who had been recently expelled from the socialist club in Walsall, offered to become an informant for the police, who soon decided he was unreliable. He went to Birmingham where he sold his story to the newspaper for drinking money. After being arrested under charges of public intoxication, he promptly declared in court next day that the police had employed him to fabricate evidence against the Walsall Anarchists. [8] Charles Mowbray and David Nicoll were soon also arrested on conspiracy charges. [9]
Following his release, Nicoll was raising money for the Walsall anarchists when, by chance, Coulon's brother let slip that Coulon himself was a police agent. [10] The defence brought up the situation at the police court and gave Coulon's address asking why he had not been arrested as well. [11] After Nicoll had set up an anarchist defence fund, Edward Carpenter set up one which raised money in socialist circles. Their different political outlook was especially noticeable as regards to what extent they felt the whole trial was a case of police provocation. [12]
The case aroused media attention, particularly around two texts: the Means of Emancipation and The Anarchist Feast at The Opera –the latter described how the maximum amount of damage could be done to an opera house by rupturing its gas supply and leaving incendiary devices in the seats, while the miscreant could make their escape. [13] Following three bombings in Paris, the correspondent for The Times made the connection: 'Anarchists should not be regarded as members of a political party, and it should not be possible for an Anarchist to hurry away from Paris to find an asylum in Brussels, in Geneva or in London.' Ravachol was arrested for two of these bombings, and promptly made a confession.
The climate of the trial was not conducive to a sober consideration of the facts –The Anarchist Feast at The Opera was read out as if it were the views of the defendants. [14] The defense did not argue that it was a police plot. Charles, Cails and Battola were found guilty, Deakin was also found guilty but the jury recommended that the judge grant him mercy, while Westley and Ditchfield were found not guilty. Those found guilty were allowed to make a statement, whereupon the first three stated they thought it was a police plot. [15] Charles, Battola and Cails were each sentenced to ten years in prison, while Deakin was sentenced to five years. Although the judge denied he was punishing them for being anarchists, The Times was more to the point: [16]
The offence with which the prisoners were charged is one of the most dastardly and wicked which it is possible to conceive. Like treason it is aimed at the very heart of the State, but it is not designed to destroy the existing Government alone. It strikes at all Governments, and behind all Governments it strikes at those elementary social rights for the defence of which all forms and methods of civil rules exist. The crime of which the Walsall prisoners have been found guilty was no isolated act ( ... ) Hate, envy, the lust of plunder, and the lust of bloodshed are stamped on every line of the Anarchist literature read at Walsall and on every word of the confessions made by RAVACHOL.
'Alas! Alas! Ten years for Charles, it is too bad. An evil conscience makes them cowards.' wrote Edward Carpenter following the trial. [17]
The Angry Brigade was a far-left British terrorist group responsible for a series of bomb attacks in England between 1970 and 1972. Using small bombs, they targeted banks, embassies, a BBC Outside Broadcast vehicle, and the homes of Conservative Members of Parliament (MPs). In total, police attributed 25 bombings to the Angry Brigade. The bombings mostly caused property damage; one person was slightly injured. Of the eight people who stood trial, known as the Stoke Newington Eight, four were acquitted. John Barker, along with Hilary Creek, Anna Mendelssohn and Jim Greenfield, were convicted on majority verdicts, and sentenced to ten years. In a 2014 interview, Barker described the trial as political, but acknowledged that "they framed a guilty man".
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August Vincent Theodore Spies was an American upholsterer, radical labor activist, and newspaper editor. An anarchist, Spies was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder following a bomb attack on police in an event remembered as the Haymarket affair. Spies was one of four who were executed in the aftermath of this event.
The Anarchist was a monthly newspaper produced in London, England, between 1885 and 1888. Henry Albert Seymour, a leading individualist anarchist was the editor throughout its production. The Anarchist is notable for being the first English-language Anarchist periodical in Britain. The paper was printed in London, although the initial idea and planning took place in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. Seymour lived in Tunbridge Wells until early 1885, and there is correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Seymour discussing the first edition which shows that Seymour was still living in Tunbridge Wells when the first issue was being prepared.
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The Labour Emancipation League was a socialist organisation in London.
Commonweal was a British socialist newspaper founded in 1885 by the newborn Socialist League. Its aims were to spread socialist views and to win over new recruits.
John Turner was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent."
The Orsini bomb was a terrorist improvised explosive device built by and named after Felice Orsini and used as a hand grenade on 14 January 1858 in an unsuccessful attack on Napoleon III. The weapons were somewhat commonly used by anarchists in the latter half of the 19th century in Europe, and surplus bombs were also used by the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The design is reminiscent of modern impact fused grenades, such as the Soviet RGO hand grenades. Orsini bombs were designed to remove “the uncertainty of slow burning fused weapons".
Marie Le Compte was an American journal editor and anarchist who was active during the early 1880s.
Thomas Edward Cantwell was a British anarchist activist.
Henry Benjamin Samuels, known as Henry Benjamin and Harry Samuels, was a British anarchist who came under suspicion of being a police spy. Samuels was known for his incendiary rhetoric.
Charles Wilfred Mowbray was an English anarcho-communist agitator, tailor, trade unionist and public speaker. Mowbray was an active orator and agitator in the Labour Emancipation League, and then the Socialist League, becoming the publisher of the Socialist League's newspaper Commonweal in 1890. At this time he began describing himself as an anarcho-communist. He was arrested in 1892 and charged with conspiracy to murder in a high profile trial but was acquitted. At this time he reportedly worked as a police informant. From 1894 he lived and worked in the United States where he went on speaker tours before being deported in the wake of the assassination of President McKinley. Back in England he moved away from anarchism and began lecturing on tariff reform (protectionism) and was funded by the National Union of Conservative Associations.
The Bresci Circle was a group of New York City anarchists remembered for a failed bombing attempt on St. Patrick's Cathedral in 1915, in which two of its members were arrested. The group was named after Gaetano Bresci, a New York anarchist who killed King Umberto I of Italy.
Galleanisti are followers or supporters of the insurrectionary anarchist Luigi Galleani, who operated most notably in the United States following his immigration to the country. The vast majority of Galleanisti or Galleanists were similarly poor and working class Italian immigrants or Italian Americans, and especially Italian anarchists and Italian immigrants or Italian-Americans involved in the labor movement of the time. Galleanists remain the primary suspects in a campaign of bombings between 1914 and 1920 in the United States.
Daniel Chatterton was a British political pamphleteer and propagandist and publisher of Chatterton's Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher.
David John Nicoll was a British anarchist newspaper editor, writer, poet and public speaker. Nicoll replaced William Morris as the editor of the Socialist League's newspaper Commonweal in 1890 until 1892 when Nicoll was imprisoned for incitement to murder a police inspector, a judge and the Home Secretary. Nicoll produced a series of pamphlets critical of the police and singling out those in the anarchist movement he believed to be police spies. Following his imprisonment Nicoll's mental health deteriorated and he died in poverty.
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James Tochatti, was a Scottish anarchist agitator, merchant tailor, trade unionist, newspaper editor and public speaker. From 1894 to 1896 he was editor of the monthly anarcho-communist paper Liberty.
Liberty: A Journal of Anarchist Communism was a monthly anarcho-communist paper published in London from 1894 to 1896, mostly comprising political essays. The paper was edited and published by James Tochatti from his shop in Hammersmith, London, with help from regular contributor Louisa Sarah Bevington.
