SOURCE: “The Era of Propaganda by Deed II: 1894-7,” in The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London, Croom Helm, 1983, 99-119.

[In the following essay, Oliver details several prominent anarchist incidents of the 1890s, including the event that inspired Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent.]

THE GREENWICH PARK EXPLOSION

The sole outrage that occurred in London, a bomb explosion outside the Greenwich Observatory in February 1894, killed the man carrying the bomb. It is probably best known because Conrad based his novel The Secret Agent on it. In his “author's note” to the novel, Conrad said that the subject came to him “in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities”. His friend told him that the man carrying the bomb “was half an idiot” but “these were absolutely the only words that passed between us”. Conrad was sure that if his friend once his life had seen “the back of an anarchist”, that must have been the whole extent of his connection with “the underworld”.¹ He admitted about a week later that he had read “the rather summary recollections of an Assistant Commissioner of Police” and also that suggestions for certain passages “came from various sources”.² Two authorities on Conrad, Professors Norman Sherry (in his Conrad's Western World, published in 1971) and Ian Watt (in Conrad: The Secret Agent, published in 1973) have carefully studied Conrad's sources and the question of how much he knew about the Greenwich Park explosion. Both emphasised the importance of Conrad's friendship with Ford Madox Ford, who was closely connected with the anarchist journal the Torch, published by the children of W. M. Rossetti. Ford's sister, Juliet Hueffer, lived with the family. In his reminiscences, Ford said that both he and Conrad knew “a great many of the Goodge Street group (meaning the Ossulston Street office of the Torch). Ford also provided Conrad with anarchist literature and introductions. But, as Professor Sherry knew, Ford's memoirs are very unreliable. As was recently shown, Ford positively took pride in doctoring them, claiming that he had “for facts the most profound contempt”.³ And Conrad visited W. M. Rossetti's house between the start of 1903 and August 1904, when only Helen Rossetti (then Helen Angeli), one of the two sisters who ran the Torch, lived there. Whatever she may have told Conrad about the Greenwich Park explosion must have been anarchist hearsay, because at the time when it happened, both Rossetti sisters were in Italy and the Torch was in suspense (see Ch. 6). Helen Angeli is however likely to have given Conrad a good deal of information about London anarchists in general.

Professor Sherry pointed out that in November 1906 Conrad wrote to Sir Algernon Methuen saying that the novel was based on inside knowledge. But in 1923 he denied all inside knowledge when he wrote to Ambrose Barker, who had sent him a pamphlet on the subject.⁴ Sherry commented that it looked as if Barker had stumbled on one of Conrad's sources and that Conrad's denial arose from a desire to conceal the sources he had used.⁵ However, on the basis of Conrad's denial, Professor Watt thought that it should be assumed that Conrad's main informant was Ford. He also believed that “there is also some evidence to show that the CID was directly involved in the affair through a secret agent pretending to be an anarchist” and mentioned David Nicoll's allegation that in the Walsall case Coulon had started an anarchist journal on behalf of the police.⁶ Conrad's denials have in the meanwhile been blown sky high in Dr Paul Avrich's study of Conrad's “Professor”, published in 1977.⁷ Avrich has demonstrated that “the Professor” in The Secret Agent was based on a passage in the 13 January 1885 issue of a Chicago paper called the Alarm, edited by the “Haymarket martyr” A. R. Parsons. (This paper appeared, disguised as The Gong, in the novel among the “obscure newspapers” in the window of Conrad's “secret agent's” shop.) As Dr Avrich says, Conrad “always tried to conceal the extent of the research he undertook for this novel”. In fact his data for it came “from a whole array of London newspapers, police reports, and anarchist periodicals and pamphlets”. It seems worthwhile to reconsider Conrad's main plot in this novel in the light of firmer evidence than Ford's and Helen Angeli's recollections. In the novel, a “secret agent”, Verloc, employed by the Russian embassy, was responsible for making his half-witted brother-in-law, Stevie, take the bomb to Greenwich Park, where he stumbled and was blown to pieces. Stevie is represented as so much looking up to and trusting Verloc that he would do anything for him.

What actually happened in February 1894 was reported in the press and at the inquest on Martial Bourdin. The press reported that a man had blown himself up when he was carrying a bomb on the 16th. The date is important because on 12 February Emile Henry had been arrested in Paris for throwing a bomb in the café of the Hotel Terminus, in the evening, when a number of people were listening to the orchestra. One person was killed and Henry was immediately arrested. It was alleged that there was reason to believe that he got the ingredients and material for the bomb in London, where several bombs thrown in Paris were made.⁸ Martial Bourdin was brother of the tailor Henri (mentioned by Mrs Wilson in 1884) and brother-in-law of H. B. Samuels. He was a ladies' tailor. But the news of the explosion was conveyed to Scotland Yard not by telegram but by letter. An inspector was fined £4 for this mistake.⁹ This detail was reported in The Times but seems to have been overlooked by all later commentators. Sherry positively says that the police officers got in touch with Scotland Yard by telegraph. However, this delay explains why no searches of suspects or of the Autonomie club were made immediately. (Bourdin was a member of the French section of the club.) And Robert Anderson, the assistant police commissioner, testified later that during that afternoon in February 1894, when he was told that Bourdin had left his Soho shop with a bomb in his pocket, it was impossible to track him. All he could do was to send out officers in every direction to watch persons and places he might be likely to attack. The Greenwich Park Observatory was “the very last place” the police would have thought of watching.¹⁰ Since railway stations would obviously be watched, to put the police off the scent Bourdin went by tram (as was shown at the inquest). But Conrad's Stevie went to Maze Hill station, perhaps on the basis of earlier press reports alleging that Bourdin went by train. Conrad's admitted interest in Anderson's memoirs seems to have been mainly because they alleged that the Home Secretary was kept in the dark. This became the germ of the sub-plot of The Secret Agent.

Hard evidence about Martial Bourdin emerged at the inquest. His brother Henri (who would not take the oath) said that Martial came to London from Paris about seven years ago (i.e. about 1887), had then visited the Continent once or twice, and about 18 months ago went to America for five months. (An Autonomie club member said that he then travelled first class.) Before returning to England, Martial went back to France.¹¹ On this evidence, his latest visit to France was in 1892 or 1893, when Ravachol had become a cult figure. Martial was 26 or 27 when he died and so was born in 1867 or 1868. Though work had been scarce, he did not seem short of money and had about £40 on him when he went to America. His landlord, Ernest Delbecque (former treasurer of Louise Michel's school), who also refused to take the oath, testified that Martial had lent him £20 before he went to America. Martial had a furnished room and his meals at Delbecque's house, 30 Fitzroy Street.¹² It was also said that Martial at one time had adopted the pseudonym of J. Allder, and that in Paris he was connected with a society known as the “Needles”, because all members were tailors. He was so prominent in these circles that in 1884 he was sentenced to two months in prison for trying to arrange a meeting in a public thoroughfare.¹³ If this was true, he seems to have belonged to a group called “L’Aiguille”, founded in June 1882 by some tailors, which became increasingly anarchist. It seems to have been the same “important” group of some 60 anarchist working tailors in the 2nd arrondissement which figured in a Paris press report on anarchist groups in May 1892.¹⁴

There was striking agreement about Martial's character. His brother said that he was “very quiet and reserved” and kept his private affairs to himself.¹⁵ His brother-in-law Samuels, in the memorial piece he published in Commonweal on 10 March 1894, extolled Martial's tenacity of purpose but said that he lacked affection because he was “too much wrapped up in the movement”. Anarchist leaders in London confirmed that Martial was a “secretive, self-centred man” (though this too may have come from Samuels). An Autonomie club member was reported as saying that Martial “acted on his own initiative” and was always so completely convinced that his opinions were right that he aired them on every possible occasion. This seems to be corroborated by the 1884 incident in Paris. He was “eminently an individual man”, working for himself without the help of others.¹⁶ Ted Leggatt, reporting in the Star, gave a quite different impression (noted by Sherry). He said that Bourdin was a bit of a simpleton.¹⁷ But this is unconvincing. To say nothing of his friendship with Nicoll, Leggatt did not speak French, was not an individualist, and would not have gone to meetings of the Autonomie club's French section. Leggatt's opinion, however, clearly played a part in Conrad's portrayal of Stevie. Samuels added, in an interview he gave to the Morning Leader, that Martial's hobby was collecting anarchist literature—as a boy he had been fascinated by the enthusiasm of the anarchists. He had not (as was alleged) given lectures on explosives at the Autonomie club but had always gone to parties and balls. Samuels was right. At Martial's workshop quantities of anarchist literature were found. On his person were two admission cards to a masked ball in aid of the “Revolutionary Party”.¹⁸ He was also found to have had a sizeable sum of money—£12 in gold and £1 is silver. And there was evidence of visits to Paris and America, as well as an Autonomie club membership card, identity card, and recipes for the preparation of explosives that he had “copied from a book in the British Museum”. These recipes were handed in a sealed packet to the Coroner by the chief government explosives expert, Colonel Vivian Majendie.¹⁹ The press reported on explosives concealed in pieces of furniture at Bourdin's lodgings as well as photographs of public characters and beautiful women.

At the inquest the tram timekeeper said that Bourdin's overcoat was undone all the way up and looked as if there was something in the left-hand pocket. A park labourer said that he was carrying a small brown paper parcel, walking very fast in the direction of the zigzag path leading to the Observatory. Colonel Majendie's evidence showed that because Bourdin's left hand and arm were so badly injured, the bomb must have been in his hand and not in his pocket. If it had exploded in his pocket, it would have blown his clothes to bits, but they were not torn. Since no brown paper was found at the scene, he believed that it must have been left between the place where it was noticed and the spot where Bourdin was found. Otherwise he would have expected to have found charred bits of it in the wounds. He judged that Bourdin must have been standing facing the Observatory holding the bomb about 46 yards from the Observatory wall. He could not have stumbled or his legs would have been wounded and the gravel would have been disturbed. The explosive used “was not one of the authorised explosives within the meaning of the act” (the Explosive Substances Act of 1883). Possession of it constituted a felony. In the public interest and with the jury's approval, the Coroner declined to name the explosive. Bourdin had in his pocket a glass bottle in a metal cover, containing sulphuric acid. Asked if the explosive might have ignited accidentally, Majendie said he had “perfect confidence” that Bourdin must have taken out as much sulphuric acid from the bottle as was necessary to prepare the bomb and then replaced it in his pocket. Through “some mischance or miscalculation or some clumsy bungling”, the explosion occurred prematurely. Majendie was sure that Bourdin had intended to attack the Observatory.²⁰ (Prestige buildings were anarchist targets in other cases.)

The Home Office managed to prevent the funeral from being turned into an anarchist demonstration. There was only one funeral coach. In it were Henri Bourdin, Samuels, Dr Fauset Macdonald, and an unnamed French friend. There was so much hostility from the crowd waiting for the cortège in Fitzroy Square that six young men had to be taken into custody. The mob broke a window in the Autonomie club. In fact, English hostility to the anarchist stereotype, to which this incident contributed so much, was increasing. And the individualist anarchist Henry Seymour cancelled a lecture he was to give at the Autonomie club in order to dissociate himself from the “suicidal and unnecessary” anarchist-communist tactics.²¹

Majendie's evidence completely disposed of the theory that Bourdin had stumbled. Unfortunately one very important question, wholly outside the scope of the inquest, can never now be answered. Did Bourdin intend to attack the Observatory when he went to Greenwich Park, or did he want to fox the police by setting off via the park to another place so as to get the bomb to France? Did he then impromptu think of attacking the Observatory when he saw it? Samuels himself, in his memorial article, said that Bourdin undertook to carry “dangerous explosive compounds to a secluded spot” to test a new weapon of destruction that would have provided the “revolutionary army” with a weapon against those who consigned “so many innocent lives to destitution and despair”. This was repeated later, but at second hand. In any case, it throws no light on Bourdin's destination if he had meant to go on somewhere else. And Nettlau explicitly said that Samuels was “absolutely outside the game” because no one entrusted any risky action to such a known blabber.²² Nor does it fit Bourdin's character to have confided in anyone else, let alone Samuels. Nettlau thought that Bourdin intended to hand over the bomb in the park near the Thames to someone who would have taken it straight to France. Some local anarchists believed that he would have caught the next train for Dover and Calais to continue Henry's exploits. Bourdin's visits to France, his personal knowledge of Henry through the Autonomie club, the money found on him, and his membership of the Paris “L’Aiguille” group make this possible. London anarchists likewise reported that he had said he intended to go to Paris, that it was well known that he had had the bomb several days before his death, and that he left London “with the intention of imitating Vaillant and Henry in Paris”.²³ The fact that both the French and English police believed that the Greenwich Park incident was part of a plot that had close connections with outrages on the Continent²⁴ means nothing, because they had an idée fixe about anarchist plots. As Sherry noted, Samuels too suspected that the incident was “the commencement of an extensive plot”.²⁵

After the delay caused by the letter instead of a telegram, the metropolitan police searched Bourdin's lodgings, the Autonomie club, and the house of a French electrical engineer in Marylebone said to have been a close friend of Bourdin. At the Autonomie they found a virulent circular printed in London on blood-red paper headed “Death to Carnot”, and at the house in Marylebone portraits of Ravachol and Vaillant, French circulars, a leaflet called “Vengeance is a Duty”, and a “Dynamiter's Manifesto” which advocated wholesale destruction of the bourgeoisie. Another leaflet urged the murder of judges and jurors. French newspapers found included La Révolte and the Père Peinard. Their dates coincided with the French outrages.²⁶ There the matter might have rested but for David Nicoll, who started a second Anarchist in Sheffield in March 1894. First in this, and later in two pamphlets called The Greenwich Mystery (published in Sheffield in 1897)²⁷ and The Greenwich Mystery: Letters from the Dead (published in London in 1898), as well as in the Jubilee number of Commonweal (which he also published in London), Nicoll wrote a version of the incident that was in essence a re-run of his Walsall scenario. (As Quail explains, the reason why the first pamphlet did not appear until 1897 was that Nicoll's resentment was probably fanned in 1896, when the new Home Secretary rejected appeals for amnesty for the Walsall prisoners.) This time, in Nicoll's final version, Samuels and Dr Macdonald were the police agents, Coulon came in marginally, but Samuels was the chief villain. Samuels, Nicoll alleged, known and trusted by Bourdin (who was represented as out of work and facing starvation) offered Bourdin £13 to carry “a small parcel” to a mysterious comrade. Samuels then went with him to Charing Cross to give him courage, and “doubtless” suggested that he should attack the Observatory. (Samuels said in the Morning Leader on 17 February that he met Bourdin, but they had parted after walking 20-30 yards together. On 21 February the paper said that Bourdin was followed by a “French” spy.) Macdonald came in as the subsidiary because Samuels had “stolen” sulphuric acid chlorate of potash, and the explosives” Bourdin had used from his surgery in such quantities that Macdonald must have noticed the loss. Sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash are legitimately used by doctors, but they do not account for the recipes copied in the British Museum and could not alone have caused such an explosion. Nicoll must have read Majendie's evidence (published in the Morning Leader, on which he relied), but he maintained that the explosion was caused by a fall or accidental leakage, and that Bourdin was “the dupe of a gang of scoundrels hired by the police.”²⁸ Since Nicoll did not read The Times, he buttressed his account by alleging that Inspector Melville might have identified the body by 8 p.m. on the same day. He might have raided the houses of suspects the same evening, because the Greenwich police “doubtless” telegraphed at once. Although Nicoll had proclaimed his story from the housetops, “the police took their time” so giving Samuels, Macdonald, and Coulon 24 hours' notice, and had raided instead the places where they knew no “conspirators” could be found. Nicoll finally alleged that Macdonald (with another man) had come to Sheffield to try to persuade him to make no disclosures, but soon afterwards Macdonald left England never to return. The implication was that he had skipped the country.

Nicoll described Bourdin as “a quiet harmless fellow”, sitting at Samuels's foot and “looking into his eyes with loving trust” (at the Autonomie club at Christmas 1893).²⁹ Sherry noted that Conrad had read this and made full use of it, but does not seem to have known what those closer to Bourdin thought of him, or Nicoll's motivation in smearing Samuels. (In Nicoll's version, the police agents had injured a man “who had done his best, poor as he is, for those who toil and suffer”.³⁰) Nicoll chiefly supported his allegations by a letter by L. S. Bevington included in Letters for the Dead. She said that Bourdin was “told” to take a new compound for experiment and he hit on Epping Forest, but Samuels persuaded him to go to Greenwich instead: “Mrs Samuels, whom I used to see very often at the time, told me”.³¹ She said that before Samuels was suspected, he too had boldly related this. But such second-hand testimony is virtually worthless in the face of what is known of Samuels's boasting, of Bourdin's true character, of Nettlau's statement that no one would have trusted him, and of Mrs Bevington's bias as a comrade. She was besides already so seriously ill that on 3 May 1894 she told Nettlau that she was not well enough to go to see him.³² She died in December 1895.

That Nicoll's version mainly sprang from his hatred of Samuels (as his supplanter as editor of Commonweal) and from his “police-plot” mania is evident. But mainly thanks to Conrad's novel, Nicoll's has become the “received” version of the Greenwich Park explosion. Quail too, though he believed that Nicoll's resentment “was probably fanned by isolation, poverty, and the failure of the Walsall prisoners campaign”, substantially accepted Nicoll's account. He said that the police were “lackadaisical” and that Samuels was seen with Bourdin in Whitehall, although he admitted that “evidence” that Samuels was a police spy was “circumstantial”. Sherry noted that there was no proof whatsoever that Samuels went with Bourdin to Charing Cross.³³ It seems relevant to add that there is no sign that Samuels ever received any police payment—he was in any case wholly mistrusted by them. Unlike Coulon after the Walsall affair, Samuels neither moved to a better house nor was able to drop his tailoring. It was still more telling that he remained on friendly terms with Martial's brother. In a letter dated 28 June 1894, he told Nettlau that “Bourdin” (i.e. Henri) had a copy of a “Revue” he could lend Nettlau.³⁴ It is hard to believe that they would have been on these terms if Samuels was a double agent who had sent Henri's brother to his death. There is an addendum to Nicoll's version. In 1897 Nettlau wrote to Nicoll protesting about the attacks on Macdonald and saying that Nicoll's pamphleteering was as crazy as Coulon's. When he had posted the letter, he ran into Nicoll in Hyde Park on 1 May and, after hearing Nettlau's explanations, Nicoll, though not convinced, was friendly and reasonable—until he returned to find Nettlau's letter.³⁵ Hence the Jubilee Commonweal issue (when Macdonald was in Australia).³⁶ Because Macdonald could not defend himself, Kropotkin took the matter up, after Mme Kropotkin and Nettlau had unsuccessfully tried to persuade Nicoll to withdraw his allegations. Kropotkin wrote a retraction for Nicoll to sign and sent a covering note to Nettlau ending “Nicoll must be compelled to sign a retraction and beaten if he does not”.³⁷Freedom's protest, when Nicoll did not sign, appeared in its June-July 1897 supplement. It had been circulated to members of the group as well as Mrs Wilson (who had by then retired for family reasons). The protest announced that the group had read “with the deepest indignation” the insinuations made by Nicoll against “our friend Dr Fauset Macdonald” and also against Dr Nettlau, well known “for his honesty and purity of character”. Because these “wicked insinuations” were the worst of libels, they dissociated themselves entirely from Nicoll until he withdrew them (without reserve and publicly”.

Allegations that Samuels was handing out explosives were made mainly in press reports in 1894.³⁸ Without giving a precise date, Nettlau says that he did take some chemicals from Macdonald's dispensary and that Macdonald then complained to the Commonweal group.³⁹ Whether this is true or not, the last time Edgware Road appeared as Commonweal's address was in the issue of 10 March 1894. The April issue was published at 18 Glengall Road (Samuels's house). This may indicate that the Edgware Road lease had expired. On checking his stores, Macdonald may have found some missing and blamed Samuels because of current talk. At all events, the complaint was discussed at Sidmouth Mews in the spring of 1894. John Turner took it seriously, suspecting Samuels of some link with the police, but others thought it much more improper that he had made three guineas from his press interview, and that taking the chemicals was just showing off. At this point Mrs Samuels appeared and made such a scene that the meeting had to break up. Both Samuels walked out for ever. He was already on a war footing with his wife. Nettlau added: “I was there that evening and did not take these grounds for suspicion seriously, just because I knew how little Samuels was worth”.⁴⁰ Samuels told Nettlau on 28 June that he had earned a rest and on no account would work again with “laggards and liars”.⁴¹ This seems to be the reason why he joined the ILP in 1895. His last number of Commonweal appeared on 12 May 1894. It is not certain how it was started again after a suspension. The July issue of Freedom shows that Joseph Pressburg was now the editor. Cantwell was the printer, but he was taken into custody on 30 June, which explains why no new issue appeared until August.

Cantwell's arrest and trial happened at a most unfortunate time. On 24 June the French President, Sadi-Carnot, was mortally stabbed by an Italian, Santo Caserio, because he had refused to pardon Vaillant. Caserio had no known connection with the London groups, but the “Death to Carnot” leaflet found at the Autonomie club after the Greenwich explosion must have been widely distributed. On 30 June, when the then Prince and Princess of Wales were to open Tower Bridge, Cantwell and the Christian individualist anarchist Carl T. Quinn held an open-air meeting near the bridge, where they sold an “Address to the Army” pamphlet and another on “Why Vaillant Threw the Bomb”. At their trial on 1 August they were accused of trying to persuade others to murder members of the royal family and politicians who were coming to open the bridge. But a number of those who were at Tower Bridge said they did not hear the words Cantwell and Quinn were alleged to have used or see them distribute pamphlets. They said there was an organised band of interruptors in the crowd. Search of Sidmouth Mews produced a manuscript of courses in chemistry, but it was not written in Cantwell's handwriting, Cantwell had letters on him showing that Commonweal was on its last legs and said that the army pamphlet was not set up in its office but was a cast made long ago. The Vaillant pamphlet did not contain his opinions; he had never advocated throwing bombs. Quinn, who denied incitement to murder, argued that while he was a Christian the law was not. But Mr Justice Lawrance found both guilty, and each got six months' hard labour.⁴² This seems to have been the only sentence not in accordance with a Home Office statement of 1894, that it was no offence to be an anarchist. It was one if anarchists attempted “to enforce their views by crime”.⁴³

PèRE PEINARD COMES TO LONDON

In France two more bomb outrages occurred in February 1894, before Carnot was assassinated. There was therefore some concern in official quarters when it was known that Le Père Peinard, edited by Emile Pouget (which had been suppressed in France) intended to set up in London. Pouget, who made use of biting caricature and slang, had also published an anarchists' almanac. The one for 1893 included a portrait of Ravachol and a new song about him. Robert Anderson said that when the customs searched some deal cases addressed to E. Boiteaux, a pseudonym of Pouget's, they found printing blocks, copies of the paper, and other anarchist literature. But in the opinion of the law officer (Sir Godfrey Lushington), so far as he could understand the paper, there was nothing in the number handed to him to justify interfering with it. He thought later issues should be watched.⁴⁴ This explains why Pouget was able to bring out eight numbers of a London edition from October 1894 until 1895. Pouget, of provincial bourgeois origins, had a disturbed youth and then had had to earn a living in a Paris shop, where he edited an anti-militarist journal for a textile union. In 1883, after a meeting of unemployed, he and Louise Michel had pillaged a bakery and were sent to prison. From 1889 he edited the Père Peinard on the model of the French Revolutionary Père Duchêne. He escaped arrest when it was suppressed by coming to England via Algeria.⁴⁵ He took a floor in a building in London not far from the Angel and was adept at disguising brochures he issued. The first, called “Il n’est pas mort”, was sent to the Home Office by the police in September 1894 but was minuted “nothing to be done at present. Lay by.”⁴⁶

Maitron noted how much Pouget's London visit influenced him because he saw the gains made by workers through the trade unions.⁴⁷ In October 1894 the Père Peinard pointed out how much anarchists had to gain by infiltrating the unions and propagating their ideas. The November issue said that the Chicago anarchists had understood that a general strike “is an open door” to a great upheaval. When Pouget returned to Paris in November 1896, he continued to issue anarcho-syndicalist, i.e. revolutionary syndicalist propaganda.

FOUR FOREIGN ANARCHISTS ARRESTED

In France terrorism continued. On 4 April 1894 a bomb thrown in the Foyot restaurant cost the French writer Laurent Tailhade one of his eyes. The French were thus gratified by the arrest in London on the same day of Théodule Meunier, who had been wanted since 1892 for the bombs thrown at the Cafe Véry and the Lobau barracks. He was arrested by Melville at Victoria station just as the train was about to start for Queenborough, Isle of Sheppey. He resisted and was helped by a German, John Ricken. When both appeared at Bow Street on 5 April, R. W. Burnie, who had defended Mowbray in 1892 defended Meunier. An excellent carpenter, Meunier had been denounced in France by two women, one his mistress. Burnie denied that there was anything to identify the prisoner with Meunier, but the judge decided otherwise.⁴⁸ The identification was likely to be right because a detailed description of him had been published in the French press on 28 June. Meunier was easily recognisable, if only because he was small and slightly deformed. He was extradited and condemned to perpetual forced labour in Cayenne. The English anarchist press regarded his extradition as a miscarriage of justice.

On 14 April Francis Polti, and on the 22nd Guiseppe Farnara were arrested, both implicated in manufacturing bombs. Polti, described as a “traveller”, aged 18, was caught in Farringdon Road with a bomb wrapped in brown paper. It seems to have been identical with Bourdin's bomb—an iron cylinder fitted with two caps screwed down. Polti was described as an individualist and as a great friend of Martial Bourdin's. He disappeared from his Soho haunts after Bourdin's death. Liquids in bottles, many letters, and quantities of anarchist literature were found at his lodgings. Farnara was arrested because Polti talked. A mechanic, aged 44, he had anarchist literature in his pockets and in his room in Clerkenwell. He said that he employed Polti to order material from ironmongers for the manufacture of bombs. A good deal of information about both men was published in the Standard on 23 April, before the trial. The Home Office believed that this must come from the police.⁴⁹ Among other things, Polti alleged that Farnara was responsible for the bomb used by Bourdin and had handed Bourdin the money found on him.

At the trial (before Mr Justice Hawkins) on 3 and 4 May a copy-book in Polti's handwriting was produced. It expressed sympathy for Emile Henry. Polti was determined to avenge Vaillant's death, and so he had decided to sacrifice his life. An Italian witness said that Polti had told him that anarchists were “very nearly done on the Continent” and they were going to start in London very soon. Farnara caused a sensation by saying that if he had the money, he would have taken the bomb to France or Italy. Since he had no money, he meant to throw it at the “Royal Exchange”. He meant the Stock Exchange. He wanted to do this because England was the richest country and there would be more rich people together at the exchange than anywhere else. If he did not escape, he would have blown up a good number of bourgeois and capitalists and could only be executed. Italians did not ask English people to go to Italy every year, but they went with the money made by English workers. “For us there are no frontiers. The bourgeois are the same all the world over.”⁵⁰ In the language of the day, the judge could find no extenuating circumstances “for the foul, abominable” design. Polti was sentenced to ten years and Farnara to 20 years' imprisonment—twice as long as the longest Walsall sentence. With exemplary moral courage Seymour, on behalf of the SDF, sent a resolution to the Home Office protesting against these sentences as “atrocious and inhuman and more criminal than the foolish acts of the Anarchists themselves”. He made it clear that the SDF disavowed any sympathy with anarchism or its methods.⁵¹

The chief interest of the last of these cases involving Continental anarchists in London is that it showed that English law insisted on proof. On 31 May 1894 Melville and a party of police searched the Chelsea lodgings of a German cabinet maker, Fritz Brall, who had come to London in 1893. A member of the Autonomie club, still not rebuilt, Brall had made a moonlight flit from Soho because of complaints about noise. Among others who had visited him was John Ricken, who had tried to prevent Meunier's arrest. The police found apparatus for making counterfeit coin, chemicals and recipes, a photograph of Vaillant, and a Bourdin memorial card. They also found anarchist papers and a copy of what seems to have been Most's Revolutionäre Kriegswissenchaft, accurately described as “The Scientific Revolutionary Warfare and Dynamite Guide”. There were minute instructions for preparing explosives and for the conduct of those making war on society. Brall said he was not an anarchist and had only gone to the Autonomie club so as to dance with his wife. He was let off because the government analyst said that he did not have enough fulminate of mercury to be dangerous.⁵²

In November a bomb was aimed at the house of Mr Justice Hawkins. All it did was to slightly damage another house in the same street. The culprit was never found but Majendie said that the explosive used was picric acid, which was almost invariably used by French anarchists.⁵³ Pouget's London Père Peinard noticed that the English anarchists did not like fireworks and said that it was not in their interest to excite the ferocity of the establishment.⁵⁴

INFLAMMATORY LEAFLETS

In 1894 quantities of violent French and Italian leaflets were forwarded to the Home Office. Some purported to be printed abroad but were in fact printed in London. More and more French and Italian refugees were leaving their countries as their domestic laws were tightened up. Many of the French ones slipped over to avoid a celebrated trial of thirty anarchists, and in September 1894 the Italian government dissolved all socialist, anarchist, and labour organisations. Anderson said that “an enormous quantity” of such leaflets were issued.⁵⁵ They illustrate the outlook of the enragés of the movement but, as is shown by the “Death to Carnot” leaflet found at the Autonomie club, they were part of the London scene. Among them was a ferocious pamphlet called “Résolution et révolution” (a corruption of Evolution et révolution). This warned the wife of the new French President, Mme Casimir-Périer, that her husband's execution, like Carnot's, would be very sudden. The President was told that they wanted his skin too, while waiting for those of his accomplices and successors. An Italian leaflet signed “La Libera Iniziativa” (free initiative) announced a terrible vendetta for Pallas, Ravachol, Henry, and others. It ended “Death to the Bourgeois Society! Long live anarchy!” Possibly the most violent one was written in Italian. It urged sons to rebel against parents, students against masters, workers against the hierarchy, soldiers against officers. It outdid Bakunin in wanting, if it could not get freedom, “infinite and manifold destruction until universal ruin chokes the planet.”

ANGIOLILLO

In 1896 a bomb was thrown at a Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona. It did not kill the officials at the head of the procession but some of the humbler people at the tail. It might have been an accident in timing the explosion, but there was no proof that it was thrown by an anarchist. The reactionary government of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo ordered anarchists, republicans, socialists, free-thinkers, and even Catalan separatists to be rounded up. In Montjuich prison many of the 400 detainees were tortured so severely that they died before the trial in May 1897. News of the atrocities soon reached France. The first article, describing a month in a Spanish prison, appeared there on 15 October 1896. Georges Clemenceau and others spoke at a protest meeting.⁵⁶ In London at a mass meeting reported in Freedom's January 1897 supplement, its editor Joseph Pressburg (now calling himself Perry) reported on all the facts collected by the daily press. In May a Spanish atrocities committee, with Perry as secretary, included delegates from the Humanitarian League, the Fabian Society, the ILP, SDF, and Freedom group. It decided to hold a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, which passed a resolution expressing horror and indignation and calling for an enquiry.⁵⁷ Protest meetings held in numerous other European countries seemed to have some effect. Only 8 of the accused were sentenced to death, but 26 were condemned to prison sentences and 61 were transported to the deadly climate of Rio de Oro. When, therefore, Cánovas was shot dead by Michele Angiolillo on 8 August 1897, it seemed a classical case of revenge. Even Señora Cánovas forgave him because she knew his “great heart”.⁵⁸ Angiolillo was tried by a military court. Before he was garrotted on 20 August, he had time to write a trial speech, which was smuggled into France. In September Freedom printed it. In it, Angiolillo said he had noticed everywhere the hardness of heart and contempt for human lives among the rich and those who governed. He had learned that “in the classic land of the Inquisition, the race of torturers was not dead”.

Angiolillo was born in Foggia (Apulia) in June 1871. He was educated at a technical institute and had first been attracted to anarchism while doing military service. After that he worked as a printer, but in April 1895 escaped a prison sentence for an anti-government manifesto by going first to Marseilles and then to Barcelona. There, in late 1895-6, he worked as a printer on a paper run by a Spanish anarchist journalist, F. Tarrida del Mármol. He was said to have left Barcelona a few days before the Corpus Christi bomb and then returned to Marseilles, but he was expelled from France and went to Brussels. There he again worked as a printer. He left Brussels in April 1896.⁵⁹Freedom's memorial issue said that between then and his return to Spain, “the united police of Europe” had failed to discover what he was doing.

In 1908 a French journal, the Revue hispanique, published an article by Rafael Salillas on Angiolillo's execution.⁶⁰ He reproduced a record made in 1896 by the Spanish journalist and writer José Nakens, who published a Madrid paper. Because of the assassination of Cánovas, Nakens wrote an account of three visits Angiolillo paid him. The second visit occurred during the second fortnight of July (“la segunda quincena de julio de 1897”). Angiolillo then said he knew Nakens's newspaper and had read his book. Nakens gave him a signed and inscribed copy. When Angiolillo returned three days later, he told Nakens that he had come to Madrid to murder Cánovas. He intended to avenge the Montjuich prisoners, but did not claim to have seen any of them. He wanted to imitate Caserio. On 8 August Nakens read an account of the assassination and feared that the inscribed copy of his book might incriminate him. Next day he sent an account of Angiolillo's visits to a friend to publish if necessary. The point of this record is that it pinpoints Angiolillo's return to Spain, a date that was confirmed by a report from Madrid published in The Times on 10 August saying that Angiolillo had returned to Spain “last month”.

The Times on 2 August reported the arrival of 28 Montjuich prisoners at Euston on 28 July. They had come to take refuge in England. A mass meeting in Trafalgar square was arranged by the atrocities committee on 22 August. One of the men who had been tortured, Francisco Gana, was there and described the horrible cruelties inflicted on him.⁶¹ By then Angiolillo had been executed. But the American anarchist Emma Goldman, who was in the United States at the time, categorically said that in Trafalgar Square Angiolillo saw “with his own eyes” the results of the atrocities when the Spaniards “opened their shirts and showed the horrible scars or burned flesh. Angiolillo saw, and the effect surpassed a thousand theories”.⁶² This must of itself cast doubt on her saying that in England Angiolillo had got a job as a compositor “and immediately became the friend of all his colleagues”. No article by him appeared in any anarchist journal, although these journals often published articles by compositors. If he had even helped as a compositor, this would have been bound to be mentioned by a contemporary witness because of Angiolillo's status as a “martyr”. An intriguing press report by the correspondent of Le Temps in London, published by the Spanish paper Epoca on 16 August, said that anarchists saw him in London in the Fitzroy Square region, but he had no recommendations or letters and was suspected of being a police agent. But Goldman had started the ball rolling. In 1937 Tom Bell (Mary Turner's brother-in-law) wrote to a Los Angeles paper saying that he had known Angiolillo in London.⁶³ It is conceivable that he did—he was in London in 1896. But an account so long after the event is suspect. Rudolf Rocker's son Firmin (not even born at the time), in an interview in New York City in February 1972, said that Angiolillo was so much upset at a meeting in his father's flat, where he saw one of the victims, that he “at once left for Spain on a mission of reprisal”.⁶⁴ This could only be a confused account of Gana's visit to Rocker's flat, which is on record.⁶⁵

Two Home Office memoranda on the surveillance of anarchists in London are revealing, and they also refer to Angiolillo. The first, dated 1902, refers to a note from the Italian ambassador suggesting that Italian police should be put in touch with Scotland Yard. It mentioned that “the spy” referred to had become notorious some years ago by “publicly eulogising” Angiolillo. But the metropolitan police commissioner thought that any such arrangements would make things worse. The police had to rely on informers for what went on at secret meetings when important matters were discussed. Unless informers could trust the way information would be used, they would not come forward “through dread of vengeance” by their comrades. The second, dated 1903, recorded the belief that Angiolillo “was denounced in Paris by his Anarchist confrères as a police spy, came over to London where his reputation followed him, and made his life so unendurable” that he was impelled to assassinate Cánovas. It mentioned similar instances, and concluded that, while there was no proof that Angiolillo's action was “caused by the desperate plight of being abandoned by authorities and denounced by former friends and comrades”, this was “in a high degree” probable.⁶⁶ It was at least indisputable that at the end of the mass meeting in Trafalgar Square on 20 August 1897, arranged by the Spanish atrocities committee which included representatives of “almost every shade of social and democratic opinion”, Gana and “a prominent English Anarchist” were mobbed, hissed, and loudly hooted.⁶⁷ Public hostility to anarchist outrages was such that the police had to protect the “prominent English Anarchist” and Gana had to escape in a passing cab.

Notes

1. Conrad, The Secret Agent (Dent, London, 1923), pp. ix-x.

2. Ibid., pp. xi and xiii.

3. Times Literary Supplement, 13 Feb. 1981, p. 171.

4. N. Sherry, Conrad's Western World (Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 1971), p. 228.

5. Ibid., p. 229.

6. I. Watt (ed.), Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Casebook (Macmillan, London, 1973), pp. 222-3, 231, and 234.

7. “Conrad's Anarchist Professor: An Undiscovered Source”, Labor History, vol. 18, no. 3 (Summer 1977).

8. Morning Leader, 17 Feb. 1894; The Times, 23 Feb. 1894.

9. The Times, 22 Feb. 1894.

10. R. Anderson, The Lighter Side of My Official Life (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1910), p. 176.

11. The Times, 27 Feb. 1894.

12. Ibid., 27 Feb. 1894.

13. Morning Leader, 19 Feb. 1894.

14. Maitron, 1975, vol. 1, p. 125; French press report on anarchist groups dated 5 May 1892.

15. Morning Leader, 17 Feb. 1894.

16. Ibid.

17. Cited by Sherry, Conrad's Western World, p. 314.

18. Morning Leader, 17 Feb. 1894 and inquest report of chief constable in The Times, 20 Feb. 1894.

19. Kentish and Deptford Observer, 23 Feb. 1894.

20. Ibid. for the fullest account of Majendie's evidence.

21. The Times, 22 and 24 Feb. 1894.

22. Nettlau, 1886-1914, 3, Ch. 5, fo. 106.

23. Morning Leader, 19 Feb. 1894.

24. See Police Chronicle and Guardian, 17 Feb. 1894.

25. Sherry, Conrad's Western World, p. 243.

26. The Times, 23 Feb. 1894.

27. The full title is “Commonweal”, The Greenwich Mystery. It is reproduced in an appendix to Sherry's Conrad's Western World.

28. Nicoll, Greenwich Mystery (Nicoll, Sheffield, 1897), p. 16.

29. Ibid., p. 12.

30. Nicoll, Letters from the Dead (Nicoll, London, 1898), inside front cover.

31. Ibid., pp. 3-4 (misquoted as “Mr Samuels” by Quail, p. 168).

32. L. S. Bevington to Nettlau, 3 May 1894, (IISH).

33. Sherry, Conrad's Western World, p. 243.

34. Samuels to Nettlau, 28 June 1894 (IISH).

35. Nettlau, 1886-1914, 3, Ch. 5, fo. 121n 195.

36. He is listed among “practitioners resident abroad” in the 1897 medical directory, indicating that he was abroad from the end of 1896.

37. Quail, p. 209, referring to “Nettlau Collection”.

38. Ibid., p. 178. Quail reports that Nicoll said that Samuels had handed out potassium picrate, the charge in Bourdin's bomb. It has been seen that the explosive used was not disclosed.

39. Nettlau, 1886-1914, 3, Ch. 5, fo. 106. Quail (p. 179n 119) interprets the date as 22 May.

40. Nettlau, 1886-1914, 3, Ch. 5, fo. 107.

41. Samuels to Nettlau, 28 June 1894 (IISH).

42. The Times, 3 July and 1 Aug. 1894.

43. HO144/545 A55/176/31.

44. HOA55/684 (dated 2 Mar. 1894).

45. Dict. MOF, vol. 14, pp. 299-301 (which says that Pouget came to the 1881 London congress).

46. HOA55/684/11, 25 Sept. 1894. The first of these brochures was printed by the Torch press.

47. Maitron, 1975, vol. 1, p. 296.

48. The Times, 5 May 1894.

49. HO144,259 A55,860.

50. Standard, 24 Apr. 1894.

51. HOA55/860/3.

52. The Times, 2 and 19 June 1894.

53. Ibid., 4 and 6 Nov. 1894.

54. Le Père Peinard (London), Nov. 1894.

55. HOA55/684/4 and 11.

56. See F. Tarrida del Mármol, Les Inquisiteurs d’Espagne (Stock, Paris, 1897).

57. Freedom, June-July 1897; The Times, 31 May 1897.

58. The Times, 14 Aug. 1897.

59. Andreucci and Detti; The Times, 11 Aug. 1897; Freedom, Sept. 1897.

60. R. Salillas, “Una Página histórica fotografada: La Ejecución de Angiolillo”, Revue hispanique, vol. 19 (1908), pp. 135-8.

61. The Times, 23 Aug. 1897.

62. E. Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (Mother Earth Publishing Association, New York, 1911), pp. 101-3. Sheila Price drew my attention to this at an early stage in my research for this book.

63. P. Avrich, An American Anarchist (Princeton UP, Princeton, 1978), p. 114.

64. Ibid.

65. In a letter from V. de Cleyre of 3 Aug. 1897, cited ibid. p. 114n.

66. HO144/545 A55,176/44 and A55,176/51.

67. The Times, 23 Aug. 1897.