Jack Hayes, a Liverpool MP and former London policeman, using the language of racism and sportsmanship that connoted manliness to his generation, told the House of Commons in 1923: ‘Inspector Syme, one of the whitest men who ever wore a police uniform, a man who has undergone untold suffering, was really playing the game as an inspector of the Metropolitan Police.’ Three years after Syme’s death in 1945, his misfortunes were again debated in parliament. ‘I remember him away back in the years before the first world war – tall, fine, handsome he was, and … very clean in his character,’ said the communist MP Willie Gallacher. ‘Injustice wore down that strong body and practically destroyed the mind and soul of that fine man.’1
Syme’s treatment was seen as a travesty by many London policemen, who projected a workplace association to resist victimization and favouritism. The authorities responded in 1913 by forbidding policemen from union membership, under penalty of dismissal. Money became a pressing issue, too. Although policemen considered themselves to be a class above the urban labouring poor, they were paid at similar levels. From the declaration of war in 1914 to the outbreak of the Russian revolution in 1917, the cost of living in London rose by 76 per cent but police pay by only 20 per cent. Policemen resented losing prestige to munitions workers earning three times as much. They fainted on duty from hunger.
These pressures led to the formation of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO), which declared a strike in August 1918. Almost all of the 12,000 Metropolitan Police withdrew from duty. So, too, did the 1,200 men of the City of London force guarding the capital’s financial institutions. These police ‘revolters’ were, thought Hensley Henson, the politically minded bishop, ‘a very ominous sign of social disintegration’. The wartime coalition government, which feared that police disaffection would spread to the army, sent a detachment of Guards to protect Scotland Yard from the mutineers. Lloyd George, as Prime Minister, conceded most of the strikers’ demands on pay, pensions and war bonuses, and was understood by negotiators to have given an oral promise of union recognition. Sir Edward Henry, who had underestimated NUPPO’s support, was replaced as Chief Commissioner by General Sir Nevil Macready. Hayes and other policemen were soon riled by Macready’s declared intention to raise the force’s discipline to the standard of a Guards regiment.2
Hayes left the Metropolitan Police on his election as general secretary of NUPPO in March 1919. Born in 1889, he was one of the seven children of a police inspector at Wolverhampton, and had been educated in the town. At the age of thirteen he became a clerk with the Wolverhampton Corrugated Iron Company. By attending evening classes he learnt shorthand, book-keeping, accountancy and French. In 1909 he joined the Metropolitan Police, in which he reached the rank of sergeant within four years. He was an imposing man whose elaborate waxed moustache suggested vanity. The success of the 1918 strike imbued him with over-confidence. On the Sunday nearest to May Day in 1919 NUPPO assembled the largest crowd seen in Trafalgar Square for years. In addition to thousands of Metropolitan policemen, who marched along Whitehall bearing banners with defiant slogans, they were supported by crowds of colonial soldiers and by some sailors. The most insistent protesters were policemen who had recently been demobilized from regiments on the Western Front and found reversion to military drilling to be an intolerable prospect. Hayes denounced Macready to the demonstrators: ‘being an army officer, the Chief Commissioner was introducing a system not of discipline, but of tyranny, brutality and Prussianism’.3
The Police Act of 1919, which came into force in August, granted higher wages, but made it illegal (with a penalty of up to two years’ imprisonment) for policemen to join a trade union concerned with pay, pensions and conditions of service. The government-subsidized Police Federation was formed. NUPPO responded by calling a national strike which flopped everywhere except Merseyside. There the strike endured for three weeks, during which troops made bayonet charges to quell looting in rough districts. When the Merseyside strike collapsed, every striking policeman there was dismissed with total loss of pension rights. Lloyd George said that ‘all England’ should feel indebted to Liverpool’s resilient municipal leadership. He saw Merseyside’s police strike ‘as perhaps the turning point in the Labour movement, deflecting it from Bolshevist and Direct Actionist courses to legitimate Trade Unionism. Had Liverpool been wrongly handled, and had the strikers scored a success, the whole country might very soon have been on fire.’4
All NUPPO activists in London were dismissed. Several of them, including its former general secretary James Marston, took jobs with the All Russian Co-operative Society (ARCOS), the Soviet government’s commercial agency which opened in London in 1920 and acted as a front for espionage and subversion. Historians of British communism imply that these men were Special Branch plants, and mock ‘the wave of Bolshevism coursing through Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police at this time’, as if the recent victimization, strikes, demonstrations and dismissals were not sufficient causes of radicalization. Special Branch did have two informants planted inside ARCOS, Karl Korbs and Peter Miller, while MI5 had its own double agent embedded there, Anatoli Timokhin. None of them had been Metropolitan policemen.5
After the collapse of NUPPO, Hayes started the Vigilance Detective Agency, which was based at Clapton Common, where he lived. A festering shared grievance is a powerful unifier of men. Vigilance was manned by a rump of NUPPO loyalists, notably Walter Dale and Arthur Lakey. Dale became Vigilance’s chief investigator. Lakey’s wife joined Marston in the ARCOS offices, where she worked under her maiden name of Kitty Reynolds. In Paris before 1914 the Okhrana’s surveillance of dissident émigrés had been delegated to a private detective agency, Bint et Sambain, in order to distance the Russian embassy in Paris from the watch. After 1920 the Cheka determined to use Vigilance in post-war London rather as the Okhrana had used Bint et Sambain in pre-war Paris. The agency’s detectives were soon recommended by Hayes to a young journalist named William Norman Ewer.
Norman Ewer of the Daily Herald
Norman Ewer had been born in 1885 in the middling London suburb of Hornsey. His father dealt in silk, and later moved to Muswell Hill. The family kept one live-in housemaid. Ewer rose up the rungs of the middle class by passing examinations. He attended Merchant Taylor’s School in Charterhouse Square in the City of London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he won first-class degrees in mathematics and history. From an early age, he was nicknamed ‘Trilby’ because, like the heroine of George du Maurier’s novel, he liked to be barefoot. After Cambridge he became private secretary to an exotic plutocrat known as Baron de Forest.
Born in 1879, de Forest was ostensibly the son of American circus performers who died of typhoid when their troupe visited Turkey. After a spell in an orphanage, he was adopted in 1887 by the fabulously rich Baroness Hirsch, who believed that he was the illegitimate child of her dead son. He inherited a castle and many millions in 1899, was created Baron de Forest by the Austrian Emperor and converted from Judaism to Catholicism. Subsequently he settled in England, where he held the land-speed record and was the victorious radical candidate at a parliamentary by-election in 1911. He forthwith spoiled his political prospects by suing his mother-in-law for slander. In 1912 de Forest contributed to the fund launched by the Labour MP George Lansbury to save the fiercely partisan Daily Herald from insolvency. Ewer was installed as de