Out for Mischief!

England expects every man but chiefly George V to do his duty. Last week the great "hunger march" of jobless men & women from all over the United Kingdom converged ominously on London. One hundred miles away at Sandringham the King & Queen were enjoying a rural autumn. Unhurried and to all appearances unworried, Their Majesties tarried in the country until at least 3,000 footsore and surly marchers had trudged into their capital, then dutifully they returned to Buckingham Palace. They knew among other things that London's bobbies had just taken a 5% wage cut.

Scottish hunger marchers arrived in the pink of condition, striding along unwearied after spanning the length of the British Isles on foot, mostly in the teeth of wind-whipped rains. One Scottish detachment had a bagpiper who mournfully skirled the subversive "Internationale." Miners from the boarded-up coal pits of Wales, shipwrights from the silent Tyneside, locked-out weavers from the Midlands arrived with some show of spunk and morale, but the weak & weary contingent from Henry Ford's plant at Dagenham (now working at a fraction of capacity) were a disgrace to their comrades. Exhorted to parade around Hyde Park, they squatted down as soon as they reached the greensward, exerted themselves no further than to join in chanting the British Hunger March. Chorus:

But now's the day of reckoning,

No longer we'll endure;

Starvation we will conquer now

And victory is sure.

We are a strong determined band

Each with a weapon in his hand (brandish stick).

We are the hunger marchers

Of the pro-le-ta-ri-at!

We are the hunger marchers

Of the pro-le-ta-ri-at!

Most marchers frankly admitted that on their way to London, local charity folk gave them more to eat than they have had in many months at home. Among the suburbs of the capital, schoolhouses, suburban railway stations and district lodging houses offered shelter for the night, but London itself was different. In London the hunger horde came up against that frigid Old Etonian, one-armed Sir Edward Hilton Young, His Majesty's Minister of Health, who was wounded at Zeebrugge Mole in 1918--a fact of which he is so proud that like Admiral Nelson he pins his empty right sleeve forward on his chest.

"These people," said Sir Edward Hilton Young when questioned as to what provision he was making for their health, "have been induced by a Communist organization to leave their homes. Very well. It is up to the Communists to take care of them."

The "Communist organization," which calls itself the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, has had headquarters for some years in London's dreary Bloomsbury district. It put on the now forgotten Hunger March of 1930. Its leader is secretive Mr. W. A. L. ("Wal") Hannington, a young man supposed to have instigated the mutiny last year in the Royal Navy (TIME, Sept. 28, 1931). Tousle-haired and tireless, "Wal" Hannington looked last week like an overwrought college student as he dashed about London in an open motor car, marshaling the hungry who called him their "Field Marshal" When newshawks caught up with Red Wal, he gave them this to think about: "We do not advocate violence, but if a society responsible for our present evils cannot be removed otherwise, we are ready to use violent revolutionary measures. If the police use batons on us you can't expect the marchers to turn the other cheek. We are organized like an army and we will act like one."

Inevitably London's bobbies had to use their batons. What else could they do when men and women started throwing stones at limousines parked outside the socialite Regal Cinema near Marble Arch? When brickbats began to fill the air? As the truncheons went to work, rioters broke branches from Hyde Park trees, used them as clubs. Chief Inspector Oger of Scotland Yard was carried to St. George's Hospital with a fractured skull. About 40 other people, bobbies and mobsters, received hospital treatment. Police reserves collared shabby men & women, packed them into vans which streaked for London's jails. Next morning the surprising discovery was made by London magistrates that almost everyone arrested was a resident of London, not a "hunger marcher" at all.

Genuine hunger marchers explained that Field Marshal Hannington was saving them for a march on the House of Commons this week, when he would try to present a petition signed by more than 1,000,000 unemployed. Over the weekend, however, Trafalgar Square was blocked by a nasty mob of 15,000, again mostly Londoners. Shouts of "Down with the National Government!'' alternated with the cries of babies brought by their mothers and vague shouts of "Down with the Rich!" "Down with the Baby Starvers!"

"Give us a quid! Give us a quid!" cried a man who may or may not have been in his senses. After a long while someone gave him a pound note. Someone else gave him ten shillings. Disgusted, the man changed his tune to "Coppers! Coppers--or anything you've got!" In five minutes his hat was lined with small change, in another five he had disappeared. A taxicab backfired. Everyone thought the sound was a shot and several riots were on.

Surging toward the Admiralty Arch, behind which lies the Mall and Buckingham Palace, one section of the mob blundered so hard into a cordon of mounted police that one was knocked from his horse. Screamed a swart, hatless man: ''Smash the Palace windows!"

Fighting perhaps for their lives, certainly for King and Country, burly bobbies used their truncheons with just one idea, to crack as many crowns as possible. "This correspondent saw one ragged, emaciated man beaten over the head until he was unconscious," cabled United Pressman Herbert Moore. "When he, an old man with a grey beard, was taken to a hospital, doctors said he had concussion of the brain and might not live."

The Admiralty Arch and its iron gates (which prudent bobbies had locked) stood like Gibraltar while Admiral Nelson looked down from his Trafalgar Column and saw the line of bobbies hold. A second mob, however, had rushed down Whitehall, 5,000 strong, heading for No. 10 Downing St., the residence of Prime Minister MacDonald. This mob was briefly checked, until police reserves could rush up and beat it back, by a thin line of ornate, scarlet-coated heroes, the Royal Horse Guards--erroneously supposed by tourists to be good for nothing but the ceremony of "changing the guard.''

On the day appointed for the march on the House of Commons, uniformed police and plainclothesmen from Scotland Yard quietly converged upon the Workers' Movement headquarters in Russell Square near the British Museum. The detectives entered the dingy headquarters building, burst in upon "Wal" Hannington who was talking with a newshawk. Unresisting, Hannington submitted to arrest for inciting a mutiny, was jailed without bail in Bow Street station.

Saddest and strangest sight of the week was a hunger marchers' Women's Brigade whose cheer leader, Mrs. Harriet Paisley, is a 62-year-old Lancashire grandmother. Clattering along on thick-soled Lancashire clogs, these hard-faced women grimly entered and marched about London solemnly blowing rubber razzberries at well-dressed citizens, bobbies and Royal Horse Guards.

Most ominous was the reception which working class audiences in London's East End gave the night of the Trafalgar trouble to such once popular Laborites as John Joseph ("Jumping Jack") Jones, Will Thorne and the Labor Party's present leader Old George Lansbury. At different meetings they were all booed and shouted down with such sarcastic cries as "We want bread not tome!" and "Tell us the old, old story!"

Leader Lansbury, when booed at a dockside meeting which seemed to want to sing "The Internationale," tried to restore order by joining in the song, managed to lead it and figured that afterward he would get a chance to speak. Instead he was booed out of the hall.

In Lancashire some 200,000 cotton spinners walked out on strike, shutting down most of the mills. The operators had cut wages 5 to 8%. Labor leaders met with the operators, reached a compromise which the workers promptly rejected.

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