Bloody Sunday (1887) - Background

Background

Gladstone's espousal of the cause of Irish Home Rule had split the Liberal Party and made it easy for the Conservatives to gain a majority in the House of Commons. The period from 1885 to 1906 was one of Tory dominance, with short intermissions. Coercion Acts were the answer of British governments perturbed by rural unrest in Ireland, and they involved various degrees of suspension of civil rights. Although the immediate object of the 13 November demonstration was to protest about the handling of the Irish situation by the Conservative government of Lord Salisbury, it had a much wider context.

The Long Depression, starting in 1873 and lasting almost to the end of the century, created difficult social conditions in Britain - similar to the economic problems that drove rural agitation in Ireland. Falling food prices created rural unemployment, which resulted in both emigration and internal migration. Workers moved to the towns and cities in thousands, eroding employment, wages and working conditions. By November 1887, unemployed workers' demonstrations from the East End of London had been building up for more than two years. There had already been clashes with the police and with the members of upper class clubs. Trafalgar Square was seen symbolically as the point at which the working class East End met upper class West End of London, a focus of class struggle and an obvious flash point.

This attracted the attention of the small but growing Socialist movement - both the Marxists of the SDF (Social Democratic Federation) and Socialist League and the reformist Socialists of the Fabian Society. Police and government attempts to suppress or divert the demonstrations also brought in the radical wing of the Liberal party and free speech activists from the National Secular Society and the Law and Liberty League, who saw the Square as a public space that had to kept free for public, political use. As so often in British politics, the Irish issue provided a focus for a wide range of political and social concerns. The Left felt that the Irish situation had direct parallels within Britain and that coercion in Ireland propelled repression in Britain.

Some historians believe that an important factor was the fact that the working class in British cities contained a very large element that was Irish in birth or origin. London, like industrial areas of Northern England and the West of Scotland, had a large Irish working class, concentrated in the East End, where it rubbed shoulders with a very diverse population, including increasing numbers of Jews from Eastern Europe. There was also a strong international dimension to the situation. Irish and British workers were strongly concerned about the fate of the anarchists arrested after the Haymarket Riot in Chicago the previous year.