“Prosecutions…are Always Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 “Don't Shoot” Prosecutions

Abstract

In the spring of 1912, the British syndicalist leader Tom Mann was prosecuted under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 for his opposition to the use of troops during the great coal strike. He was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, but an outcry from socialists, trade unionists, and progressives forced the Liberal government to reduce his sentence and release him early from prison. This much is familiar to historians of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. It is often forgotten, however, that Mann was only one of eight syndicalists and socialists who were prosecuted for their involvement in the “don't shoot” agitation. It is likewise forgotten that Mann went on trial just days before the suffragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence shared a similar fate, amid demands that Sir Edward Carson, the leading opponent of Irish home rule, join them in the dock. Indeed, the Nation, a progressive Liberal weekly, complained that “the country is…getting somewhat tired of political trials.” Perhaps because we assume the relative transparency of the law, historians have failed to scrutinize in detail the origins and outcome of the “don't shoot” prosecutions. George Dangerfield devoted one sentence to them, Elie Halévy a few more; although the “don't shoot” episode has been invoked to symbolize the increasingly fragile relations between Liberalism and the working classes, it continues to receive only brief mention in accounts of Edwardian labor and politics. Even Tom Mann's biographers have shed little new light on his case.