Mutiny and Leadership 0192893343, 9780192893345

Table of contents :
Cover
Mutiny and Leadership
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Introduction
Chapter 1: Rethinking Mutiny
Defining Mutiny
Refrains of Mutiny
Explaining Mutinies
Conclusion
Chapter 2: Mutinies in Revolutionary Times
Spithead and the Nore, 1797
The Spithead Mutiny
The Nore Mutiny
The Nore Mutiny
Hermione 1797
Potemkin 1905
Conclusion
Chapter 3: Mutinies in War
The Christmas Mutiny 1914
Russia 1917
French Army 1917
The German Mutinies 1917–18
ANZAC 1916 and Étaples 1917
Salerno 1943
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Mutinies after War
The British Forces 1918–19
Canadian Forces 1919
The Royal Air Force 1946
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Mutinies in Civil Wars
English Civil Wars 1646–9
Krondstadt 1921
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Mutinies and Ethnicity
The British West India Regiment 1801 & 1837
The Sepoy Mutiny, the Rebellion, and the 1st Indian War of Independence 1857–8
The Curragh 1914
Singapore 1915
The British Army Labour Corps & Foreign Battalions 1917–1918
Port Chicago 1944
The Royal Indian Navy 1946
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Dystopian and Utopian Mutinies
The Batavia 1629
HMS Bounty
FFG Storozhevoy
Conclusion
Chapter 8: Mutinies against Austerity
The Chilean Navy and Invergordon 1931
Conclusion
Chapter 9: The Erosion, Breaking, and Betrayal of the Moral Economy : A Reflection on Mutinies, Mutineers, and Leadership
References
Index

Citation preview

Mutiny and Leadership

Mutiny and Leadership KEITH GRINT

1

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Keith Grint 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021933262 ISBN 978–0–19–289334–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

For the leader of an army mutiny in Devizes, 1949

Contents Acknowledgementsix List of Figures  x Introduction1 1. Rethinking Mutiny Defining Mutiny Refrains of Mutiny Explaining Mutinies

9 9 27 41

2. Mutinies in Revolutionary Times Spithead and the Nore, 1797 The Nore Mutiny Hermione 1797 Potemkin 1905

58 58 68 82 91

3. Mutinies in War The Christmas Mutiny 1914 Russia 1917 French Army 1917 The German Mutinies 1917–18 ANZAC 1916 and Étaples 1917 Salerno 1943

98 98 110 126 133 147 151

4. Mutinies after War The British Forces 1918–19 Canadian Forces 1919 The Royal Air Force 1946

166 166 179 184

5. Mutinies in Civil Wars English Civil Wars 1646–9 Krondstadt 1921

191 191 204

6. Mutinies and Ethnicity The British West India Regiment 1801 & 1837  The Sepoy Mutiny, the Rebellion, and the 1st Indian War of Independence 1857–8  The Curragh 1914  Singapore 1915  The British Army Labour Corps & Foreign Battalions 1917–1918  Port Chicago 1944  The Royal Indian Navy 1946 

214 214

7. Dystopian and Utopian Mutinies  The Batavia 1629 HMS Bounty  FFG Storozhevoy 

308 308 320 333

218 257 263 279 283 298

viii contents

8. Mutinies against Austerity  The Chilean Navy and Invergordon 1931 

342 342

9. The Erosion, Breaking, and Betrayal of the Moral Economy: A Reflection on Mutinies, Mutineers, and Leadership

359

References  Index 

369 384

Acknowledgements This book has been several years in the making. I have used the concept of mutiny as a way of understanding leadership and power for many years, and I would like to thank all the students, civil and military, who have suffered the consequences, conceptual and physical, of my burbling. Mutiny is, by definition, a social not an individual action, and so is writing a book about it because without my co-­teachers, and all of the authors whose material I have read, none of this would be possible. In the former category I particularly want to thank Alex and the boys at Warwick for all their support over the years. I would also like to thank Adam Swallow at Oxford University Press for his encouragement and support in this project, Thomas Deva for managing the project, and Wade Guyitt for the copy editing. Finally, I would like to thank all my family for putting up with yet another ‘book’. The support of the adults (Sandra, Katy, Beki, Kris, Richie, Adam, and Becky) and the rebellion of the children (Lola, Livi, Nate, Nell, and Daphne) has proved an important point: resist much, obey little.

List of Figures 1.1 Amistad 1839: Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad

17

2.1 Richard Parker 1797: President of the Nore Mutineers’ Delegates 

71

2.2 HMS Hermione 1799: ‘cut out’ at Puerto Cabello 25 October 

83

2.3 The Potemkin 1905: Mutinying sailors 

92

3.1 Christmas Day 1914: British and German Soldiers fraternizing at Ploegsteert, Belgium 

102

3.2 Russian Mutiny 1917: Naval and army forces mutiny and drive through St Petersburg 1917 

118

3.3 French Mutiny 1917: French African Soldier 

127

3.4 German Navy Mutiny 1918: Kiel Harbour, 28 October

145

4.1 Kinmel Camp 1919: Tintown after the mutiny

182

5.1 Burford Mutiny 1649, Plaque, Burford Church and Oxford Mutiny 1649, Plaque, Gloucester Green, Oxford 

203

5.2 Krondstadt 1921: Mutineers in Krondstadt, Russia

208

6.1 Donald Stewart 1837 (formerly named Daaga), British West India Regiment, awaiting execution for leading a mutiny

217

6.2 Lakshmibai, the Rani of Maratha-­ruled Jhansi, 1857 

252

6.3 Curragh Camp 

260

6.4 Singapore Mutiny 1915: Execution of mutineers, Outram Road Gaol

277

6.5 Chinese Labour Corps, France

282

6.6 Port Chicago 1944: Damage resulting from the Port Chicago ammunition explosion, July 17 

290

7.1 The Batavia Mutiny 1647: engraving showing the Beacon Island massacre of survivors from the Batavia shipwreck

316

7.2 HMS Bounty 1789: Mutineers turning Bligh and crew adrift by Robert Dodd, 1790 

327

8.1 Invergordon 1931: Daily Mirror front page, 16 September 

349

9.1 Mutiny and vocabularies of motive

360

Introduction ‘History never repeats itself but it rhymes’ (attributed to Mark Twain)

Mutiny and leadership are two sides of the same coin: as soon as leadership emerges within a group there will be resistance to that leadership. It has always been thus. From what we know about our ancestors in hunter-gatherer societies from their contemporary incarnations, we know that ‘reverse-dominance hierarchies’—attempts by subordinates to organize against the superordinate to either discipline or overthrow them—are omnipresent (Boehm, 2001). The same is true in chimpanzees (De Waal, 2000), where leadership is embodied in coalitions, not individuals. But mutiny is a different form of resistance to that employed in most organizations. Generally speaking, where the subordinates are unhappy with their lot, they will either remain passively unhappy or rationalize their unhappiness (‘it could be worse, at least we are alive’) or do something about it. What they do about their unhappiness depends on a whole raft of issues, including the time and space for the resistance, the resources available to them, the legitimacy of their oppression and resistance, the presence of enough people willing and able to lead the resistance, and, of course, the equivalent issues for those deemed by the oppressed to be the oppressors. Since mutiny is, by definition, limited to social rather than individual dissent, and to military or naval organizations rather than all organizations, the leadership of both sides in a mutiny are often encased in a different aspic than their equivalents elsewhere. Elsewhere, social dissent might take the form of a protest, a go-slow, a strike, a march or sit-in, or any one of hundreds of other manifestations of dissent that are visible every day. For example, on the day this section was written (7 October 2019) there were reports of overt public dissent in Hong Kong (anti-government), Iraq (unemployment and corruption), and Britain (Brexit and Extinction Rebellion). When I first came to revise this section, on 10 November 2019, a ‘mutiny’ by the Bolivian police began the slow overthrow of President Morales. The final edit occurred on 5 June 2020, at which point COVID-19 was rampaging through the world, and protesters marched through large numbers of American, and indeed European, cities after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In mutinies, any form of dissent can be interpreted by the authorities as an attempt to overthrow, by force, the status quo; in other words, not just a manifestation of unease amongst the subordinates but some form of rebellion. In this sense, mutiny is almost always a significant problem for the authorities and is seldom seen as an attempt at ‘organizational improvement’, contrary to the approach taken by Murphy and Coye (2013: 4–5). And with rebellion comes extreme coercion, oftentimes ending in corporal or capital punishment. That unique context generates different forms of leadership which challenge our understanding of power, leadership, and legitimacy. For most of us, deciding to dissent from our employers’ wishes, or the demands of the state, might require us to reduce

Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0001

2  Mutiny and Leadership our income or prompt us to march in the rain for a few hours or even leave the job or the country; for mutineers and those against whom they mutiny, the decision to act, and the form of response taken, might very well lead to being shot by a firing squad, hung from a yardarm, or dumped into the ocean. Or it might just improve conditions, secure the back pay owed for months, get rid of despicable tyrants, and set the organization on a better path. In effect, leadership in mutinies, on both sides, is a precarious act where any false move—or even any move—might be your last. This is especially the case for the mutineers where leadership is not something honed to a professional skill over years of practice, supported by the majesty of the law, the fear of dismissal, and the terror of the lash and noose but rather something that often emerges rather spontaneously and usually with little ex­peri­ence on the part of the leaders. The military or authoritarian context of mutiny does not necessarily mean that overtly coercive hierarchies or bullying tyrants are omnipresent. Oftentimes military hierarchies operate without superordinates barking orders, and subordinates work without per­man­ ent intimidation. Of course, this may be because the subordinates accept the legitimacy of the hierarchy or because it is self-evident that any challenge will bring down the wrath of the gods, so what would be the point of dissenting? In itself this is an important point: generally speaking, people who deem themselves to be in an unjust or unfortunate pos­ ition will not do much about it if there is no obvious resolution of the problem available (Gallagher,  2010). Recognizing that you are unjustly enslaved does not automatically result in your revolt if you cannot see a path to your freedom. Moreover, dissent amongst those at the top of the hierarchy is also common, but that does not count as mutiny if it is limited to individuals. Thus, for example, not all British officers in the First World War complied with orders from above, especially if those orders were perceived to be selfevidently irrational or suicidal by those required to execute them. Indeed, many such ­dissenting officers were removed or ‘degommed’,1 especially by Haig (Sheffield, 2012). In effect, many hierarchies work on the principle of self-discipline where the fear of being caught breaking the law, or shirking one’s responsibilities, is sufficient to suffocate dissent or illegal activity. This is the principle behind the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham’s unrealized design for an economical and effective prison, where the warder within the central tower of the prison could look into each cell, but the prisoner within that cell was unable to establish whether they were being observed or not, hence they would selfdiscipline, just in case. This, is also the philosophy behind CCTV and speed cameras, where the possibility of being observed from afar is allegedly sufficient to deter anti-social or illegal activities on the streets and roads of our cities. The point, then, is not that the absence of dissent within a military hierarchy demonstrates support for the authorities, though it might, but that the possibility of being caught dissenting deters the dissenter from acting. In short, the absence of overt dissent does not equate to consent. Indeed, for long periods of time the coercive control of the state over its soldiers in particular would have been minimal outside parades, marches, or battles. Few armies lived permanently in barracks, and on campaign many were traditionally billeted amongst civilians, thus the overt military discipline and control would have been minimal for significant periods of time. It was for this reason that the wearing of uniform and the regular rotation of guard

1  From the French dégommer (to dismiss).

Introduction  3 duties was required: to remind soldiers that they were just that, soldiers who had signed a contract to comply (Hendrix, 2019: 28–30). It is also for this reason that leadership within military hierarchies is suffused with supporting systems beyond the mores of legitimacy. A monopoly over the legitimate use of violence is, of course, the sine qua non of the state, as Weber (1919) insisted, but that usually pertains to the deployment of violence by agents of the state against an actor or movement which challenges the rule of that state. In the case of mutiny we are looking at the use of violence either against the authorities of the state or against those normally required to use violence against the state’s enemies or opponents. Since mutiny challenges the legitimate use of that violence against the internal agents usually required to deploy it, mutiny is often only seen when the mutineers perceive that there has been a severing in the moral economy, the agreed rules of ‘the game’ under which subordinates risk life and limb in exchange for some level of care on the part of the superordinates. But for those against whom the mutiny is organized, it is often regarded as posing an existential risk to the state. It is for this reason that military hierarchies reinforce their own legitimacy with symbols of power, not just the power of the law but the rituals associated with it: the uniforms, the flags, the medals, the drum beats, the deployment of marines, the ordering of the naval crews and the army units to witness punishments, the physical separation of officers and others, the hovering ever-present threat of ‘the enemy’, the media, religious rituals, appeals to loyalty to the monarch, and so on. All of these are arranged in a sequence of practices to deter dissent and encourage compliance, and the consequence is that leadership in mutinies, on both sides, is unusually difficult and frequently terminal. Naturally, many mutinies are not intended by the mutineers to be the first act of dissent in an eventual rebellion intended to replace the hierarchy or escape from it. Frequently, mutinies are the equivalent of industrial disputes, at least in the eyes of the perpetrators, especially when external protests are commonplace and notions of equity with external comparators become popular. As such, many successful mutinies follow what Hendrix (2019: 15) calls a ‘script’: the demands remain within the conventions of the military contract; violence is absent or minimal, and the legitimacy of the hierarchy is confirmed after the settlement. But, since the legitimate monopoly of violence runs through the institutions of the state, any challenge to it is often construed by the superordinate agents of the state as a political rebellion, not an industrial dispute. The consequence is that the forms of leadership within a mutiny, and the skills required to lead one or suppress one, are not that necessary outside military hierarchies. Thus while Murphy and Coye (2013: 1) suggest that mutiny ‘is when members of an organization defy and depose an incumbent leader’, this both expands the definition outside a military context and implies that the replacement of the legitimate leadership is involved, neither of which is suggested in the approach taken here. It is also important to recognize that mutinies have a different temporal element when compared to industrial or social protests. Industrial strikes are often dependent upon the strikers coordinating their protests and developing supports that will ensure they can last without pay for weeks or months if necessary. For social movements, such as those seeking the acquisition of civil rights for instance, the goal may be recognizably months or even years away. This time frame is not usually possible in mutinies that may occur without months of preparation or planning and will almost certainly last for just a few days, since the organization that provides the sustenance is the very one being mutinied against.

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4  Mutiny and Leadership This appears to generate a clear requirement for the leadership of mutinies to be absolutely clear about the purpose, strategy, and tactics required to bring the mutiny to a successful conclusion. If the purpose is not the overthrow of the ship’s captain, for example, but rather the securing of backpay, then violence needs to be closely monitored and ­probably abstained from, but even this may be insufficient to prevent retribution, especially if the mutiny fails. That also means that the process of leading a mutiny is fraught with danger. Without the rituals and practices associated with the leadership of the formal hierarchy, or within industrial organizations, the leaders of mutinies have few of the trad­ ition­al levers of power. They are unlikely to be able to ensure that those unwilling to join the mutiny can be punished in any conventional way by permanent exclusion from the union or being ejected from membership, and they are left with merely ostracizing those refusing to rebel or engaging in violence or restraint against them. But these actions are, again, often signs of impending failure and expose the weakness of the mutineer’s main weapon: solidarity. Such problems are reflective of the continuing weakness of leadership in anarchist organizations: in the absence of the very aspects of power that anarchists rail against, anarchist movements have little of the coercive force of their rival left- or rightwing hierarchies, as the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War found to their cost: the communists were far better at eliminating the challenge from anarchists than they were at defeating Franco’s Falangists. Even if the purpose is both clear and engaging for potential mutineers, the task of the leadership—individual or collective—is to construct a strategy that will secure this goal and to have an array of tactics that may be called upon to keep the strategic focus of the mutineers and ensure the mutiny has a good chance of succeeding. Oftentimes, of course, given the speed with which mutinies develop and the importance of retaining secrecy in the early stages, it becomes an enormously complex task to lead a mutiny, and the serendipitous nature of events means that victory is never certain and possible defeat is a constant companion. Indeed, it may well be that some mutinies are not well planned and thought through but rather spontaneous acts in the face of a particular event that are regarded by the mutineers as ‘beyond the pale’, irrespective of the consequences of the response.2 If then, as I shall argue, leadership is necessarily a relational activity in which the success of the organization, movement, mutiny or suppression of the mutiny is dependent upon the relationship between the leaders and followers rather than the ‘power’ of the leaders or followers in and of itself, then the cause of the mutiny is frequently the collapse of that relationship between the officers and their subordinates. Equally important, the explanation of the success or failure of the mutiny is usually a consequence of the relationship between the mutineers and their leaders. As we shall see so often in mutinies, success is related not only to the solidarity of the mutineers but also their leadership. If the purpose of the mutiny is clear and generally accepted by those required to support it, if the strategy is appropriate for the context, and if the tactical skill of the leaders is better than that of their opponents, then a mutiny has a chance of not just succeeding but of concluding without the scapegoating of the mutiny’s leadership. But if the purpose is confused or divisive, or the strategy inappropriate, or the tactics insufficiently inflexible, then not only 2  The ‘pale’ in this context, refers to the symbolic boundary mark that differentiates acceptable from un­accept­ able behaviour; the ‘pale’ derives from the Latin palus, meaning stake or fencepost.

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Introduction  5 is the mutiny likely to fail but the leadership will almost certainly be disciplined at least and at worst perish. Leaders in a mutiny have to take the general disquiet of the group and turn that frequently inchoate anger into a coherent and disciplined response, designed to address the disquiet as quickly as possible. Making a mistake in life is often an opportunity for learning something about oneself and the world; making a mistake in a mutiny is often a lifeending event. In some of the mutinies that are discussed later, the world is changed for the better and for the many, but in some cases it is changed for the worse and, for the few, forever. Many contemporary countries have not seen a mutiny for many years, and this is often because war plays a less important role in some areas and because in others the recognition of how important pay and conditions are agreed upon has generated a more sustainable model for the relationship between civilian and military rulers. Moreover, many military organizations are composed of volunteers not conscripts, so the relationship between superordinate and subordinate is different. But, as we shall see, this is not always the case, and some countries remained plagued by mutinies that are both the cause and effect of the destabilized context. Even those countries that rely on volunteer forces are not immune though: in 2013, sixteen soldiers of the (British) Yorkshire Regiment refused direct orders on parade in front of 1,000 guests in a protest about ‘being led by muppets’ after a tour in Afghanistan. The group were protesting about the actions of their own Captain and Colour Sergeant but were found guilty of disobeying a lawful order and sentenced to forty or sixty days in prison and a reduction to the ranks for those who had a rank, and the ringleader (Corporal Anthony Brown) was also dismissed from the service (Drury, 2013). Other countries do seem plagued by mutinies: Sudan has suffered fifteen military coups or mutinies since 1952, while the rest of Africa had experienced 206 coups or mutinies—the level has remained remarkably stable at about four a year on average. And even liberation movements can face mutinies, as did the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA) in 1974–5 (Tendi,  2017). In contrast, South America had experienced ninety-five coups or mutinies in the same period, with just under half being successful—about the same success rate as in Africa (Giles, 2019). But is a military coup the same as a mutiny? Conventionally a coup is an attempt to replace the government of a country, whereas a mutiny is a revolt against the military superordinates by the sub­or­din­ ates. The 2016 revolt by elements of the Turkish military against President Erdogan appears to have been closer to a coup than a mutiny, for example. And whatever the outcome of a mutiny, and whether it succeeds or not, the future will have been ineradicably changed, for good or ill (and it is important not to romanticize all mutineers as the worthy underdogs—some were unworthy murderers); the world will never be the same again for those involved, and for some it will be the end of their world. I have written this book so that it is possible to ignore the theoretical introduction (and the theoretical reflection in the final chapter) and dive straight into any of the mutinies, since they are primarily narrative-based. The first chapter examines the main theoretical perspectives that surround mutiny and uses some of the lesser known and understood mutinies to explore elements of the topic that set the frames for what follows. In particular, it sets out the issues surrounding the definition of mutiny; identifies the recurring themes, or refrains, that emerge in the history of mutiny; and finally explores what we know about the causes of mutiny.

6  Mutiny and Leadership Chapter 2 begins with those mutinies that many might regard as the most typical, and typically dangerous: mutinies that occur in revolutionary times and reflect the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist. Here we start in 1797, a time of extreme political turbulence as the effects of the French Revolution washed first over Europe and then the rest of the world. This revolutionary calling is precisely what the British Admiralty feared with the mutinies that occurred at two British Royal Navy anchorages at Spithead and the Nore, and these two mutinies embody a primary axis of mutiny: the first is resolved by negotiation; the second by extreme violence. We then focus on the Hermione also in 1797, where the crew believed they had been badly treated and treated their captain and officers just as badly. The authorities responded by treating the mutineers as the most repellent scum of the high seas. This, in itself, is an important reflection on the importance of mutiny to the authorities—those engaged in it were almost always hunted down at great cost and over years to try to eradicate any further dissent. The chapter ends with the mutiny that heralded the beginning of a long, drawn-out civil war in Russia, the Potemkin in 1905, when the rebellious sailors erroneously assumed, rather like those on the Storozhevoy some seventy years later, that they were beacons of revolution for the rest of Russia or the Soviet Union to follow. Chapter  3 shifts from mutinies in revolutionary times to mutinies that—in some cases—presaged revolutions. We begin with the events of Christmas 1914 along the Western Front when Allied and German troops stopped killing each other and, despite all orders to the contrary, fraternized with the enemy. This case exemplifies another primary axis of mutiny: at what point does a disinclination to follow orders turn into a mutiny? As we shall see, the authorities on both sides tried to avoid calling the action ‘mutiny’ to cover their own embarrassment, but mutiny it was. The second case, concerning the Russian Army in 1917, is a classic case of a mutiny that transforms into a full-blown revolution, the very thing that many authorities feared more than their conventional enemies and one explanation for why the response to mutinies is so often egregiously bloody. That revolution also generated echoes across the First World War battlefields, with first the French Army then the German Navy refusing to fight. Not that the British Army and its dominion troops were undisturbed by events in Russia, and there were further minor mutinies later in 1916 and 1917, some involving troops from Australia and New Zealand from the ANZAC contingent. The British Army also features in the Second World War when it suffered a significant problem at Salerno in 1943 with troops from the Eighth Army. Chapter 4 shifts from wartime mutinies to mutinies that occur after war, which, iron­ic­ al­ly, proves to be one of the most dangerous times for the authorities, when troops believed they had done their duty and now was the time for demobilization and civvy street. If the French Army was ripped apart by the 1917 mutinies, it is the British Army that almost collapsed in 1919. At the same time as this was occurring, the Canadian forces were in a parallel position, and in both Britain and Russia soldiers and sailors mutinied at the prospect of continuing their service. Finally we move to the end of the Second World War, and in particular the British Royal Air Force (RAF) in India and the Far East, that effectively ceased to operate in protest at the slow demobilization. Chapter 5 highlights mutinies in a particular kind of war, civil war, where ‘normal’ conditions are so unbalanced and disappointed expectation so common that thoughts of betrayal are never far from the surface. We begin with the English Civil Wars where frustration first with the King’s behaviour, and then with the behaviour of the parliamentary

Introduction  7 army leaders, entices previously loyal soldiers to mutiny against their erstwhile leaders. We end in Krondstadt in 1921, ever the home of Russian revolutionaries, who also felt themselves betrayed by the very Bolshevik party they had fought so hard to install four years previously. In some ways Chapter 6 is a refraction of Chapter 5, because if the latter concerns how different political allegiances can lead to mutiny, the former focuses on the ethnic roots of many mutinies. We begin by delving into a mutiny of the British West Indies Regiment in 1801 that throws light upon the role of slavery at the time and the schizophrenic attitudes of the British Royal Navy as they wrestled with a shift from slave supporting to slave freeing—but often only in order to secure the ‘headmoney’ offered by the British government and to fill up the decimated ranks of the British Army in the West Indies. The quest for wealth and the resultant executions are also familiar paths in the Indian Mutiny or First War of Independence in 1857/8, and here we lay bare the way an initial protest against a cultural insult reveals a deep-rooted resentment that creates the conditions for unbridled violence on both sides of the revolt. We then move to another country where ethnic divisions are never far from the surface: Ireland. Here we look at the Curragh ‘incident’ where British Army officers refused to march north to contain not a civil war but expected civil unrest generated by an uprising from their Protestant kin. And if the British thought that 1858 was the last mutiny of their Indian subjects, they were wrong: in 1915 a Muslim regiment of the (British) Indian Army in Singapore mutinied against the prospect of being posted by the British to fight Turkish Muslims in the Gallipoli campaign. The significance of ethnicity is also represented by contrasting what happened to the British Foreign Battalions at the end of the First World War in 1918–19 with the response of the same authorities to the mutinies of British troops in 1919: while the latter were treated with kid gloves, the former were shot in significant numbers. An analogous mutiny occurs at Port Chicago in 1944 in California, whose roots were deeply embedded in the racist policies and practices of the USA and its military. We end this chapter with the 1946 mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy, just at the brink of Indian independence from Britain, and look not only at the ethnic origins of the dispute but also the attitude of the two main Indian pol­it­ ical parties to the mutiny, for whom the event proved dangerously premature and provocative. Chapter 7 shifts from the binaries of ethnicity to the binaries of utopia and dystopia. We begin with the Batavia in 1629, surely one of the most depraved mutinies, that starts with a quest for riches and ends with a dystopian fiefdom and mass executions. Next we consider the opposite end of the political spectrum and accompany the crew of the Bounty as they find themselves deracinated from what they believed to be a deserved utopia and coerced back to the mundane world of seafaring. Once again we witness here that even if Captain Bligh (himself a relatively humane captain) and the rest of his abandoned shipmates are never physically harmed by the mutineers and all, bar one, survive the open boat journey to Java, the authorities spent an extraordinary amount of time and treasure hunting the mutineers down and bringing them to naval justice. We end with the Storozhevoy, a Soviet naval ship that, in 1975, appeared to be trying to emulate the Potemkin in (re)starting the Russian Revolution. It ended with a similar despondent defeat for the mutineers. Chapter 8, the last empirical chapter, ends the narratives with those mutinies that are furthest away from the revolutionary mutinies we began with. Here we consider mutinies

8  Mutiny and Leadership that are more concerned with the mundane matters that ordinary industrial strikers would be familiar with: wages and conditions. In this final case we look at mutinies in the Chilean and the British navies in 1931, an age of austerity not dissimilar to the one experienced by many since the economic malaise of 2008. In the 1931 cases the radical cuts enforced by governments on the navies of both countries stimulated mutinies that ended with the Chilean air force bombing their own navy and the British Army preparing to do the same to the British Atlantic fleet anchored in Invergordon. The final chapter draws the work together by offering a typology of mutinies using the Vocabularies of Motive adopted by the protagonists involved—in other words, not what we think they might have been intending or believing but what they actually said about their actions. This allows the construction of a typology that compares three different vocabularies used by mutineers, rooted in the erosion, breaking, or betrayal of the economic, social, or political contract respectively, with three vocabularies used by the superordinates, grounded in the assumption either that the mutiny could not be put down (fait accompli), or that the mutineers must have been misled, or that the mutiny posed an ex­ist­en­tial threat and must be destroyed. We end by reflecting on the issue that we began with: leadership. Here I want to shift the focus from the context of mutinies that I start with, and not to the leadership of the authorities but to that of the mutineers. There is always a danger of what Wrong (1961) called an ‘oversocialized’ account of action, to the extent that the context determines everything and the actors are mere ciphers for greater economic, social, or political powers that they may not even be aware of. However, even if mutinies in revolutionary times are self-evidently a reflection of those turbulent conditions, not every military unit experienced a mutiny, so clearly there must be a significant role for individual leaders and small groups of leaders. Why did some individuals put themselves at extreme personal risk for the sake of what many of their contemporaries regarded as either the inevitable consequence of power, legitimate or otherwise, or something that, however wrong, could not be challenged, at least not without dire risk to those leading the challenge? Many people face immoral, unfair, unjust or just evil authority; most of us just do the best we can to live with it, but some lead mutinies. These are the subjects of the final section of the last chapter.

1

Rethinking Mutiny Defining Mutiny ‘Mutiny’ is defined by the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology as ‘open revolt against authority’, and its origin—as an English word—derives originally from the Latin ‘movere’—to move—via the Old French ‘mutin’ meaning ‘rebellious’. It first appears in the English language in 1567 (during the reign of Elizabeth I) as an ‘open revolt against constituted authority’, and by 1579 it was associated directly with ‘the revolt of soldiers or sailors against their officers’ (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1983). The English navy’s Articles of War were first published by the Admiralty in 1653, after the Battle of Dungeness, when the English fleet was comprised of both warships and impressed merchant ships, and several of the latter had declined to join the battle against the Dutch, preferring to chase down their own prizes. The Articles put all impressed ships under military command, divided the fleet into squadrons to ensure better control, and provided sailing and fighting instructions for the first time. The Articles were based on the sea ‘Laws of Oleron’—a system of naval regulations brought to England by Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1160 after the Second Crusade, when she had accompanied her first husband, Louis VII of France, and learned of them from King Baldwin III of Jerusalem. The laws were themselves in use from the 1st century and governed Mediterranean commerce. In 1661, during the first post-­interregnum parliament of England, Charles II authorized the ‘Naval Discipline Act’ that embodied the Articles of War, covering, amongst other things, mutiny. The English, and later the British, Royal Navy was heavily dependent upon impressment to fill its ships, especially in wartime. Elizabeth I’s 1563 ‘Act touching political considerations for the maintenance of the navy’ was the first of several related acts (the relevant others were the ‘Vagabonds Act’ 1597 and the ‘Recruiting Act’ 1703) that worked to ensure the manning of both the navy and the army, using whatever sources were available. But, after a failed campaign in Normandy in 1592 under the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth made no effort to bring the foot soldiers back and left them to fend for themselves for six months—until another threat to her appeared and she needed the remnants of the army back home (Guy, 2018: 186–7). The difficulty of securing recruits to bolster the army or navy, given what had happened to the previous campaigns, eventually forced the government to issue ‘An Acte for necessarie Reliefe of Souldiers and Maryners’ in 1593 that provided payments for those left disabled by the wars, though again it was up to the local counties to levy the tax and provide the payments, and did not involve the central state (Dixon, 1981: 12). The Spanish monarch, Philip II, in contrast to Elizabeth, paid the ransoms of those captured by the enemy and paid the arrears of all those who had sailed in the Armada. But we should not read into this gesture anything more than the importance of the individual leader, rather than the significance of national political culture. Between 1572 and 1607 the Spanish-­Habsburg Army of Flanders (composed primarily of mercenaries), deployed Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0002

10  Mutiny and Leadership to crush the Dutch rebellion, mutinied at least forty-­five times (Parker, 2008). In August 1573—while Philip was king of Spain—Don Fadrique, then the son of the third Duke of Alba and field commander of the Spanish Army in Flanders, had the leaders of a mutiny at Haarlem shot, even after Philip had agreed to pay them thirty escudos each to settle their back pay claims and gave them all a pardon. Fadrique then added fuel to the mutinous fire by refusing to pay for the sick or wounded or dead, despite agreeing to do so. The consequence was not a compliant army but the opposite: in April the following year the same troops mutinied at Antwerp, and this time they demanded a written safeguard—signed by the king: ‘let us not be trusting as we trusted the Duke of Alva and his son Don Fadrique since they were so illustrious and since the same Don Fadrique made his promises on oath, for words and promises were carried away by the wind’ (quoted in Parker, 2008: 172). Five years later, in 1578, English and Scottish mercenary regiments of the Dutch Army of Flanders were the only ones left to fight the Spanish at the Battle of Rijmenam after the German mercenaries refused to fight until they got paid. The payment to the English and Scottish regiments did not occur for a decade (Trim, 2001: 50), but English mercenaries were just as likely to mutiny as any other nationality if they did not get paid— as indeed the troops under Captain John Hawkwood did in 1373 when they devastated the area around Mantua after the pope failed to pay them (Sherer, 2014: 898). Machiavelli famously excoriated the Italian city states for their use of mercenaries, but mutiny was never restricted to those fighting for money. Impressment in the English navy tended to seek out experienced merchant sailors between 18 and 55 years old, since sailing a ship was no task for so called ‘land-­lubbers’, but the English army frequently depended on the emptying of jails, and Cromwell’s New Model Army (1645–60) had also depended upon impressment. Army impressment applied to all those who were ‘able-­bodied idle, and disorderly persons, who could not, upon Examination, prove themselves to exercise and industriously follow some lawful Trade or Employment, or to have some Substance sufficient for their support and maintenance’. Britain was not alone in this endeavour: France, Spain, and Denmark–Norway also used variants of the impressment/conscription and militia system, though all three used registers of seamen to call upon in times of war. No such register existed in Britain, so the press gangs made up with wooden clubs what the others did with paper. The Dutch navy used ‘crimps’ or ‘sellers of souls’ (zielverkopers), an outsourced system whereby the crimper gangs ‘encouraged’ desperate debtors on board, and the Dutch navy paid their wages directly to the crimpers until such time as the debt had been paid off. As a supplementary recruitment system, all countries actively sought out foreign nationals. As we shall see, only half of the crew of HMS Hermione were English, with the Irish commonly providing around one-­quarter of the Royal Navy crews, so that by the time of the mutinies in 1798 there were probably 30,000 Irish sailors in the British fleet (Britain included Ireland at that time, and the British army contained troops from all four countries making up the union). The proportion of non-­Dutch crews in the Dutch navy was significantly higher, and ships frequently had only a minority of their crews able to understand Dutch (Frykman, 2009: 72). Another primary strategy in the mutineer’s armoury is not just to construct a strong network of allegiance to the mutineers but to eliminate the possibility of a third way: ­people were either with the mutiny or against it; there could be no sitting on the fence here because that would weaken the collective strength of the mutineers. Slater et al. (2019) take this framework one stage further to suggest that the content of a shared identity is

Rethinking Mutiny  11 also critical to the extent that leaders need to cultivate a sense of social identity by defining the appropriate content. For sports teams this might be performance excellence; for mu­tin­eers this might be the righteousness of their cause and the illegitimacy of those opposing them. If the group is not singing from the same song sheet then, very soon, they will not be singing at all. And the consequence for failure in mutiny was not being fired from the sports squad but being fired at by the execution squad. Death was the sentence written into the 1749 Articles of War of the British Royal Navy: If any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall make or endeavor to make any mutinous Assembly upon any Pretense whatsoever, every Person offending herein, and being convicted thereof by the Sentence of the Court Martial, shall suffer Death: and if any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall utter any Words of Sedition or Mutiny, he shall suffer Death, or such other Punishment as a Court Martial shall deem him to deserve. . . . [Moreover] if any Person in or belonging to the Fleet shall conceal any traitorous or mutinous Words spoken by any, to the Prejudice of His Majesty or Government, or any Words, Practice or Design tending to the Hindrance of the Service, and shall not forthwith reveal the same to the Commanding Officer; or being present at any Mutiny or Sedition, shall not use his utmost Endeavors to suppress the same, he shall be punished as a Court Martial shall think he deserves.1

In the British Royal Navy execution usually meant a firing squad for a senior officer and hanging from the yardarm for everyone else, but all executions were public affairs, rituals arranged under a yellow flag—the symbol of death.2 Occasionally other ranks below the rank of officer were shot: in 1799, for instance, three Royal Marines (all of Irish extraction) were shot on Plymouth Hoe, in front of 10,000 military personnel and 40,000 civilians, for a mutiny that involved swearing oaths and refusing orders. A fourth Marine (Maginnis, also Irish) was given 500 lashes (the last 50 had to be delayed after Maginnis passed out at 450) (Waddington, 2017).3 Hanging involved a slow process of strangulation because the victim was hauled up to the block of an upper yard by his fellow sailors; there was not usually a drop designed to break the neck for an instantaneous death. The first English ‘Mutiny Act’ occurred in 1689, following a mutiny by part of the army that remained loyal to James II in the face of the ‘invited’ invasion by William of Orange; prior to that, mutiny was covered by the Articles of War, authorized directly by the sovereign and only in force for the duration of hostilities. Since England has historically chosen not to have a standing army—partly because of the costs involved and partly because of the fear of an army (as opposed to a royal) dictatorship of the Cromwellian republican format, military discipline within armies was only ever a temporary phenomenon. But the 1  Articles 19 and 20 of An Act for Amending, Explaining and Reducing into One Act of Parliament, the Laws Relating to the Government of His Majesty’s Ships, Vessels and Forces by Sea (also known as the 1749 ‘Naval Act or the Articles of War), 22 Geo. 2, c. 33 (quoted in Buchan, 2017: 1). 2  It is not clear why the colour yellow is associated with executions in particular and cowardice in general, at least in the Western world. It may be that the common feature of executions was the involuntary urination induced by fear, and the yellow colour of urine became associated with fear. Pastoureau (2019) suggests that, during the European feudal period, yellow was associated with honour and beauty, but gradually the colour became associated with ill health through urine analysis and subsequently became linked to envy, lying, and— most importantly in this context—treachery. 3  It was not unknown for the flogging to continue after the victim was pronounced dead (Frykman, 2009: 82).

12  Mutiny and Leadership absence of a standing army—and the alleged liberty of the English—was also used to ­justify the necessity for impressment: the forced conscription into the army and navy at times of threat. The ‘Mutiny Act’ effectively severed soldiers and sailors from any civilian justice by revoking what rights they have had in a conventional jury system where the prosecution and judge were separate and where some forms of appeal was permissible. Gilbert’s (1985) review of military disciplinary in the Seven Years War suggests, from his sample of 1,000 general courts martial cases, one-­quarter ended in capital convictions, half in floggings, and one-­fifth in acquittals. But impressment also served to control dissident populations, especially the Irish in the British case, and was a means of reducing prison populations when they became overcrowded (Westover,  1998: 365). At this point, British Army discipline was divided into three forms: minor offences were handled by regimental officers, more serious offences fell within the remit of Regimental Courts Martial requiring five officers, while the most ser­ ious (including all those where the death penalty was a possibility) were handled by General Courts Martial, led by a field officer and involving twelve officers from regiments other than that of the recalcitrant. The sentences from a General Court Martial (and cap­ital sentences required a two-­thirds majority) had to be confirmed by the commander-­in-­chief, but the precise nature of that sentence was often vague and followed the ‘customs of war’ (Hendrix,  2019). Indeed, General Braddock’s order book from 1755 noted that ‘Any ­person whatsoever that is detected in stealing shall be immediately hanged without being brought to a Court Martial’ (quoted in Way, 2016: 352). However, the 1689 Act transferred responsibility from the sovereign to parliament, and this was altered in 1803 and remained in situ until the 1879 ‘Army Discipline and Regulation Act’ (subsequently the ‘Army Act’ of 1881). The Acts codified the various offences in decreasing order of priority (to the army) and the consequent severity of the punishment: treachery, cowardice in the face of the enemy, plundering, sleeping on duty, mutiny and insubordination, desertion, fraudulent enlistment, going absent without leave (AWOL), committing fraud or embezzlement, and being drunk. Drunkenness was usually dealt with by a fine imposed by the commanding officer, but flogging had been gradually reduced from 1820, so that by 1868 it could only be applied for cases of mutiny or violence against a superior officer on active service. By this time Field Punishment Number 1 (handcuffed in irons and fixed to a post for a couple of hours a day for up to twenty-­one days) and Field Punishment Number 2 (handcuffed in irons but not fixed to a post) became common (French, 2005: 24–5). In fact, British court martials declined in number across time, suggesting a steady improvement in discipline: between 1868 and 1893 an average of 77 per 1,000 soldiers were court martialled, but between 1902 and 1913 that number had dropped to 30 per 1,000, and it was a mere 19 per 1,000 between 1919 and 1935. As French suggests, the data are not always reliable or consistent, but, excluding the World Wars and the Boer War, most British court martials were concerned with desertion and being AWOL, followed by drunkenness. However, in the Edwardian British Army (1901–10), refusal to obey a lawful order was the second most common offence, dis­placing drunkenness. After 1918, crimes against the army (theft, etc.) rose to number two. What is also intriguing is just how few court martials for cowardice, mutiny, or other crimes committed in the face of the enemy there were. Between 1865 and 1898 only five soldiers were tried for crimes committed in the face of the enemy, and only ninety-­four for mutiny. However, few deserters ended up in court martials because many either were never

Rethinking Mutiny  13 captured or, if they were, they were dealt with by the commanding officer and not sent for court martial. The same problem relates to the figures for drunkenness, but perhaps the most interesting data relate to the growth in court martials at the end of the First World War. For instance, the 1st Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment experienced only 17 courts martial per 1,000 men between 1915 and 1919. But in 1920 that ratio rose to 45 per 1,000, and it stayed as high as 42 per 1,000 in 1922, reflecting the morale problems at the end of, rather than during, the war for the British Army. Moreover, a lot of the court martials related to the same recalcitrant soldiers (French, 2005: 182–3). In 1955 the ‘British Army Act’ defined mutiny in the UK as occurring when two or more persons, subject to military law, engaged in: (1) overthrowing or resisting lawful authority from Her Majesty’s forces (or any forces cooperating with them) (2) disobeying such lawful authority so as to undermine discipline or avoid duty in connection with operations against the enemy or (3) impeding the performance of any duty or service in Her Majesty’s forces (or any force cooperating with them). Only in 1998 was the death penalty for mutiny in the British forces removed from the statute book, even though it had ceased to exist for civil offences in 1965 in Great Britain (1973 in Northern Ireland). The USA provides a similar legal code on mutiny, or sedition, through the ‘Uniform Code of Military Justice’ (10 US Code § 894—Art. 94. Mutiny or Sedition) (a)  Any person subject to this chapter who— (1) with intent to usurp or override lawful military authority, refuses, in concert with any other person, to obey orders or otherwise do his duty or creates any violence or disturbance is guilty of mutiny; (2) with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of lawful civil authority, creates, in concert with any other person, revolt, violence, or other disturbance against that authority is guilty of sedition; (3) fails to do his utmost to prevent and suppress a mutiny or sedition being committed in his presence, or fails to take all reasonable means to inform his superior commissioned officer or commanding officer of a mutiny or sedition which he knows or has reason to believe is taking place, is guilty of a failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition. (b) A person who is found guilty of attempted mutiny, sedition, or failure to suppress or report a mutiny or sedition, shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-­martial may direct. Here the important points are twofold. First, it is reaffirmed that mutiny requires some form of collective resistance to legal authority (it remains a defence in many countries to resist an illegal order); an individual refusing to obey a legal order does not constitute a mutiny—it must involve more than one person. On 29 November 1864, for example, Captain Silas Soule and his deputy, Lt Joseph Cramer (D Company, 1st Colorado Cavalry), refused a direct order from their commanding officer, Colonel John Chivington, to attack

14  Mutiny and Leadership the Cheyenne and Arapaho camp of Black Kettle at Sand Creek. The camp flew the Union flag and a white flag as a sign of peace and posed no hostile threat to the cavalry, but the rest of the 675-­strong American cavalry attacked the camp, killing and mutilating between 70 and 500 Native Americans, two-­thirds of whom were women and children. Soule later testified against his commanding officer, but Chivington resigned his commission, and no punishment was given either to him or to any other cavalryman. Soule was himself murdered the following year. Here, although there are the requisite numbers refusing an order, the demand was regarded as illegitimate by the dissenters and therefore not categorized as mutiny. Nor is the headline for the London Evening Standard newspaper on 23 May 2019 evidence of a mutiny. ‘PM admits defeat after cabinet mutiny’ refers to the revolt against the then British prime minister, Theresa May, by her cabinet and her subsequent resignation. In some countries the refusal to back the political leader in a military dictatorship is a mutiny, but (at the time of writing at least) the United Kingdom is not a military dictatorship, so the cabinet revolt was not a mutiny. In September 2019, cruise passengers on board a Fred Olsen Cruise Lines ship, the Balmoral, ‘mutinied’ after the ‘mystery cruise’ included visits to Great Yarmouth, a migrant camp near Dunkirk, and a run-­down Dutch port (Metro, 21 September 2019). And the same happened in October when a Norwegian Spirit liner replaced visits to Iceland and Amsterdam with stops in Glasgow and Belfast, among other substitutions (MailOnline, 9 October 2019), but neither involved resistance to legal authority and therefore do not count as ‘mutinies’. The second important point in the American approach is that passivity is not a defence: failure to stop or act against a mutiny is also an offence. This, as will become evident, is also used by authorities other than Americans to explore whether troops or sailors or avi­ ators, who did not actively participate in mutinies, made sufficient effort to stop or report them. But the fluidity of the definition ensures that it is possible to define acts that we might conventionally call ‘strikes’4 or ‘desertion’ as ‘mutinies’. Thus the mass desertion of Georgians from the Army of Tennessee during the American Civil War is referred to as mutiny by Weitz (2001), as were the British police strikes in 1919. Moreover, even the absence of a legitimate authority does not mean that acts of rebellion might not constitute mutiny, as Belco (2001) suggests of the Italian partisans towards the end of the Second World War. Sedition—conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of the state or monarch—relates to civil authority, whereas mutiny relates to military authority; the former covers a political rebellion or revolution. Thus conscientious objectors who refuse to comply with military orders (once they are in the military) are not engaging in a mutiny unless the resistance is collectively organized. For example, the British Military Service Act of January 1916 allowed men the right to apply for exemption from the military on the grounds of ill health, protected occupation, or conscientious objection. The exemption claims were heard by local authority tribunals—some of whom dismissed claims because the chairperson (in one case Councillor Hopwood at Shaw, Manchester) did not believe in conscientious objection! On the other hand, Brentford Tribunal allowed brewery workers to avoid conscription because their work was ‘of national importance’. By March 1916 the 4  Ironically, the origins of the English word ‘strike’ derive from dissenting sailors who would ‘strike’ (take down) the sails to prevent a ship from moving. Its first use is from 1768, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Rethinking Mutiny  15 British Army, fearful that conscientious objectors would undermine the demands for recruiting, formed a Non-­Combatant Corps (NCC) for conscientious objectors in which the recruits would be subject to military law but not required to carry arms or fight, while the officers and non-­commissioned officers (NCOs) would be drawn from regular infantry units. By August 1918 there were 3,319 soldiers in the NCC, most of whom served in Britain. Once in the army they were, of course, subject to military discipline, and therefore any further refusal to comply, if undertaken as a group, amounted to mutiny. One such group—from the 1st Eastern Company, NCC—refused to carry stones from the beach at Harwich, arguing that they were to be used for military purposes. On 7 May 1916 they were transported to France—and as such a war zone, where refusal to obey orders carried a death sentence. Three days later a smaller group refused to march off parade or handle tools at Harfleur Quarry where they had been sent. When they refused twice more, they were arrested, court-­martialled, and sentenced to death on 15 June. The sentence was then commuted to ten years’ penal servitude. Thirty other conscientious objectors were sentenced to death in France (Starling and Lee, 2009: 202). We might fruitfully turn to slave ships to consider just why the definition of mutiny is important. Since ships at sea (especially slavers) operate under the total control of the captain, such rebellions have usually been dealt with as mutinies and, according to Finkenbine (2001: 233), about 10 per cent of slave voyages involved some form of insurrection. Indeed, Linebaugh and Rediker (2000) use the term ‘hydrarchy’ to explain the multiple mutinies at sea—and not just in slave ships—where the presence of coercive authority was constantly contested by those below deck. Such a high rate of resistance might be explained in slave ships by the proximity of the slaves to each other, the time to build the necessary relationships of trust, the overwhelming proportion of slaves to crew, the physical isolation of the ship, and the ability of the slaves to escape with the ship to safety if they could overpower their captors (Sale,  1997). William Bosman, who sailed for the Dutch East India Company, had twice experienced failed slave mutinies in the late seventeenth century; in 1701 James Barbot, an English slaver, lost several crew to the mutineers, many of whom he shot, while more leapt overboard ‘and drown’d themselves in the ocean with much resolution, shewing no manner of concern for life’ (quoted in Kaplan, 1969: 293). Twenty years later, William Snelgrave faced a mutiny and tried to justify his cargo of slaves by suggesting they ‘had forfeited their Freedom before I bought them, either by Crimes or by being taken in War’. Of course, Snelgrave could not possibly have known whether his captives were indeed POWs or criminals, but presumably it served his conscience to rationalize his actions by believing it to be true. The same year (1721) a surgeon in the British Royal Navy, John Atkins, spoke of his conversation with a Captain Harding of the slaver Robert, from Bristol, who had put down a mutiny and made the two surviving male slaves eat the heart and liver of the dead third mutineer before killing them (Kaplan, 1969: 295). By 1807 Britain had outlawed the international slave trade but not slavery, though it also meant that it was illegal for British subjects to crew, build, supply, or insure slave ships. Britain also authorized the formation of a British naval ‘preventative’ West Africa Squadron to operate as the international anti-­slavery police (Rees,  2010), though many slaving nations insisted that Britain was merely cloaking its imperial ambitions in the fraudulent morality of anti-­slavery, rather than enacting an ethical policy (Walls, 2019: 35). In fact, aligning the moral ambitions of the abolitionists and the more mercenary motivations of the sailors was achieved through the ‘Abolition Act’ that specified the prizes

16  Mutiny and Leadership allocated to those freeing slaves: ‘headmoney’ amounted to £40 per male slave, £30 per female slave and £10 per child under 14 years old.5 In effect, the act treated slaves as ‘captured negroes’, not free as such but now the property of the British Crown, which chose not to ‘own’ the confiscated slaves; instead, since they were no longer slaves but not legally ‘free’, the British state could, and did, enlist them in the British armed forces (Scanlan, 2014). Slavery itself was abolished in 1833 within Britain’s own colonies, though slaves would not be freed for a further six years, by which time the West Africa Squadron had thirty-­six vessels and 4,000 men and had freed about 200,000 Africans from potential slavery, about 0.6 per cent of the 3.2 million slaves shipped between 1808 and 1863 (Wills, 2019). But the complexities of the slave trade are captured by the mutiny on board the Amistad (Spanish for friendship). It was a schooner, designed for carrying sugar mainly, but on 28 June 1839 it carried fifty-­three Mende slaves (forty-­nine adults, four children). They had been il­legal­ly transported to Cuba from Sierra Leone on board the slave ship Teçora, and the Amistad was sailing the short two-­day journey from Havana to the plantations near Puerto Principe, also in Cuba. Since the Amistad was not designed as a slaver, half of the slaves were kept on deck, with the other half manacled below deck. Three days after the Amistad left Havana, the slaves below deck, led by Joseph Cinqué (real name Sengbe Pieh) broke free, and the Spanish captain, Ramon Ferrer, was killed, along with the cook and two of the crew (the cabin boy claimed that the two crew men had escaped by boat). The two owners of the slaves, Don Pedro Montez and Don José Ruiz, who sailed with their ‘possessions’ were spared on condition they navigated the way back to Sierra Leone. Montez was told to sail east by the slaves using the sun as their guide, but as soon as it was dark he sailed north and eventually steered the Amistad to Long Island, New York, where, two months after the mutiny, the ship anchored off Culloden Point while the ship took on fresh water. When Cinqué and some of the crew went on land to find water they were captured by Captain Green of Long Island, while the Amistad was taken into US custody by Lt Commander Gedney, the captain of the American Survey ship the Washington. The ex-­slaves were then detained at New Haven, Connecticut, while the legal case was resolved. The Spanish owners of the slaves claimed compensation for their slaves lost to ‘pirates, who, by revolt, murder, and robbery, had deprived’ them of their property. The mutineers, supported by the abolitionist movement, demanded that the mutineers be set free, for it was their right to kill anyone trying to abduct then from their homes and enslave them elsewhere. Lt Commander Gedney and Captain Green were the third parties involved, wanting to claim the recaptured slaves and the Amistad as their prizes (see Figure 1.1). The case of the United States versus The Amistad began on 14 September 1839 and became a cause celébrè. For the slave owners the issue concerned their property rights, but it also highlighted a concern for the abolitionists about the nature of slaves. One of the most common defences of slavery was that slaves were content with their lot—hence the alleged absence of successful slave revolts. But the mutiny of slaves on the Amistad demonstrated to the world that the opposite was the case: that slavery was an affront to

5  The largest single pay out was £13,180 to HMS Protector and the overall victor in this regime went to HMS Thais that secured £20,475. After the Consolidation Act of 1824, the headrate was reduced to £10 per head and half of the proceeds of the sale of the ships and their cargoes were distributed to those capturing them, which were, of course, divided amongst the crew at the standard rates and (Walls, 2019: 36–7).

Rethinking Mutiny  17

Figure 1.1  Amistad 1839: Death of Capt. Ferrer, the Captain of the Amistad (Randy Duchaine/Alamy)

humanity and not an institution beloved by slave owners and slaves alike. Moreover, the Amistad slaves had demonstrated that they were not a very passive group, unable and unwilling to organize themselves in any other way, and therefore the dangers of slave revolts were not grossly exaggerated by the abolitionists. However, the violence of those on the Amistad posed a problem for those abolitionists from a pacifist line, for whom only rational and moral argument could topple slavery, but never violence (Finkenbine, 2001: 235–7). The trial took place at Hartford, and it became clear that the slave owners had lied about the origins of the slaves, claiming that they were native Cubans—and therefore had not been transported and were, thus, not subject to the law prohibiting the slave trade (as opposed to slavery). As slaves, their rebellion and killing of the captain and crew was deemed justifiable self-­defence, and the thirty-­four surviving defendants were freed and subsequently returned to Sierra Leone, courtesy of the United Missionary Society that had raised funds for their defence and repatriation. The slaves’ case was also supported by several black self-­improvement societies, but there was relatively little effort to support them from most of the black churches or newspapers until they won their freedom via the US Supreme Court in March 1841, and by then they had become ‘symbols of freedom’ (Finkenbine, 2001: 238–9). In 1841, the year before Cinqué arrived home in Sierra Leone a free man, the American brig Creole,6 owned by the slave traders Johnson and Eperson of Richmond, was ­transporting slaves from Richmond to sell in New Orleans at a time when the domestic transportation of slaves in American waters was still deemed legal by the American courts. Besides the 135 slaves separated by gender in the fore and aft holds, there was a crew of ten, as well as a few passengers, including the captain’s wife and daughter. Amongst the slaves was Madison Washington, a slave who had escaped from Virginia to Canada and 6 Creole was the name given to the ethnic group generated by the intermixing of European and non-­ European groups.

18  Mutiny and Leadership then returned to try and free his enslaved wife, still in Virginia. After seven days at sea, on the evening of 7 November 1841, about 210 kilometres north of the Bahamas, Washington broke out of the forward hold and threatened to throw all his eighteen fellow mutineers overboard if they did not help him. The first mate, Zephaniah Gifford, was grazed by a pistol shot fired by the slave Elijah Morris. Captain Ensor attacked the mutineers with a knife and was himself stabbed several times (Hendrick and Hendrick, 2003: 80).7 In the ensuing melee the slaves (who were not chained) killed one of the slave owner’s agents acting as guard, John Hewell, before subduing the crew and taking control of the ship. Several people on both sides were wounded, including many slaves bitten by the captain’s dog before it was killed, and one of the slaves subsequently died from wounds received in the mutiny. Hewell’s head was almost decapitated from his body before he was thrown overboard (Hendrick and Hendrick, 2003: 88). The original intent of Washington seems to have been to sail to Liberia, then a free colony set up by the United States, but their navigator—the slave overseer William Merritt— persuaded them that if they did not kill him he would take them to freedom, but not to Liberia since they did not have enough food and water for the journey. Another slave, Ben Blacksmith, then suggested they sail to the British West Indies where it was known that slaves would be freed because the slaver Hermosa had run aground in the Bahamas the previous year and all the slaves were set free. The rest of the crew were then told to help sail the ship to Nassau—and that, if they were not there in three days (the slaves knowing that it was only a two-­day sail), then the whole crew would be thrown overboard. Since one of the slaves—known as Dr Ruffin because he was literate—could read the compass, the crew complied with their demands. Two days later they arrived in Nassau, the Bahamas, and were intercepted by the local black pilot and a black crew who told the slaves they would be free once they landed. However, as the ship approached the harbour, a quarantine officer came alongside in a boat and Gifford jumped in it, telling the officer that a mutiny had occurred and demanding to be taken to the American consul, John Bacon. The consul then informed the gov­ ern­or of the Bahamas, Colonel Sir Francis Cockburn, who placed an armed guard (of black soldiers with Captain Fitzgerald, a white officer) on board the Creole, and the slaves were prevented from leaving it. Later that day, two Bahamian magistrates boarded the vessel and interviewed all the whites—no slave was ever interviewed—and the four leaders of the mutiny, Madison Washington, Ben Johnstone, Dr Ruffin, and Elijah Morris, were placed in a small boat and guarded by an armed sentry. On 12 November, at the request of the consul, a group of American sailors from the Louisa and the Congress, two US ships already anchored in Nassau, approached the Creole intending to take possession of the ship by force and sail it back to US waters, but the white British officer threatened to order all his twenty-­four black soldiers to fire on the American boat and it retreated. Later that day the governor informed the slaves unconnected to the mutiny that they were free to leave the Creole, and fifty to sixty small boats then transported them back to the mainland with what baggage they had after the British had prevented Gifford from selling it. Gifford even reported that several freed slaves that he later met in Nassau had begged him to take them back—as slaves—but there is no 7  None of the slaves was allowed to give evidence in court so we do not know of the conditions they were held in.

Rethinking Mutiny  19 independent evidence of this and it seems incredulous to believe such a claim (though the ‘contented slave’ was a common slave owners’ motif). Although the Creole generated much less media interest in the USA, Washington in particular became an icon for black abolitionists, especially Frederick Douglass, who spoke about him during an anti-­slavery speaking tour in Britain and Ireland between 1845 and 1847 and in his subsequent novella about Washington, The Heroic Slave (Finkenbine,  2001: 243–7). Some of the freed slaves then sailed to Jamaica and disappeared from history (Hendrick and Hendrick, 2003: 106–9). The nineteen mutineers, on the other hand, were told they would be detained for the murder of one man and the attempted murder of others until the British government decided whether they should stand trial. Five months later, on 17 April 1842, by which time two of them had died in prison, Colonel Cockburn found them not guilty of piracy— since they had been illegally enslaved and had the right to use force to defend themselves, and they were freed (Hendrick and Hendrick, 2003: 110–12; Jervey and Huber, 1980). The Creole then sailed to New Orleans with the original crew and passengers, including three slave women and two children who had remained hidden throughout the entire episode. Various American pro-­slavery groups then tried to secure the return of the slaves from British territory, but their claims were rejected on the grounds that, since slavery was il­legal in British territory, any slave landing there would be free. Pro-­slavery groups were incandescent that the British thought it right to strip American citizens of their rightful property. The Charleston Mercury suggested it was ‘a new outrage by British colonial authorities on American property’ (quoted in Hendrick and Hendrick, 2003: 112). Initially Sir Robert Peel, the British prime minister, refused to countenance compensation, but, after a prolonged diplomatic and legal dispute between Britain and the USA, in 1853 the Anglo-­American Claims Commission awarded the United States and the slave owners US$110,330 compensation for the slaves freed by the British (Finkenbine,  2001: 243; Hendrick and Hendrick, 2003: 120). If mutinies on slave ships posed legal as well as moral problems then we might assume that, in war situations, obedience and dissent are self-­evidently treated differently than they are in civil situations. For example, in Augustine of Hippo’s City of God, written in the fifth century, he argues that, because of humanity’s inherently sinful nature, war was in­ev­ it­able, though it could be a just war if fought to secure peace and if disproportionate force was not used to achieve this. Moreover, because temporal leaders were accountable to God for their actions, and soldiers were accountable to their temporal leaders, a soldier’s obedience took precedence over a soldier’s conscience. Thus, for most of the Middle Ages in Europe, Christian soldiers was obliged to obey their superordinates unless that obedience put their soul in jeopardy (Smith,  1994: 5). Once Thomas Aquinas had reworked Aristotelian theory, it became commonplace to argue that, since natural law, God’s law, and human reason were indivisible, it was self-­evident that temporal leaders were responsible for establishing precisely what this meant on the battlefield. That including using it as a justification for eliminating indigenous people who resisted European invaders. It was also used by John Locke to suggest that people had a right to resist and even to overthrow political leaders who failed to protect them. But, as Smith (1994: 7) points out, the right to dissent did not include the right of soldiers to dissent from their military leaders, only the right of political citizens of wealth and standing to dissent from their sovereign, if the latter failed to protect the former.

20  Mutiny and Leadership Only with the French Revolution, and in particular the writings of Rousseau in The Social Contract (1762), do we get an argument that soldiers, in obeying themselves, obey the people and are thus still free. And, where they do not obey the people, they can be ‘forced to be free’. Here, then, soldiers must consent, not because it is the will of God or a natural law but because they have voluntarily put themselves under a social contract to obey the will of the people. From now on, the division between civil and military society was erased, or at least it was according to Clausewitz’s On War, but that also implied that a citizen army had civil rights, and therein lay the problem of dissent. For Clausewitz, and for most military leaders, dissent was—at best—a problem of friction, an inevitable and irritating consequence of so many people, things, and processes enwrapped together in a military enterprise. The distinction between civilian and military authority reflects the idea that the latter exudes a form of sovereign power that is only available to the former under extreme conditions—what Walzer (2004) calls a ‘supreme emergency’, and Schmitt (2005) called a ‘state of exception’ in which it is the sovereign who decides when to suspend the normal constitutional limits to the power of the very same sovereign. The difference, then, is that there are precious few limits to the sovereignty of the military commander, especially— but not only—under conditions of war. In effect, mutiny can only occur under sovereign power, when any form of dissent is categorized as a threat to the body politic. Rose (1982: 561) relates this general abhorrence of the establishment to mutiny, to Max Weber’s (1919: 155–6) generally accepted claim that the state is rooted in its claim to have sole legitimate use of violence; as such, any threat to that claim is a threat to the existence of the state. Mutiny, then, poses an existential crisis for the state and cannot be reduced to the equivalent of an industrial dispute, even if the demands of the mutineers bear close resemblance to those of their industrial counterparts (Weitz,  2001: 16). But the division between a strike and a mutiny is blurred for those groups who are not in the military or in naval vessels; are involved in the legitimate use of force against citizens; yet do not have the le­git­im­ ate right to strike. Foucault argues for a temporal transition in Europe from his version of ‘sovereign power’ (the power to punish, often violently, and to eliminate physically any form of dissent) to what he calls ‘disciplinary power’ through which individuals could be disciplined into obedience through the construction and policing of behavioural norms, especially in what he calls ‘complete and austere institutions’ (Foucault,  1979: 231). These are what Goffman (1961) called ‘total institutions’—that is, ‘closed’ institutions such as prisons, military organizations, internment camps, monasteries, asylums, boarding schools, etc. where rigid rules, norms, and disciplinary procedures are enforced by a single authority. In total institutions the conventional barriers between private and public life are eradicated, a ‘mortification’ process converts the identity of the inmate by stripping away the previous (usually individual) identity and replacing it with a new collective one, and a privilege and punishment system is introduced to encourage obedience. The response of the inmate can be varied but may include withdrawal, conversion (to the institutional mores), or rebellion. Clearly rebellion is the one that embodies the mutineer. Since mutinies can only exist in the context of sovereign power, the replacement of sovereign power by disciplinary power should also herald the gradual elimination of mutiny. That said, sovereign power can only continue to the extent that subordinates comply, so that mutiny is not a genteel and sophisticated representation of an alternative reality and a

Rethinking Mutiny  21 legitimate complaint but a red-­blooded denial of the legitimacy of the sovereign. Why subordinates comply—and why they don’t, when the consequences of non-­compliance can be so dire—is the subject of this book. It should be self-­evident that where a consensus existed between leaders and followers there would be no need for the presence of the lash, except for isolated and unusually recalcitrant deviants who represent only their own interests. This is often how individual rebels were represented by the authorities. But in an institution such as the British Royal Navy that press-­ganged a significant proportion of its crew and forbade shore leave on the grounds that desertion would be the inevitable result, it is clear that a consensus seldom existed. In effect, the absence of a mutiny does not equate with the presence of a consensus because, as Lukes (1974) intimated, not everything is overtly decided upon (his second dimension of power after the first dimension of overt decision-­making), and underlying many apparent examples of consensus is an ideological power (the third dimension) where subordinated populations act against their own self-­interest. And here we might also turn to Gramsci’s (1971) notion of hegemony, with its insistence that quiescence is as much to do with ideological saturation as physical coercion. In effect, the absence of mutiny might simply reflect the normative power of the authorities; why rebel when it has always been—and will always be—thus? For Gramsci, then, rebellion requires not just resistance to the physical force of the dominant class but also their ideological monopoly. Why, then, if the power of the legitimate authority was so all-­compelling, have the penalties for mutineers been so dire? After all, what can a few disorganized, inarticulate, and often illiterate sailors or soldiers do that so threatens the all-­encompassing and terrifying power of the state? The answer, ironically, lies in the nature of the power relationship between subordinate and superordinate. There are never sufficient officers to control subordinates if the latter choose not to comply, just as a recalcitrant room of children can never be controlled by a single teacher if the children decide—collectively—to misbehave, walk out, or riot. It is only necessary to watch parents trying to control their unruly ­offspring to realize that power is not a possession of those allegedly in authority but a relationship between subordinates and superordinates that is only held in place by the compliance of the former. Should subordinates decide to rebel—and should they be un­deterred by the consequences of the rebellion—then the game is up, the cloak of authority torn away, and the weakness of the superordinate revealed. This is the main reason for the extraordinary brutality of the authorities when faced with mutiny: because the power that authorities wield is so fragile, so dependent upon subordinate compliance, that any dissent—however legitimate, however limited—embodies the potential unravelling of the lie of sovereign power. Just as Dorothy pulls aside the curtains hiding the Wizard of Oz to reveal a weak old man pulling levers to generate an illusion of power, so a mutiny exposes the vulnerability and insecurity of the state. It is the very terror of the retribution against the subordinate that reveals the trepidation of the superordinate. In effect, the punishment is so strong because the system is so weak. Thus the ‘state of emergency’, so often used by the state to legitimize extreme violence against those that (temporarily) threaten the established order, becomes permanent or chronic. A state of emergency is then, as Benjamin (1969: 257) suggested, not ‘the exception but the rule’. This implies that, where any infraction of the rules, any form of dissent, any act of disobedience generates the ferocious response of those more commonly facing an existential threat to their very survival, we have a state of emergency. Who says ‘no’ says ‘mutiny’. Of course, there are times where no

22  Mutiny and Leadership punishment is inflicted on mutineers, but usually these are occasions when not only is the state’s weakness exposed but the resources available for a response are so fragile that the state recognizes its inadequacy, such that a weak response, rather than a negotiated settlement, would make the state’s impotence clear to all. This recognition by the authorities of a fait accompli is oftentimes followed up by the more usual violent reckoning at a later date, once the state’s coercive resources are in place. The gap between the theory of sovereign power—total control—and the reality of ­dissent sometimes leading to mutiny might also explain why almost no military attacks resulted in 100 per cent casualties—because at some point, and irrespective of orders from above to ‘push on’, soldiers simply refused to continue. Indeed, when soldiers did appear to continue to fight until the end (as in some Japanese attacks in the Second World War such as Iwo Jima, for example, where only a handful of the 21,000 Japanese defenders survived) the American defenders were shocked at their behaviour; but even here some soldiers ­surrendered (Hastings, 2007: 285). This ambiguity lies at the heart of what follows. Oftentimes the demands of mutineers are relatively limited: better conditions, regular pay, and the removal of unnecessarily coercive discipline. These are also the conventional demands of striking workers over the last two millennia. The fluidity of the word ‘mutiny’ is perhaps best represented by noting that although, by tradition, mutiny is restricted to a military context, in fact mutiny is also the appropriate word for collective dissent at sea on board merchant ships, not just warships. Partly this is because there is no recourse to an external source of authority on board ship so that, in effect, the captain’s word is the law. As such, refusals to comply with the legitimate orders of a captain on board a merchant ship were treated as mutiny by the British High Court of Admiralty. For example, in 1690, the St Thomas, a merchant ship sailing from London to Virginia to return with tobacco (in part sponsored by Daniel Defoe), was involved in a mutiny when two sailors refused to pump water from the ship and told the Master to ‘kisse their Breeches’ (quoted in Appleby, 2017: 19). This ‘verbal mutiny’ ended when the two sailors deserted the ship and were hunted down by the colonial authorities in Chesapeake. But if dissent on merchant shipping was often a financial danger to the owners, such demands from military personal were usually perceived as a mortal challenge to their superordinates and the political establishment. This implies that there is seldom an agreement between mutineers and their officers about the nature of dissent in a military situ­ation because the intent of the dissenter, and the understanding of the recipient of the dissent, can be very different. Another way to put this is to differentiate between agonism and antagonism. Agonism represents the inevitable tension that arises between people in any kind of relationship, and it also embodies the necessary conflict in sports: if your opponent does not resist and try to beat you in karate, football, hockey, or just about every other sport, then not only do you not improve your own play but the game does not play out as required. As we shall see, it is common for mutineers to assume their actions are a legitimate response to the agonism that is common within military organizations. After all, the members of such organizations are often required to risk life and limb for meagre reward, so it would be highly unusual if such a relationship generated no conflict at all. Furthermore, to represent dissent as merely a legitimate complaint—and not mutiny— might also protect the ‘mutineers’ from the often brutal response of the authorities to mutiny. On the other hand, the officers at the receiving end of mutiny are just as likely to

Rethinking Mutiny  23 understand the dissent as rooted in antagonism, not agonism. If conflict is inevitable under the former then it is illegitimate in the latter and poses a direct threat to the military unit. Antagonism is the sine qua non of military conflict, of fighting in the street, and of most violent situations. As such, trying to land a kick on an opponent in a karate competition is agonism, whereas trying to land the same kick on an attacker in the street is antagonism. Of course, understanding mutiny as antagonism only makes sense if we assume that total compliance, and a complete consensus, is the legitimate norm of behaviour in military organizations. As suggested above, the absence of overt dissent, and the related assumption of a consensus, does not mean that there is no power at play in controlling subordinates. As has been all too obvious in places like North Korea now and most dictatorships historically, there are often good reasons for subordinates to overtly comply with their superordinates, even if they regard the relationship as unethical, illegal, or downright criminal. This also means that authorities often describe mutinies in terms that reflect something other than an overt challenge to their authority—because that implies the of­fi­ cers have somehow failed in the paternalistic responsibilities to their troops and sailors. For instance, the British military mutinies of 1919 were called ‘strikes’ by the authorities, while those of December 1914 were called ‘Christmas truces’. This also allowed the British military to represent its forces as radically different from (and superior to) the French army which was wracked by ‘mutinies’ in 1917. In turn, the French described these as acts of ‘collective indiscipline’8 that actually involved as many as fifty-­four divisions (half those on active service at the time) and left only two reliable divisions between Paris and the front line (Rose, 1982: 563–4). Whether all forms of mutiny ended up with a court-­martial usually depended upon the response of the authorities. What made the relationship much more delicate—and dangerous—was, first, that at sea the captain had high levels of discretion as to how to cope with dissent—and little likelihood of immediate support from the outside world if the officers and marines failed to resolve the problem. Second, the crew were more often than not composed of all kinds of people: volunteers (all officers and marines were volunteers) as well as those pressed ganged into service for the duration of hostilities (effectively kidnapped), and from a wide range of countries and ethnicities. Since the bonus paid to ‘volunteers’ significantly exceeded that paid to pressed men, it made sense to ‘volunteer’ once you had been pressed, and it has been suggested that perhaps half of the British Royal Navy crews were composed of real volunteers while one-­quarter were pressed and a further quarter were pressed but had subsequently ‘volunteered’ to take advantage of the bonus. The contract the Royal Navy had with its crew was not time-­dependent but was voyage-­dependent: when the voyage was over the ship’s company was paid off, and they could leave or re-­join as they wished, but, to ensure desertion was minimized, wages were always six months in arrears and often several years late. On average, during the eighteenth ­century, a Royal Navy ship would lose 25 per cent of the crew in desertion, though the numbers dwindled once the voyage was over a year old and the wages had been accumulated. In reality, pay was often withheld until the end of a voyage to prevent desertion and 8  There is only one reference to ‘mutiny’ in ninety volumes of the official French history of the First World War according to Rose (1982: 565).

24  Mutiny and Leadership it was a significant problem (Gilmour, 1993: 186). Nelson talked of desertion as ‘French Leave’, and well he might: between 1793 and 1802 around 42,000 British sailors deserted, from a total of 120,000 in 1800 (Doorne,  2011: 180; Frykman,  2009: 83). In European armies a desertion rate of about 20 per cent was regarded as normal in the mid-­eighteenth century (Hendrix, 2019: 10). Manwaring and Dobrée (1937: 27) noted that at the time of the Nore mutiny some ships’ crews had not been paid for between eight and fifteen years. Moreover, while volunteers acquired legal protection from creditors, they would also be hanged if recaptured after desertion. One response of English merchant sailors and fishermen to impressment was to join the Sea Fencibles—a naval militia raised originally by Sir Home Popham and supported by a string of Martello towers around the English coastline to defend the country against French invasion. Since being a member of the Fencibles militia kept you out of the arms of the press gang, many sailors joined their local flotilla, not necessarily out of loyalty to the establishment but out of self-­interest (Frykman, 2009). Certainly Nelson was unimpressed in 1801 when he called on the Margate Fencibles to put to sea to beat off the French Navy—few responded, because few recognized the threat as real and many were deeply suspicious of the harsh discipline employed within the Royal Navy (Rogers,  2016: 51). This is also important because those hostile to impressment in principle at this time were often labelled as Jacobins by the British press, though the system of self-­organized democracy had long persisted amongst British trades guilds, such as journeymen tailors and the London Corresponding Societies (Flannery, 2007). So critical was the manpower shortage at this time that the British government was forced to introduce the Quota Act requiring counties and ports to provide a certain ‘quota’ of men for the navy. Pope (1998: 47) suggests, for example, that roughly one-­third of most crews at the time were pressed and most of these would previously have been merchant seamen or fishermen—where pay was three or four times higher and conditions were often considerably better. Prize money did offer the possibility of generating a very high reward, and although Queen Elizabeth I took 50 per cent of every prize, and Cromwell had reduced that proportion to one-­third, the ‘Cruizers and Convoys Act’ of 1708 ensured that the whole prize went to the captors in what Walls (2019: 34) calls ‘institutionalized piracy’. But the division between officers and crew meant that it was seldom the latter that benefited in any substantial way. For example, when the British Royal Navy was involved in taking Havana from the Spanish in 1762, each sailor was awarded £4 in prize money (equivalent to an annual bonus of 25 per cent) while Vice-­Admiral Sir George Pocock took £122,000 (Gilmour,  1993: 191). In contrast, the highest payout ever recorded occurred in the same year, when the Spanish ship Hermione was taken by the Royal Navy and each sailor received £300—almost nineteen times greater than their average annual wages. In 1799 four British frigates captured two Spanish ships laden with treasure and worth £600,000 together. Each of the British captains received £40,000—the equivalent of 200 years’ worth of their annual salaries. But these were exceptions to the rule, for the average prize value was between £725 and £960 in total (Benjamin, 2015: 2–4). Even such rewards were, of course, contingent on living long enough to spend the money, and there was never a better-­than-­even chance of that, with half the sailors pressed between 1600 and 1800 dying at sea (Gilmour, 1993: 186), usually at the hands of disease rather than enemy action. For instance, during the Seven Years War (1756–63),

Rethinking Mutiny  25 133,700 crew died on British ships, but only 1,512 from enemy action, the rest from disease or accidents at sea (Pope, 1997: 131). As Baugh (1995: 138–40) suggests, 82 per cent of deaths in the Royal Navy were from disease or accident, 12 per cent from shipwreck or equivalent, and only 6 per cent from battle.9 On board HMS Trent between 1796 and 1803, of the 952 sailors on the muster books, 81 were discharged ‘dead’, and of these only 6 died from enemy action. In effect, there was only a 0.6 per cent chance of being killed in war. There was, however, a 27 per cent chance of desertion, and while a soldier in the British Army had a much greater chance of dying from conflict (though again disease was the greatest mortal threat), the ratio of officers to soldiers was 1:22; in the navy, the ratio was 1:89. Equally important, the casualty rate in the armed forces depended upon the conflict, so if a crew member was unlikely to die in battle in the British Navy in the nineteenth century, that was not the case for all conscripts in the First World War. For example, the casualty rates (killed, wounded, missing in action, or POW) in the Russian and French armies in the First World War were 76 and 73 per cent, respectively. Germany was only slightly less, at 65 per cent, but the British and Empire forces rate was considerably less, at 36 per cent. When two-­thirds or three-­quarters of your forces are not coming back, either whole or at all, you need to be very persuasive that the sacrifices are worth it.10 In effect, the Royal Navy had a large number of seamen, cooped up in a very small space with relatively little that needed doing on a daily basis, combined with few officers and lots of alcohol: ‘Is it any wonder that we were regularly holystoning the decks and painting the ship in order, no doubt, to give them something to do’ (Slope, 2011: 229). But desertion was not restricted to the British Royal Navy: in 1795 such a large proportion of the Dutch Navy deserted that on the Staaten Generaal only 122 of 550 crew remained, while the Delft was left with just 10 from a crew of 350 (Frykman, 2009: 84). Ironically some Dutch sailors probably found themselves involved in the 1797 Royal Navy mutinies after they mutinied against their officers on board the Jason in 1796 and sailed the ship to Greenock, Scotland, where many of the crew joined the British navy (Frykman, 2009: 89). If keeping seamen busy was not enough to discipline British naval crews there was always the navy’s ‘cat-­o’-­nine tails’: a whip that was designed to compensate for the inability of ship’s captains to order more than a dozen lashes without a court martial (after 1790 and until 1806) by increasing the weight of each ‘tail’ to four times that used by the British Army of the time. The cat, kept in a red baize bag,11 had a handle two feet long and nine tails, each two foot long and made of quarter-­inch line. A single blow could knock the unfortunate victim down, hence they were usually tied to an upended wooden grating at the gangway or a capstan—the cylindrical device used to wind ropes. The boatswains who were responsible for delivering punishment were replaced after twelve lashes, so as to ensure the second victim—or the second and subsequent lashings to the same individual— did not receive a lesser punishment. Some recipients of the lash died after twelve lashes (three died in Bombay within 24 hours of the flogging); some survived 500. One eye witness 9  Benjamin and Tifrea (2007) note that the casualty rate from combat amongst British sea captains (and by inference British sailors) fell by 98 per cent between 1660 and 1815 through the accumulation of combat experience and thus skill. At the same time, the success rate increased markedly because the incentives offered through the prize system were so significant. 10  See https://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-­war-­one/world-­war-­one-­and-­casualties/, accessed 4 July 2019. 11  Hence the phrase ‘let the cat out of the bag’.

26  Mutiny and Leadership said that a dozen lashes with a naval cat made the lacerated back ‘look inhuman; it resembles roasted meat burnt nearly black before a scorching fire’ (quoted in Pope, 1998: 62). In the British Army it was not unheard of for sentences of 1,000 lashes to be given. Gilbert’s (1985) review of discipline in the Seven Years War suggests that the average number was 742, with 45 per cent awarded 1,000, but the army’s lash was less damaging, and there may well have been an inverse correlation between the extent of corporal punishment and that of capital punishment. In effect, and in sharp contrast to the Austrian Army of the mid-­eighteenth century, the British Army executed fewer but flogged more of its recalcitrant soldiers (Hendrix, 2019: 7). Under the Articles of War, the ‘Captain’s Cloak’ covered every offence except capital offences that had to go to a court martial, and for these ‘minor’ offences an offender could expect a dozen lashes. The ship’s captain was judge and jury; there was no appeal, and only floggings were recorded—and not all of these, especially if they exceeded the legal max­ imum. For example, Sir Edward Hamilton, captain of the Trent between 1800 and 1802, was court-­martialled for ‘gross cruelty’, but that did not relate to any of the twenty-­nine floggings he had ordered but rather to an episode where a gunner and gun crew were tied to the rigging in a storm as a punishment that was both illegal and unrecorded. Overall, between 1796 and 1803, where 952 seamen and 158 marines served on that ship, there were 219 recorded floggings: 160 seamen and 59 marines. Proportionately, the marines were twice as likely to be flogged as seamen, despite their voluntary service and dis­cip­lin­ ary role, while ‘quota men’ were much less likely to be flogged, despite regularly being blamed for discontent by officers. In other words, the British navy saw an average of 1.6 lashes per day and a flogging every twelve days (Slope, 2011: 230/6). The ferocity of the discipline, and its quotidian presence, implies that flogging was not an aberration but the norm in an era when punishment was just one element in what Way (2016: 350) calls ‘the dramaturgy of terror’: when the French were guillotining their nobles for their social class, the British equivalent clearly thought that now was not the time to start being lenient to their subordinates. And after the 1797 mutinies, flogging continued apace—as if leniency had somehow contributed to the indiscipline. In the first seven months of 1804 on Nelson’s HMS Victory, for instance, someone was flogged every other day on average (Rogers, 2016: 52). Despite the savagery of floggings, they rarely seemed to be the cause of complaint amongst the crew—if they thought the punishment appropriate. Bryn (1989: 5) suggests that ‘the methods used to maintain harmony in the King’s fleet were similar to those of the eighteenth century English system of criminal justice’. But actually flogging was a rare not a common occurrence in civilian Britain at the time. In contemporary English civilian life, while capital punishment was relatively common, the ‘secondary punishment’ system made use of transportation to Australia or confinement to the village stocks or pillory more than flogging. While prisons (including the prison hulks—floating prison-­ships) were primarily a means for holding prisoners prior to trial or transportation (Taylor, 1998: 142–3). If civic shame was a primary means of civilian control in Britain, its soldiers and sailors were kept in line by a corporal ferocity unknown in towns and villages. There was a culture of petition, and it had some legitimacy based on the Articles of War, which stated that ‘if any person in the fleet shall find course of complaint of the unwholesomeness of the victuals, or other just grounds, he shall quietly make the same known to

Rethinking Mutiny  27 his captain or commander-­in-­chief, who shall cause the complaint to be presently remedied’ (quoted in Gill,  1913: 7). But there are, for instance, remarkably few petitions against officers that relate to flogging. The petition from crew of the Pompée dated 8 May 1797, during the Spithead mutiny, stated: ‘My Lord we do not wish you to understand we have the least Intention of encroaching on the Punishments necessary for the preservation of good order and discipline so necessary to be observed in his Majesty’s Navy’ (quoted in Orth,  2011: 99–100). Yet the delivery of three dozen lashes for ‘silent contempt’ was beyond the pale. ‘Flogging-­round-­the-­fleet’ was also used where a death sentence was inappropriate, and the convicted man was rowed to each ship in the fleet and flogged with a ‘cat-­o’-­nine tails’ by the Boatswain’s Mate of each ship to the sound of the Rogue’s March, played out by the drummers and under the eyes of all the individual ships’ company. The precise number of strokes was determined by the commander-­in-­chief. More commonly, each ship’s captain could order a sailor to be lashed on his own ship. Sailors were also ‘started’ by being beaten with the end of a rope for slow responses; they could also be gagged for insolence or ‘keel-­hauled’ under the boat for uncleanliness or ‘scandalous’ behaviour. By 1871 flogging was restricted to mutiny or striking an officer, and by 1899 a commanding officer could issue an order for no more than twenty-­five lashes (the order was only removed in 1949) (National Museum of the Royal Navy, 2014). Of course, not every ship was well run, and the level of centralized control operated by a British admiral upon his fleet, never mind the British Admiralty upon their admirals, was limited. There was no standard approach to training of officers or seamen, and the first attempt to impose a significant degree of regulation came in 1755 from Admiral Thomas Smith, and that was limited to his own responsibility: the Downs Squadron (Lavery, 2011: 195). That coincided with a major shipbuilding programme, at a time when extended overseas service was becoming much more common, and the proliferation of larger ships generated a spate of regulations pertaining to individual ships, in particular to the regulation of health and cleanliness—both of which could lead to widespread infection if not attended to, rather like dissent. It should be clear, then, that what counts as mutiny or sedition depends upon who ­provides the most powerful interpretation. As Arundhati Roy (2019: 796) reflected about the actions and perspectives of the Indian establishment: ‘Now it’s true that my views on these matters are at variance with those of the ruling establishment. In better days, that used to be known as a critical perspective or an alternative worldview. These days in India, it’s called sedition.’ This is important, not least, because it challenges us to consider how our perceptions of historical events change and yet persist across time. As Lampedusa (1963: 29) suggests, ‘if we want things to stay the same as they are, things will have to change’. So what are these things that recur in mutiny; what are these refrains?

Refrains of Mutiny Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1 (Act IV, Scene 1), written in 1591, has the Duke of Gloucester trying to calm an apparently personal, and ostensibly petty, quarrel about the significance of the colour of roses (red or white—the beginnings of the English ‘War of

28  Mutiny and Leadership the Roses’)12 between the Duke of York and the Earl of Somerset on the eve of battle against the French: To raise a mutiny betwixt yourselves: Let me persuade you take a better course. Shakespeare uses the term several times elsewhere in his plays. For instance, in the ­prologue to Romeo and Juliet comes the line ‘From ancient grudge break to new mutiny’, and the word recurs in Coriolanus (Act 1, Scene 1, and in Act 2, Scene 3), King John (Act 2, Scene 2), Hamlet (Act 5, Scene 2), Henry VI (Part 2, Act 3, Scene 2) and in Henry VIII (Act 3, Scene 2). Generally speaking, it refers to an act of rebellion or dissent rather than the technical sense adopted in this book. However, it is important to note that even when we are considering a collective act of dissent in a military context (a mutiny), what the per­pet­rators believe they are doing, and how that act is understood by those being mutinied against, is subjective, a social construction rather than an objective fact. A similar approach to dissent can be seen in the frequent mutinies of the Spanish infantry serving in the Italian Wars of 1525–38, where complaints about pay—or lack of it—and the mutinies that resulted were much closer to contemporary industrial disputes than the blood-­letting associated with Roman decimations (Sherer, 2014). This is the first, and most important, leadership refrain: what counts as a mutiny is socially constructed in the same way that what counts as leadership is socially constructed. In other words, effective leadership is as much about persuading your allies (and opponents) that ‘the situation’ is ‘a crisis’, or ‘nothing to worry about’, as it is about recognizing and responding to the situation. On many occasions, as we shall see, the more successful leadership secures that achievement through painting a narrative that either enthuses or suppresses a specific position. For successful leaders of mutinies, that might be persuading enough compatriots to follow the mutineers and ignore the roars of the paper tigers in the establishment. For successful leaders of that same establishment, it might mean persuading enough mutineers to surrender so that the solidarity of the mutiny is unpicked and laid bare for subsequent retribution. We cannot, therefore, predict the success or failure of a mutiny on the basis of any allegedly objective conditions or resource mapping because success does not lie in the ‘situation’ but in the way the ‘situation’ is constituted, corralled, and cooked. It did not matter whether there ever were, or were not, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003; it did not matter whether Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden or not; what mattered was whether President Bush and Prime Minister Blair could persuade their respective political systems that they were right and an invasion should occur (Grint, 2005a). Similarly, the Brexit quagmire that was circling the UK at the time of writing this section (October 2019) is not something that has divided the British since the first referendum in 1975 but something which only took hold in 2016—after the then prime minister, David Cameron, announced that there would be a referendum on leaving the EU (to resolve an internal Conservative Party division). In other words, the discontent with the EU was generated by the possibility of leaving it; until that time, most British people were 12  The War of the Roses was a long, drawn-­out (1455–87) civil war in England between rival branches of the Plantagenets: Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose). It was eventually resolved when Henry VII married Elizabeth of York in 1486, uniting both families under the dual-­coloured Tudor Rose.

Rethinking Mutiny  29 not especially concerned with it. In short, the discontent was constructed by the ­leadership process: the leadership process was not a consequence of simmering popular discontent (Allen, 2018). The importance of this theoretical approach is that what counts as mutiny, whether there should be one, and whether it is successful or not is seldom, if ever, a black and white issue; it was always thus. As Carney (1996: 20) notes, while the armies of Rome operated on disciplinary systems not radically dissimilar to contemporary armies, ancient Greek and Macedonian armies seldom did. Thus, ‘The concept of mutiny assumes that military discipline is centred on obedience to commands; that is why disobedience to a specific command is seen as so grave an action. Mutiny has an absolute quality: there is a sense that, at a certain point—usually specific refusal of a direct order—soldiers pass a legal point of no return.’ According to Carney, the disciplinary system portrayed in the IIiad is more concerned with cultural norms of masculinity, bravery, and competition than strict obedience to orders; indeed, since Greek soldiers were citizens in uniform, they were expected to retain and maintain the personal discipline expected of a citizen, including a vote in the election of their military leaders. There are, then, relatively few examples of punishment for refusal to comply with orders because orders were few and far between: as long as you stood your ground and showed no cowardice, there was little need for overt military discipline. In other words, mutiny was not something that figured highly in the minds of soldiers in Ancient Greece or their officers. Indeed, there was no single ancient Greek word for ‘mutiny’ (though ataxia is the most commonly used; Brice,  2015a), because, although indiscipline might exist, a state of open rebellion seldom did. As Carney (1996) suggests, mutiny requires two preconditions: unquestioned obedience and a difference in the rights and obligations of soldiers and civilians. Since these did not consistently prevail, then disobedience cannot always be regarded as mutiny. Phillips (2001: 315) considers this point with regard to the English Tudor armies: This is not to suggest that Tudor soldiers did not have some concept of discipline, in the sense of control gained by the establishment of order of some sort. However, this did not necessarily include the notion of unquestioning obedience to orders. While subject to established codes of martial law, the common soldier of Tudor armies could engage in collective or individual protest in the same fashion as contemporary civilians and, like a civilian, could often expect a resulting measure of compromise from his superiors.

The military in Tudor England was primarily composed of those men between 16 and 60 mustered through the Shire Levy or through an obligation to a lord, noble, or gentleman. By 1558 the Militia Act shifted the responsibilities away from the local landowner towards the state, but only a small proportion of the English Army were professional soldiers, so consent remained important, as did mercenaries. Codes of conduct were common and certainly existed in the armies of Richard I and Richard II. Henry VIII’s 1513 campaign against France included rules covering payment, ransoming prisoners, and the protection of women, merchants, the church, and children, as well as imposing the severest penalty for anyone ‘crying havoc’—the traditional call to looting. In addition, gambling and brothels were outlawed, and, in the context of a multinational army, so was casting aspersions on anyone else’s nationality, ‘be he French, English, Northern, Welsh or Irish’ (quoted in Phillips,  2001: 317). Despite this, there were protests against the missing pay and an

30  Mutiny and Leadership attempt to reduce the size of the army in 1515 outside the governor’s (William Blount) house in Tournai, and the governor concluded that it was ‘the horriblest mutiny that hath been heard’. That dispute ended in victory for the soldiers, despite the king’s wrath, but a second dispute in October of the same year, again over pay, ended with seven executions. Thus, what to the soldiers appeared to be just another industrial dispute, a ‘conservative riot’ as Way (2000) put it, was configured by the authorities as a mutiny—an aspect of the first refrain: the social construction of life. The most significant mutinies in the First World War on the Western Front occurred in France in 1917 and in Germany in 1918; the British mutinies occurred primarily after the termination of the war in very late 1918 or 1919, though the Christmas ‘Truce’ of December 1914 along the British and German lines must surely count as an event that was a ‘mutiny’. The lexicon of rebellion is important here: the British often referred to their mutinies as ‘incidents’ or ‘strikes’ as a way of covering up the disciplinary problems at the front; the French, on the other hand, were much more transparent in their terminology and more vigorous in their coercive response. That, in itself, is important because it highlights the problem of military law—if collective refusal to obey orders is ‘mutiny’ then those found guilty of the offence are liable to be executed under most of the penal codes of the warring nations. For the French in 1917, the mutinies appeared to threaten the stability of the whole front line, and therefore the war, and, under those circumstances, the French authorities were keen to re-­establish discipline through large scale arrests and executions. The British in 1919 faced an altogether different problem: the war was apparently over, and the troops had been promised an immediate demobilization that clearly was not going to happen. Against a background of significant political unrest at home, as well as military indiscipline both at home and in France, the British authorities were not in a position to enforce rigid discipline: it had to be a gentler, negotiated response. Corns and Hughes-­Wilson (2002: 379–80) suggest that only 1,800 British men were charged with mutiny between 1914 and 1920 (out of a total force of 5,363,352) and that only three were executed.13 The French, in contrast, charged between 25,000 and 40,000. This, of course, depends upon the definition of mutiny and the authorities’ ability to bring, or interest in bringing, charges against alleged offenders—and confirms the importance of defining the topic. Had the British army, for example, charged all those engaged in the 1914 ‘truce’—a mutiny in all but name—then the British numbers would have been considerably higher. And quite often records were not kept: neither the French in August 1914 nor the British in December 1914 or January 1919 made record keeping a priority. The relatively low number of British soldiers charged with mutiny was ‘a remarkable endorsement of the British Army’s discipline and cohesion’, according to Corns and Hughes-­Wilson (2002: 379–89), and such an approach implies that the large-­scale in­dis­ cip­line that we shall consider later really consisted more of actions akin to strikes than mutinies, because they were primarily related to living conditions and terms of service rather than refusals to fight. Strictly speaking, a strike is a refusal to work, and if refusing to work prevents you from fighting then the two, in a military context, are equivalent actions. Moreover, it is clear that a strike about conditions in a military context can very 13  Pte John Braithwaite, actually a New Zealander, and Gunner Lewis of the Royal Field Artillery, both for separate incidents at the Blargies Military Prison in 1916; and Cpl Jessie Short, Northumberland Fusiliers, for his part in the Étaples mutiny.

Rethinking Mutiny  31 quickly change into a political rebellion if either those conditions do not improve or the authorities respond in a way deemed by the soldiers to be contravening their social ­contract. As the Canadian authorities found to their cost at Kinmel in 1919, what started as a vociferous complaint about a delay in demobilization quickly ended up in a shooting match between the mutineers and the military authorities. In short, what counts as a strike or as a mutiny does not inhere in the action of those ‘striking’ or ‘mutinying’ but in the relationship between them and the authorities. In particular, as the Nore ‘strikers’ found to  their cost, merely replicating the actions of their fellow ‘strikers’ at Spithead, did not prevent the Admiralty from seeing the latter as a strike and the former as a mutiny. And arguing that ‘they did not want to be treated like the dregs of London’s streets, not the footballs, shuttlecocks, and Merry Andrews [a clown] of a set of tyrants who claim from us . . . their honours, titles and fortunes’ (quoted in Rogers, 2016: 52) did not cut much ice with a frightened Admiralty. This does not mean that all acts of dissent, resistance, or rebellion are mutinies, though sometimes they are both mutinies and rebellions at the same time. In effect, we should stop addressing the topic of mutiny through binary lenses: rather than trying to establish whether it was a mutiny or not, whether those involved were radical or militant, revolutionaries or conservatives, misled or crystal clear about the implications of their acts, we should consider whether mutineers are, like the rest of us, confused and just trying to make sense of a world that sometimes does not make sense. After all, we know that voters in contemporary democracies are not usually that interested in politics, do not really understand policy details, and often vote against their own material interests—so why should we assume that mutineers in previous eras were any more logical, rational, or coherent than we are? (Achen and Bartell,  2016). We also know that groups can have extraordinary power over individuals (Tarde, 1890), and we know that loyalty is often a much stronger force for action than logic (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1982), so it would be surprising if mutineers were driven by anything other than these same forces. It pays, then, for mutineers to work out whether their superordinates are intent on treating them like members of the family or intending to throw them to the wolves once their utility is redundant. In 1588 Elizabeth 1, Queen of England, who was always reluctant to spend money on the military (though she spent £13 6s 8d on flowers that same year [about £13,000 in today’s prices]), refused to pay the sailors who had saved the country from the Spanish Armada in 1588.14 Ironically, she had promised these same men rewards in her famous speech at Tilbury: ‘I know already, for your forwardness, you have deserved rewards and crowns, and, we do assure you, on the word of a prince, they shall be duly paid to you.’ She never seemed to have had any intention to fulfil that promise, and while a few hundred had died on the English ships in the battles, several thousands died after the battle from typhus and, without money to buy food, starvation. Howard, the Lord High Admiral, sold some of his own silver plate to help the survivors and warned Elizabeth that her actions had created an ‘infection [that] is grown very great and in many ships’. Indeed, the medical infection soon turned into a political disease as a company of sailors and ­soldiers from the fleet walked to London to demand their pay. Her response was to have 14  Contrary to popular opinion, the Spanish Armada was not the largest fleet ever sent to invade England; both the Franco-­Norman fleet in 1066 and the French fleet in 1545 which sank the Mary Rose were larger (Worsley, 2020: 52).

32  Mutiny and Leadership them all hanged for mutiny. One victim cried out: ‘The gallows are the pay they give us for going to the wars.’ Worse, Burghley, the royal treasurer, then imposed martial law and ordered that ‘all soldiers, mariners and vagrant persons [and such] disloyal persons’ were to be punished ‘with all convenient extremity’ (quoted in Guy, 2018: 120). The leaders of this and many other mutinies made a classic error of judgement in a field where there is no second chance. They had assumed that risking one’s life for monarch and country was an honourable act that would receive its own just reward from a grateful monarch; they were wrong. Here is the second refrain that runs across mutinies in time and space: ‘Know your enemy.’ The third refrain also relates to the importance of time and space—and learning from antecedence. For example, in the Macedonian Army of Alexander the Great, two ‘mu­tin­ies’ occurred: at the Beas or Hyphasis river in 326 bce; and subsequently at Opis in 324 bce. As is so often the case, the former was successful for the rebels but the latter was not (Carney,  1996). The ability to learn—or not—from this rhythm of mutiny will prove a constant in what follows. In other words, there is a path dependency argument here, in that the antecedent conditions affect the development of subsequent developments, such that certain options are progressively eliminated as one side learns how to close them off. Ultimately this is about the way time and space play out and are mobilized into support of one side or the other. We will stay in Ancient Greece to consider the fourth refrain: the two most important responses to open rebellion, the mailed fist or the gloved hand, that both surfaced during the Mytilenian Debate in the Athenian Assembly. In 427 bce, according to Thucydides, Mytilene was, along with the other five city states of Lesbos, in alliance with Athens against the Spartans. However, the Mytilenian oligarchy, fearing that Athens was trying to take over Lesbos, rebelled against Athens but were quickly subdued, and a delegation of the Mytilenians was sent to the Athenian Assembly to beg for mercy. It was not forthcoming, and—to prevent any further revolt within the alliance—the Assembly decided to execute all male Mytilenians and enslave all female adults and children (Thucydides, 1972: 194–211). A trireme was duly despatched to Mytilene to carry out the sentence, but, as it set off, another debate occurred the next morning in the Assembly to reconsider the ­draconian decision: this was the famous Mytilenian Debate as described by Thucydides. The hard-­line response was best articulated by Cleon, an aristocrat with a reputation for violence, who insisted that they should not change their mind because this would demonstrate weakness and merely encourage further revolt. He urged them ‘not to be traitors to your own selves’ (Thucydides, 1972: 216). In response, Diodotus insisted that decisions should not be made in ‘haste and anger . . . the two greatest obstacles to wise counsel’ (Thucydides, 1972: 217–18) and that the main issue was not whether the Mytileanians were guilty of breaking their word but, much more pragmatically, whether executing them would lead to more or fewer revolts. For Diodotus, the answer was self-­evidently the former, and mercy should be extended in order to preserve the alliance. The Assembly agreed and a double-­crewed trireme was despatched to Mytilene, but it arrived only after a thousand of the men had been executed, though just in time to save the rest of the men and prevent the enslavement of the women and children (Thucydides, 1972: 222–3). As we shall see, the twin responses to mutinies—crush them or negotiate with them—reverberate throughout history, and this is the fourth refrain. The authority’s default tendency when facing a mutiny is to crush it mercilessly, but, where there is no mailed fist available,

Rethinking Mutiny  33 the resort to a velvet glove—however temporary—is not uncommon. We might also recall Machiavelli’s famous phrase about injuries from his Prince (chapter 3): ‘Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; there the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.’ The Romans seemed to have learned something from the history of their own mutinies; as Emperor Severus Alexander (ad 222–35) recalled: ‘One need not fear a soldier, if he is properly clothed, fully armed, has a stout pair of boots, a full belly, and something in his money-­belt’ (quoted in McNab, 2010: 12). Contrary to many assumptions about the hyper-­disciplined nature of the Roman Army (Keegan,  1976), mutinies (sedito) were not uncommon in the late Roman Republic— though they were usually about pay and conditions and rarely occurred in the face of the enemy, unless during a civil war. One exception occurred in ad 43 when the army refused to cross the channel from northern Gaul to invade Britain and another when German Usipi soldiers in the Roman army mutinied and fled from Northern Britain back home— only to be shipwrecked en route where the survivors were sold as slaves (Coulston, 2013: 25). Messer (1920: 159–60) dismisses the claims (especially by Polybius) that the Roman Army was singularly unaffected by them, and this is the stage for examining the fifth refrain: the role of scapegoating. Tacitus regularly complained about the state of army dis­ cip­line compared to the old days: ut olim virtutis modestiaeque, tunc procacitatis et petulantiae certamen erat! (While once the soldiers had vied with one another in bravery and good discipline, they now strove to excel in insolence and audacity), but Roman officers tended to learn how to cope from experience, not regulations (Brice, 2015b: 104). Messer divided the Roman period by time, starting with the era from the foundation to the Republic (roughly 509–265 bce), and begins with the mutiny of the burgher army in 495 bce, then considers those in 488, 482, and 480. But it was only the mutiny in 471 bce that generated a significant disciplinary response by their commander, Appius Claudius Sabinus, who decimated his army after their lamentable defeat by the Volscians. The first written account of decimation—theoretically the execution of 10 per cent of the military population concerned—occurs in the Roman war against the Volsci in 471 bce, according to Livy’s History of Rome, book II, when Consul Appius Claudius Sabinus Regillensis had every tenth soldier (drawn by lot) executed by his own comrades. Here, writ large, was a perennial problem facing the authorities in a mutiny: how to appear resolute and induce fear into the mutineers to prevent further dissent without simultaneously invoking hatred for any punishment rendered and destroying the very mechanism for imposing order on the rest of the world? The answer was scapegoating—to execute a symbolic number only—and to get the mutinous comrades of the ringleaders to execute the punishment, a tactic used from the Roman era right through to the execution of British mutineers after the Nore mutiny in 1797. Moreover, many of the Royal Naval punishments, such as ‘running the gauntlet’, embodied this same self-­executing principle. Similarly, in 1758 seventy-­five sailors from the British Royal Navy ship HMS Namur mutinied against the conditions on board, abandoned their ship, and marched to London to seek out the Admiralty to resolve the problems. Fifteen of the mutineers were sentenced to death for their temerity, and Matthew McCann, drawn by lot, was executed (Smith, 2011: 175–6). In 342 bce, after victory against the Samnites in the First Samnite War, Roman troops mutinied in an attempt to take land then controlled by the Campanians, but a peace

34  Mutiny and Leadership was brokered and no disciplinary response was forthcoming. The mutineers in the war with Pyrrhus were less fortunate; having sacked the town of Rhegium in Calabria—contrary to their orders to protect it—the 4,000 legionnaires were besieged by a loyal Roman army, and the 300 mutineers who survived were flogged and executed. In 206 bce, during the Second Punic War, the first Scipio suffered a serious mutiny when 8,000 of his troops at Sucro in Hispania (Spain) mutinied, demanding back pay. Scipio, having promised the legion that there would be no decimation, had thirty-­ five ringleaders flogged and beheaded. What is also important to note is that mutinies amongst the Roman army did not lead to the collapse of the state, primarily because order was always restored, through one means or another, and this implies that most of the mutinies were concerned with conditions of service or leadership rather than attempts to overthrow the republic or the emperor. At a symbolic level, then, to subject individuals to retribution buttressed the sacred relationship at the heart of authority: it was derived from God or the monarchy or some equivalent institution beyond criticism, and therefore it was not to be questioned, ever (Grint, 2010a). Or, as Prince (1998: 3–4) suggests: In blaming ‘professional malcontents’ for resistance, such ‘explanations’ do two things. First, they contrast a largely mythical ‘docile’ workforce with malign and ill-­intentioned extremists bent on the destruction of ‘civilisation as we know it’. Second, and far more important for the arguments here, they divert attention away from the relationship between those in charge and their subordinates, and tend to foster a view that implies, if it does not actually state, that those who are appointed to positions of dominance are somehow free of culpability—an implied moral ascendancy. In other words, blame for the breakdown of ‘normal functioning’ is to be found ‘elsewhere’.

Mutinies appeared a common feature of military life. In 90 bce Numidian Auxiliaries mutinied in Rome; in 89 bce the consul Porcius Cato was assaulted by mutinous troops; in 88 bce two mutinies occurred in or near by Rome; in 87 bce a mutiny was put down using Gallic troops; in 85 and 84 bce two military commanders were murdered by mu­tin­ous troops; and in 82 bce two further mutinies occurred in troops led by Carbo and Marcius (Messer, 1920: 169–71). This is the sixth refrain: that—contrary to many assumptions— mutinies are commonplace not unusual events and dissent is a quotidian phenomenon, not an atypical phenomenon. Conventionally, Caesar’s army was one of the greatest Rome ever fielded, and he is reputed to have had a good relationship with his troops, but at least three serious mutinies occurred in legions that had been under Caesar’s command for years. The first occurred in 58 bce at Vesontio and was, in Caesar’s account, the fault of cowardly officers, though they faced a battle with German tribes led by Ariovistus and were on an unauthorized campaign that the senate deemed illegitimate. In Caesar’s own account, he shames the centurions back into compliance and notes that, even if all the other legions desert him, his faithful 10th will remain and do their duty. The same ‘cowardly officers’ were then persuaded to encourage their own centurions into battle and no punishment followed (Chrissanthos,  2001: 67). Kemezis (2016) suggests that while most subsequent scholars have accepted Caesar’s word at face value, Cassius Dio implies that the issue was less the fear of the Germans on the part of the centurions and more to do with the illegality of

Rethinking Mutiny  35 Caesar’s campaign. Thus Caesar conflates the interests of Rome with his own interests while simultaneously ensuring that his success will be at Rome’s cost. This, according to Kemezis (2016: 254), is yet another example of ‘collusive mendacity, in which the speaker presents lies and obfuscations that the audience recognize as such, but nonetheless finds in some way useful or gratifying and chooses to accept’. The second mutiny, in 49 bce, occurred when the 9th Legion at Placentia mutinied against its officers during the Great Roman (Caesar’s) Civil War, after Pompey’s leaderless army had been defeated. Caesar had issued orders for them to move to Brundisium on Italy’s Adriatic coast, with a view to moving east, rather than marching on—and sacking— Rome, as the 9th legion had wanted in the absence of any pay. At Placentia, Caesar al­leged­ly ordered the decimation of the entire legion: this does not seem to have happened, though 12 of the 120 ringleaders were executed. Indeed, much is made—once again—in the Roman accounts of the rhetorical skill through which Caesar regained control. One might wonder, then, why Caesar tried to suppress not just this mutiny but also the evidence that it occurred, though there are several accounts for the event (see Fantham, 1985). The problem of pay and rewards still festered after Placentia and was to erupt again in 47 bce, when the third mutiny occurred and the seventh refrain plays out: the heroic leader. This time it involved the 10th (Gallic) legion in Campania (now the Naples region of Italy) which had been central to the victory at the battle of Pharsalus in 48 bce—and was Caesar’s favourite legion. It refused to embark to fight against the Roman Army in Africa that had previously been loyal to the by-­then dead Pompey, and it marched on Rome instead, insisting on back pay, land, bonuses, and discharge. The 10th had been on active campaign for over ten years, since 58 bce, in Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Greece; had lost a significant proportion of its soldiers; and had suffered from meagre food supplies. Furthermore, since it joined Caesar in his crossing of the Rubicon, it had seen little of the material rewards they expected because —unlike in Gaul—they were prohibited from sacking Italian cities or executing enemy Roman soldiers, thus prolonging the civil war. Indeed, many of them had not been paid for months. They had clearly decided that they had done their bit for Caesar and Rome, and they were not alone, with eight of the remaining nine Gallic legions involved. The mutiny seems to have been well organized by troops who recognized their strong bargaining position, and several cities in Campania were sacked. A visit by Caesar’s commander of cavalry, Antonius, in June of 47 bce failed to resolve the mutiny because he had neither the funds to pacify them nor the troops to quell them. Caesar himself remained in Egypt and then moved to Syria but seems not have considered the mutiny serious enough to warrant his personal attention at this point. By October that same year, and after rejecting or killing several of Caesar’s envoys, the mu­tin­ eers marched on Rome, reaching the Campus Martius, to the north of the Capitoline Hill. There, according to the popular accounts, Caesar shamed them back to order by reminding them that they were Quirites—Roman citizens—and threatening to dismiss them. Chrissanthos (2001: 63) summarizes what allegedly happened: According to the legend, with characteristic audacity, Caesar appeared alone before his men and quelled the mutiny simply by addressing them as quirites rather than fellow-­soldiers. They begged his forgiveness, even asking him to execute the ringleaders of the mutiny as a means of cleansing their guilt. Properly chastised, the soldiers followed Caesar to Africa and to ultimate victory in the Civil War. This story is found in numerous ancient accounts

36  Mutiny and Leadership and is generally accepted by modern historians. Thus, we are told that Caesar ‘recalled the mutinous troops to their allegiance’ by using quirites with ‘marked effect’. His actions ‘broke the spirit’ of the rebellious men, after which the ‘mutiny came abruptly to an end'’ ‘Rebuked, they returned to their allegiance.’ The Gallic legions ‘had met their master’.

Chrissanthos (2001: 73–5) suggests that this was far from what probably happened, though it satisfied the Roman penchant for idolizing a charismatic leader facing down a mutinous band through force of personality alone, and this motif recurred in previous Roman accounts of both Roman and Greek ‘heroes’. It is our seventh refrain: the popular narrative of mutinies may seek out and feed upon the bodies of heroes as the explanation for success and failure, but it is more likely that a whole raft of resources, human and ­non-­human, is at play. Chrissanthos, for example, notes that Caesar’s position in 47 bce was quite different from that in 49 bce. In 47 bce he had only one legion that might be called upon to fight the mutineers, but their loyalty was questionable, and Rome itself was in the throes of disorder so it was unlikely to provide him with further recruits. As such, he had little alternative but to appear before the troops alone. Moreover, Caesar did not win over the mutineers simply through his rhetorical skill but rather by engaging in substantial negotiations that included the discharging of four of the ten Gallic legions involved in the mutiny. It also included paying off the monies owed by levying a tax on Rome and by providing land to the veterans. But there was also recourse to delayed punishment for any mutineer. Some ringleaders who remained in the army were later despatched on dangerous missions, while those who had been discharged subsequently had their land and monetary rewards reduced. The scepticism of treating individuals as heroic victors and dastardly traitors in mu­tin­ies does not mean that structural conditions determine events because individuals do make a difference, but such individuals cannot, in and of themselves, explain success and failure. As Brecht (1981: 252–3) quipped in his poem ‘Questions From a Worker who Reads’: ‘The young Alexander conquered India; Was he alone?’ The eighth refrain relates to contingency: life is not determined and sometimes luck is critical, despite the fact that we tend to attribute success and failure to individual leaders or individual characteristics (Frank, 2017; Liu and de Rond, 2016). The 1522–3 English campaign in France, for instance, led by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, was plagued by discontent and resolved through negotiation, but the important point here is to note that the leadership of the ‘mutiny’ seems to have come from the prosperous ranks of the Essex and Suffolk yeomanry, not the very bottom of the social hierarchy, and, indeed, precisely the same group that had led the political protests in England (Phillips, 2001: 321). As Phillips concludes, leadership was a critical element to the maintenance of discipline and consecutive commanders of the same troops in near-­identical situations often had very different relationships with their soldiers and consequently different disciplinary records, with the best facilitating ‘Machiavelli’s virtù: duty, loyalty, aggressive resolution, physical courage, and steadfastness’ (Phillips,  2001: 326). But, as the army shifted away from its feudal origins and personal loyalties to the nobility, so did the mechanism for retaining discipline. Once Elizabeth had secured the crown, that local loyalty was displaced towards the crown, and discipline involved the coercive methods that we are more familiar with today. Indeed, swearing oaths of loyalty became more common from the middle of the sixteenth century; with that, punishment, including the death sentence,

Rethinking Mutiny  37 became more common, less for committing crimes and more pour encourager les autres. Nevertheless, negotiated settlements to resolve disputes remained more typical than executions: these were perceived primarily as industrial disputes, not political threats. As Phillips (2001: 332) concludes in his review of the transition in Tudor armies: The hungry, ragged, ill-­paid, and ill-­used soldier did not cease to grumble at his lot, to disappear when his captain's back was turned, to organise and protest when his treatment became unbearable. In many respects, military indiscipline ran parallel to civilian popular protest. In both cases, the common man recognised that alongside power and priv­il­ ege came responsibility and obligation, and he was swift to protest against those who failed in their duties. For all the insistence on obedience, the Tudor soldier was never reduced to an unthinking cipher.

What is important here is to understand that whether mutinies break out, or do not, whether they are successful or fail, whether they recur or die out, are all contingencies: they are not determined by the situation or the balance of resources available to each side. In other words, and the eighth refrain, serendipity is ever-­present. We might also switch the verb tense that we often use for leadership and adopt the subjunctive—a tense that implies that the result could have been otherwise. Conventionally we might use the in­di­ ca­tive mood for leadership—a statement that appears to be a fact. ‘It is important that she lead them now’, however, is a subjunctive: it implies that she might not lead them. Just as leadership is always a possibility rather than a certainty, so too is mutiny always a possibility and never an impossibility, nor a certainty. This brings us to our ninth refrain: leadership as relational. In the fourth century bce, war fighting had moved beyond the mass ranks of hoplites facing each other, and dis­cip­ line began to embody a greater reliance on direct orders—and hence the possibility of mutiny. However, the real difference is less to do with time and place and more to do with relationships. While soldiers in Ancient Greece fought for a political system over which they had some influence, the Macedonian soldiers of the armies of Philip and Alexander did not: they fought for kings. This, and the increasing sophistication of battle strategies, seems to have led to an increase in the use of direct orders and thus compliance. Training, especially forced marches, were a common feature of these armies, and military drill was particularly important as the coercive balance to the booty, pay, honours, promotions, and Dionysian celebrations through which Alexander, in particular, seemed to have controlled his soldiers on campaign. Executions and flogging, particularly for treason or threats to the king, were rare but existed, though the real control mechanism seems to have been the paternal leadership that both Philip and Alexander exhibited. In effect they shared the risks facing their soldiers and expressed their concerns for the wounded that generated a veneration and allegiance quite different from that present in Persian armies. Greenwalt (1986, cited in Carney, 1996: 28) even suggests that Alexander’s use of medicine persuaded some of his soldiers that he was indeed sacred (see also Grint, 2010a). As Alexander’s military success continued and his army grew, so the proportion of Macedonian troops decreased, and the disciplinary mechanism that had kept the original army bonded to their leader began to dilute. Yet the ‘mutinies’ that occurred are redolent of personal bonds between soldier and Alexander: the mutineers spoke of ‘despondency’, ‘less kind’, and a ‘lack of heart’, though, as Carney (1996: 33) admits, these accounts are from subsequent

38  Mutiny and Leadership Roman authors or from other contemporaneous Greek or Macedonian accounts. Nonetheless, given the traditionally robust nature of the communication between soldiers and Alexander, the ‘mutinies’ are represented as ‘disagreements’ and ‘quarrels’ rather than mutinies. And again, we should note the importance of the relational aspects of leadership here, rather than assume that Alexander, in and through himself, explains the success or failure of the army. This is the ninth refrain: leadership is quintessentially relational. The likelihood of mutiny, and the requirement to impose rigorously coercive discipline, is common when those in military units are impressed or compulsorily mobilized. In effect, it is not the material context (the danger, the fear, the battle) that determines whether coercive discipline is necessary but the cultural context, especially the nature of the relationship between leaders and led, and the absence of choice (Uhl-­Bien, 2006; Holt, 2016). So, for example, the most effective disciplinary device for those serving in the British Commandos or the US Marine Raider Battalions in the Second World War was not the threat of imprisonment or execution for refusing to obey orders but the shame of being RTU (Returned to Unit), implying you had failed the test of resilience and could only operate in a non-­elite unit, possibly behind the combat zone (Grint, 2008; Schultz, 2014; Wukovits, 2009). This is important in mutiny because the threat to mu­tin­eers is so grievous that only the most cohesive and resilient of mutinies is likely to succeed against all the odds stacked against it. As Haslam (2004) and Hogg (2001) suggest, the stronger the cohesion of the ‘in’ group (the mutineers in these cases) in terms of common characteristics, beliefs, and behaviours, the more likely they will perceive themselves as ‘us’ against the outgroup—‘them’—and the more likely they are to prevail. Moreover, the most effective leader is likely to be the person who prototypically represents the core values of the group. For instance, Churchill became the prototypical Briton in 1940 as he manifested the resilience and fighting spirit of the British Bulldog. In short, war forges a different—and usually stronger—relationship between leaders and followers, and the conventional levels of ­dissent between the two are often channelled against the common enemy. But dissent can, of course, take many forms—some of which are constructive rather than destructive (Grint,  2005b; Holt,  2016)—and the price of dissent is seldom greater than refusing to comply with military orders during wartime. Here the price is often death or corporal punishment or imprisonment. If mutineers are willing to challenge their subordination in the face of dire consequences then two things are worth considering: first, organizations are rooted in subordinate compliance, and this becomes self-­evident when that compliance is withdrawn; second, the exposing of the deceit of power—that we pretend we have no choice but to comply (what Jean-­Paul Sartre (1993) called ‘bad faith’, or mauvaise foi)—casts a radical eye upon less coercive systems of compliance. Or, as Foucault (1982: 791) suggested: ‘At the very heart of the power relationship, and constantly provoking it, are the recalcitrance of the will and the intransigence of freedom.’ Hence, for Foucault, there was a significant difference between power relations and physical force. The latter did not involve ‘power’ in the sense that Foucault considered the term, for ‘power is exercised only over free subjects, and only in so far as they are free’ (Foucault quoted in Smith, 1994: 15). As Lt Col. Bui Tin from the North Vietnamese army recalled saying to the South’s president, General Duong Van Minh, on 30 April 1975, waiting in the Presidential Palace in Saigon to ‘transfer power’ to Bui Tin: ‘But you have no power to transfer!’15 15  Quoted at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-­asia-­45195395, accessed 30 August 2018.

Rethinking Mutiny  39 In other words, if the most coercive organization that we know of—the military at war—can still suffer from mutinies because they do not possess power, our own less dangerous forms of compliance are painfully exposed for what they are: systems held in place, at least in part, by our own compliance. In effect, when you next hear yourself justify your decision on the basis of having ‘no choice’, you are probably lying to yourself: we always have a choice, provided we are willing to accept the consequences of non-­compliance. Oftentimes we are not: we are unwilling to accept the consequences, but this does not mean we had no choice—we just chose to comply rather than the consequences of ­non-­compliance. Clearly there are some exceptions to this: there are times when we literally do not have a choice. Falling out of a plane suggests we cannot choose to go back into the plane because gravity takes us downward; similarly, there are individuals with mental health issues or learning difficulties who would have difficulty in recognizing their freedom to choose otherwise. But for most of us we have no such justification or explanation. Indeed, ‘learned helplessness’ is a condition that is recognized as a medical condition in which clinical depression occurs through a perceived absence of control over a situation (Seligman,  1975). But even at the point of death we are still free to resist, to refuse to comply with our executioner, even if that does not stop us dying. Take the case of Masha Bruskina, a teenage girl hanged by the German SS in Minsk on 26 October 1941 for al­leged­ly shooting at German soldiers. She was hanged with two male partisans outside the gates of a yeast factory and refused to turn to face her executioners, twisting her body to face away from them even as she died. She was known to the Germans as ‘an unknown woman’, and her recalcitrance was captured by her final act of resistance (Tec and Weiss, 1997). In some ways, then, one of the conditions that inhibits mutiny is enthralment, and this is our tenth refrain.16 Enthralment is a state of capture, or even enrapture, a material or psychological enslavement in which the ‘thrall’ is literally or figuratively unable to escape and appears powerless in the face of her or his captor. But this can only be the case if the captive is bound hand and foot, and even then, as the British authorities found to their cost in trying to subjugate the imprisoned suffragettes, force-­feeding prisoners through tubes can still be an extraordinarily difficult procedure—unless the prisoners comply. And this is the point: compliance can always be refused if thralls are willing to accept the consequences of non-­compliance. History is full of such ‘refuseniks’—people prepared to risk everything rather than offer any form of compliance—and many people have died rather than comply with their captors. This is the deceit of enthralment: organizations only continue because their members comply, to some extent, but the same members often rationalize their compliance because of their alleged powerlessness. We speak to each other of our powerlessness to resist, our enslavement to the system, our thwarted freedom stolen from us by powerful organizations, bosses, systems, partners, monarchs and dictators, but all the time we are—to some extent—complicit in their power over us. This is the utility of what Nye (1990) called ideological persuasion or ‘soft power’ to distinguish it from force, from coercive ‘hard power’. If we chose to resist, to refuse, to reject their authority, then we would expose both their dependence upon us and our self-­deceptive strategies of compliance. But for that to occur, for us to refuse to comply, we must be willing to pay the price of non-­compliance, or at least risk that. Mutiny, then, is the act 16  ‘Thrall’: the state of being in someone’s power (from Old English thæl slave; Old Norse thræll slave; perhaps from a German root meaning ‘run’ [Concise Oxford Dictionary]) from 1570s English: ‘enthral’.

40  Mutiny and Leadership that disenthrals us, that frees us from the illusion of our helplessness in the face of apparent fatalism. In other words, mutiny reminds us that freedom can be fatal but that fatalism can lead to enslavement. Some military hierarchies can resonate with enthralment, they are ideocracies—pol­it­ical systems rooted in totalitarian and utopian ideology that justify their control through ­reference to the radical ideas that support a total transformation of society in a totalitarian direction. Typically, these have been either Communist, Fascist, or Islamic, but they are held in place by more than state terror and require an effective ideological apparatus to maintain control and longevity (Backes and Kailitz,  2016). In this sense ideocracies are dependent upon mass compliance, and the clearest manifestation of this occurred when the Berlin Wall fell—not through mass physical attack but through a recognition by a sufficient proportion of the population that they were no longer held in a state of enthralment by the regime (Engel,  2011). Of course, people comply for different reasons. As Held (1989: 101) suggests, compliance can occur because of coercion, tradition, apathy, pragmatic acquiescence, or normative agreement—but these are all rooted in choice and all generate compliance. This also means that leadership is necessarily rooted in the same earth. If mutiny exposes the deceit of enthralment, then leadership is often part of the enthralment process, a mechanism to persuade followers that they have little or no choice but to follow. Of course, a different aspect of leadership is to disenthral people too. That is to say, leadership might also be configured as telling people truths that they would rather not face—such as being responsible for their own health, for the environment, for their neighbours, etc. Here we might usefully turn to Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, in which the apparent problem—the renegade company man Kurtz (Colonel Kurtz in the movie Apocalypse Now)—seems to be ‘up-­river, out there, the other’, but, as the journey to ‘the problem’ continues, it becomes clear that the problem is ‘down-­river, in here, us’ (Grint, 1995). In short, while it is a depressingly common aspect of human culture to demonize others for our own problems, they are our problems and, despite our unwillingness to look in the individual and collective mirror, that is where we are most likely to find the person responsible for a large proportion of our own problems. We might construct this as the Kurtz Complex—a phenomenon embodied in following the cause of a problem all the way to a mirror and then choosing not to look. Mutiny forces the military hierarchy to look in the mirror, even then they might still choose to see their own innocence. Mutiny, however, is often at the extreme end of forms of resistance and consequently embodies the most danger for those resisting and those being resisted. Acts of resistance can occur at a relatively harmless level: refusing to wear the socks that your parents have laid out for you; refusing to eat vegetables; refusing to clean your teeth, all of these are minor acts of resistance that parents face on a daily basis, but they seldom generate violence, even though they can be very frustrating. And again, acts of resistance to parents by an 18-­month-­old infant are clear indications of the limits of ‘power’ that adult parents have over their apparently ‘weak’ offspring. Similarly, citizens refusing to pay taxes, protesters refusing to disperse when asked to do so by the police, students refusing to vacate a building, and workers refusing to work are all various acts of resistance and may incur significant penalties, but only rarely are these draconian or fatal. Hence, mutiny provides the extreme case that acts to expose the deceit of enthralment better than all the others: if military subordinates are prepared to risk execution in order to resist, then it should be

Rethinking Mutiny  41 clear that other forms of resistance in less dangerous situations are always available to us, even if we pretend that they are not. It is worth pondering too about the success or failure of mutinies, since this must have weighed heavy in the hearts of the mutineers. As it will become clear from what follows, some mutinies clearly succeed in the sense that the mutineers achieve their primary aims; on other occasions, they clearly fail. As an example of the former, over the winter of 1763/4 the British Army’s Royal American Regiment mutinied when the free rations that they had been receiving during the war were withdrawn and replaced by a charge of four pennies—out of their daily pay of six pennies. As a result the commander-­in-­chief, Jeffrey Amhurst, reversed the decision, the free food was restored, and the mutiny was ended without violence on either side (Hendrix, 2019: 16). But success and failure are perhaps more complex when we adopt a rather more contextual focus. In effect, a mutiny may lead to the mutineers ‘failing’ and being executed, but the consequence of the mutiny may be that the authorities change their practice and remove the behaviours that stimulated the mutiny in the first place. Similarly, mutineers may achieve their immediate goals but are subsequently hunted down or their compatriots are punished to render the initial victory one perhaps deemed unworthy of the name. One thing is clear: mutiny on a grand scale is far more dangerous to the authorities and safer for the mutineers than single-­ship or -unit mutiny. As the British naval mutineers at the end of the eighteenth century came to realize, mutiny on a single ship (Bounty, 1789; Windsor Castle and Culloden, 1794; Terrible, 1795, and Hermione, 1797) brought terrible retribution for some of the mutineers, and, while the Nore led to a rigorous collective punishment, a collective mutiny did offer a greater chance of protection for the mutineers (Coats and MacDougall, 2011: 12). Yet the ‘failure’ of the Nore mutiny might also have sparked a slow liberalization of discipline and conditions in the Royal Navy. For example, ‘running the gauntlet’, an ancient military punishment for minor infractions of the rules, had been part of discipline in the Royal Navy for many years but was abolished in 1806.17 In 1808 the prize money allocated to the crew changed from a quarter to a half; and ‘starting’ with a rope’s end was abolished in 1809. In 1814 all long-­service seamen (and not just disabled ones) were given pensions; and in 1815 impressment was abolished (Coats and MacDougall, 2011: 14). But were these kind of issues—often long-­term material changes—at the heart of most mutinies?

Explaining Mutinies We know that poor material conditions, in and of themselves, do not equate with rebellion because several other aspects need to be in place. First, the decline may be relative in two directions: that is, conditions might start to deteriorate or, alternatively, improvements might not be as significant or as quickly acquired as expected. Second, these perceived changes (which may be more symbolic than material) are often associated with a change in those held responsible for any deleterious effects. In effect, a switch in scapegoat, typ­ ical­ly from an external enemy beyond the direct control of the subordinates to an internal 17  Rodger (1986: 227–8) notes how, in 1760, Francis Lanyon was sentenced to three runs round the deck on HMS Royal George while his comrades were supposed to beat him for failing to return from leave on time. The crew disagreed with the sentence and refused to beat him.

42  Mutiny and Leadership enemy not beyond control, often seems to be associated with one element of the shift from quiescence to mutiny. Third, the switch in scapegoat needs to be buttressed by a leader or leadership cadre that ostensibly provides an answer to the concerns of the subordinates. We know from research on whistle-­blowing, for example, that the mere presence of wrongdoing is insufficient to generate protests, and this is especially unlikely if that protest will lead to no change in the action of the wrongdoers.18 Fourth, the mutineers need to be able to manage the tension between solidarity and isolation. In other words, without in­tern­al solidarity the mutineers have little chance of success, but this also has to be maintained through external isolation by keeping the mutineers together and away from external incentives to leave. This is particularly evident in naval mutinies, when the solidarity of the sailors in the fleet is critical to the mutineers and one of the primary targets for the authorities. The fifth aspect relates more to the likelihood of success in the mutiny than just the presence of a stimulus, a new and more tractable scapegoat, and a leadership cadre. Here we need to turn to the power of the alliance built by the mutinies to compete with the authority structure controlled by those they are mutinying against. For Machiavelli, alliances were the sine qua non of political success, and The Prince makes this abundantly clear, but an important addition to this is to recognize that alliances with humans are ­necessary but not sufficient. To increase the resources available to a leader or group there must also be non-­humans—not just material elements such as the guns that mutineers frequently acquire to achieve their aims but also elements such as the support of the law, the weather, the tides, and so on. Here we need to turn to Actor–Network Theory (Callon, 1986; Grint and Woolgar, 1997; Latour, 1999, Law and Hassard, 1999) to recognize that a mutinous group of sailors, for example, needs ships, guns, ammunition, food, and appropriate weather and tides, as well as support from others beyond their direct reach. On the other side, of course, the authorities also seek to produce and reproduce their own alliances, not just for suppressing existing mutinies but to try and ensure they never occur or recur. Hernán Cortés in 1519, for example, burned, or rather scuttled, his own boats off the coast of what is now Mexico to forestall any mutiny intended to report Cortés to his own superior, Governor Veláquez in Cuba (Goodwin, 2019: 35). But many of the disciplinary systems that we will meet are not just embedded in ma­ter­ ial and legal forms but also rooted in symbolism, spectacle, and ritual, designed to re­inforce the imperial and impervious system of oppression that could not be undermined by any ragtag band of mutineers. For example, in the nineteenth-­century British Royal Navy, all discipline was executed in full view of the entire crew, preceded by a formal reading of the Articles of War by the captain to remind the crew of what was about to happen and why. A drummer would call the crew to attention, and the crew would stand in silence as the punishment was inflicted upon the guilty individual. This was something to be undertaken not below decks in private but as a spectacle to remind the crew of the sovereign power of the legitimate authority on board. Hechter et al.’s (2015) evaluation of mutinies suggests that they occur for two related reasons: where there is both a long-­standing set of complaints of the kinds we have ­considered thus far; and when these are magnified by a contingent and temporal issue. In their argument, only when we combine the structural grievances with some aspect of 18  See https://www.whistleblowing.co.za/why-­people-­don’t-­speak-­up-­at-­work-­insights-­and-­actions-­for-­leaders/, accessed 10 January 2019.

Rethinking Mutiny  43 incidental grievance do we tend to see mutinies. Their analysis of sixty-­two mutinies in the Royal Navy between 1740 and 1820 lists the top seven grievances (accounting for 90 per cent of all grievances) as discipline (27 per cent), wages (16 per cent), food (13 per cent), naval customs (11 per cent), leave (9 per cent), impressment (7 per cent), and safety (7 per cent). They conclude that mutinies are often generated by a particular spark that sets ablaze the structural conditions, and preventing the spark is the most difficult task of the authorities. But this does not explain why mutinies do not always break out when the structural conditions are present and the incidental grievance arises. As a single case, why did not the whole of the British fleet mutiny in 1931 when the British Atlantic Fleet at Invergordon did? Is there, then, not a requirement for leadership to channel all these grievances into a mutiny and—often for very good reasons—that leadership only existed at Invergordon? In effect, structural conditions and incidental grievances do not a mutiny make; it also requires a cadre of leaders, usually small in number because of the dangers involved and the mutual trust required, who are willing and able to construct the situation in such a way that the problem appears self-­evident and the solution viable. Parker (2001: viii) suggests that mutinies in the Spanish Army of Flanders were invariably spontaneous reactions to material and mundane conditions at the time, though he recognizes that ‘small causes can produce great effects’. And Parker’s (2008) work has led others to assume that this is always the case, but Trim’s (2001) account of the Dutch Army of Flanders, which was both attacking its Spanish equivalent and also a mercenary force, had few of the problems associated with the Spanish enemy force. Moreover, while many mercenary armies were prone to mutiny, there were always elements that were not, such as the Irish mercenaries with the Hapsburg armies, whose devotion to Catholicism kept mutiny at bay. And while pay was a frequent cause of mutiny amongst mercenaries, it was often used as the overt issue rather than an underlying one. For example, Sherer (2014: 901–9) notes how a mutiny amongst Spanish mercenaries in 1525 was represented as a pay problem but in fact the underlying cause was the fear of the army being posted to Genoa, when it was common knowledge that a Turkish fleet was approaching. In 1538 Spanish soldiers refused to embark on ships from Sicily to Lipari, after a dangerous prior sea journey, upon hearing that Lipari had no fresh water, no firewood, no food, but plenty of lizards. And in the same year it was the defrauding of their own troops by captains in Sicily that stimulated a mutiny. In many of these mutinies the mutineers demonstrated a high level of self-­organization, frequently electing their own representatives, or electos, to represent them in negotiations. As ever, becoming a representative for the mutineers was a dangerous decision. In 1539, at the behest of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, the twenty-­four electos involved in the Sicilian mutiny were hanged, and their leader had his arm chopped off before being jailed. Hathaway (2001a: xv) accepts that there are almost no mutinies that occur ex nihilo and that material and mundane grievances are often present but, in and of themselves, are seldom sufficient to explain such events: more typically they sit nested within a framework of wider social and political grievances. Dwyer (2017: 179–80) suggests that many are much more consciously planned: they are strategic interventions designed to secure success rather than spontaneous tactical reactions. Dwyer also suggests that the reduction of the causes of mutinies to material grievances—what First (1970) for instance calls ‘pay mu­tin­ies’—misunderstands the importance of injustice, but she notes that mutinies are usually about inequity not inequality. This replicates the industrial relations issues in the

44  Mutiny and Leadership UK in the 1970s that were usually resolved by material improvements but may well have been caused by political issues, especially inequities of power or a break in the implicit or psychological contract that could not be resolved by management, except by ceding control to the ‘revolting’ workforce. Moreover, since the military is a society of subjects not citizens, subjects have few if any rights against their sovereign, and certainly not the kind of le­git­im­ ate negotiating rights implicit to citizens bargaining with their employer. Hattendorf (2003: xvi) embodies a similar line, implying that mutiny is a ‘failure in the necessarily reciprocal relationship between officers and men’. And part of that relationship, according to Coats and MacDougall (2011: 5), is ‘authority’s failure to enter into a dialogue’. Not all mutinies are covered in detail in what follows, but many are worthy of a m ­ ention. For example, in March 1970, Alvin Glatkowski and Clyde William McKay Jr, two ­members of the American merchant ship SS Columbia Eagle that was taking napalm bombs to US Air Force bases in Thailand during the Vietnam War, used guns to take over the ship. They then forced twenty-­four of the crew off the ship and coerced a skeleton crew of thirteen into sailing the ship to Cambodian waters, where Glatkowski and McKay insisted they were anti-­war revolutionaries and sought political asylum. Unfortunately for the two mutineers, their arrival coincided with a coup against the Cambodian government, and Glatkowski was repatriated and imprisoned. McKay escaped and his where­abouts remain disputed, though his remains were allegedly returned to his family in 2005. Where any dissent is configured as a rebellion because there is no legitimate political alternative to the establishment—as in Czarist Russia, for example—then we would expect mutinies to transfigure into revolutions because the only opponents of the czar were rad­ ical if not revolutionary political parties. But where the political system has some element of democracy, as in Britain in 1919 for instance, then we might expect military dissenters to temper their demands for change to addressing what they see as some form of injustice. Moreover, we should not expect mutineers to necessarily articulate coherent political demands if their own responses are relatively inchoate, especially at the beginning of a mutiny. As we shall see, the movement from nascent refusal to work to a mature set of coherent political demands may proceed extremely quickly with the right circumstances and appropriate leadership. That leadership is principally involved in establishing not just the goals of the mutineers but also the strategy, and, since the goals are often both obscure and divided, the leadership’s role is to mould the relatively incoherent frustrations into a coherent strategy and to monitor whether the strategy—when deployed into the tactics adopted by the mutineers—appears to work or not. The strategy of both sides, then, is to connect the goals to the tactics in the face of complexity (including Clausewitz’s ‘friction’), ambiguity, and a recursive situation where the other side is actively trying to undermine your own strategy (Kornberger and Engberg-­Pedersen, 2019). Whether the goals that the mutineers’ strategy is designed to achieve are radical or revo­lu­tion­ary depends not just on what they think they are doing but what their op­pon­ ents perceive. And here we might fruitfully turn to the work of Albert Camus, particularly his 1951 work The Rebel. Camus was not a revolutionary—he had no utopian dream of the kind that motivated his long-­term friend Jean-­Paul Sartre (Zaretsky,  2010)—but wrote that ‘rebellion alone is the proper response to the betrayal of innocence . . . It protests, it  demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end . . . ’ (Camus,  1991: 10). For Camus, an act of ‘revolution’ implied an (impossible) grasp of logic that led inevitably to a totality that excluded all but the true believer. Yet each act of ‘rebellion’ was an act for the

Rethinking Mutiny  45 greater good for it marked out the limit of immorality and the defence of the common good. In effect mutiny, in principle, did not necessarily promise a utopian alternative to the present—intolerable—conditions, but it did point to something better than the status quo: a more just society, or at least the hope for one. As Solnit (2016: xiii–xiv) notes: Hope . . . is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction . . . Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcome—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is the embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

In short, mutiny as rebellion, rather than revolution, implies not just that the instigation of the rebellion lies in the actions of the superordinate that are perceived to be illegitimate by the subordinates but that subordinates have a moral duty to stand up for the common good: to do something other than simply complain to other subordinates. In some ways this resonates with Hirschman’s (1990) argument that when organizations deteriorate over time the two main responses are Exit or Voice. Exit works best within a market situation, when the consumer can seek a similar product elsewhere or the employee can find another employer. But in other situations, where Exit is not available—such as political contracts or, in our case, military covenants—the alternative is Voice, where individuals and col­lect­ ives voice their complaints in an effort to change the situation. Since Exit operates to undermine Voice, the third mechanism, Loyalty, operates to deter Exit. For example, if you wanted to change a country’s state educational or medical system, then allowing Exit (to the private sector) undermines the loyalty necessary to maintain the Voice which is needed to change it. In our case, the mechanism of Voice and Exit are severely restricted by the nature of the relationship between superordinate and subordinate such that Loyalty is assumed to be sufficient to deter either. Yet, as we shall see, the presence of quotidian dissent negates the very idea that Loyalty explains acquiescence—loyalty is neither necessary nor sufficient. Conventional leadership theory rooted in organizations or institutions may be ­appropriate for analysing how the establishment or the authorities responded to mutinies, but it has limited capacity to explain how mutineers operated because the conditions are so different. In other words, mutineers do not have the officers’ network that includes the formal hierarchy, the associated reward and punishment system, the (usually patriotic) media, and the rest of the state and population to rely on. Mutineers usually have only themselves, and it is not always self-­evident which of their comrades are trustworthy mutineers and which untrustworthy loyalists. To explore this difference we need to use social movement theory, since social movements have few if any of these resources in their network, at least not in the beginning. As Ganz (2010: 1) suggests, social movements are

46  Mutiny and Leadership ‘initiated in hopeful response to conditions adherents deem intolerable, [while] social movement participants make moral claims based in renewed personal identities, col­lect­ ive identities, and public action’. Of course, mutineers do not always act in the morally upright way that Ganz reserves for social movement activists. For Ganz (2010: 2), ‘authority rests on moral suasion more than economic or political coercion,’ and Ganz (2010: 3) follows James  Q.  Wilson (1973) when he insisted that in most voluntary organizations ‘authority is uncertain and leadership is precarious. Because the association is voluntary, its chief officer has neither the effective power nor the acknowledged right to coerce the members.’ This makes leadership in mutinies much more complex, critical, and chron­ic­ al­ly dangerous by comparison to leadership in either conventional organizations or indeed on the establishment side opposing the mutineers. We only need to compare how many officers and mutineers died or received punishment as a result of mutinies to recognize that the risk asymmetry is literally dreadful. Leadership in social movements requires learning to manage the core tensions at the heart of what theologian Walter Brueggemann (2001) calls the ‘prophetic imagination’: a combination of criticality (experience of the world’s pain) with hope (experience of the  world’s possibilities), avoiding being numbed by despair or deluded by optimism (Ganz, 2010: 4). But where the kinds of social movements that Ganz has in mind are those operating to attain civil rights, or protect farm workers, or elect political leaders, the focus here is much more short term and often intended to set the world right, not overturn the world or set up a new world (though some mutinies are clearly aimed at this). Moreover, while social movement members are often unknown to each other and are only temporarily in each others’ physical presence, mutineers tend to be close comrades, and the arena for the playing out of the mutiny is up close and personal. Moreover, it is often the case that we know much more about the authorities’ perspective on mutinies than that of the mutineers because—for obvious reasons—mutineers seldom write down their plans and seldom survive if those plans become unhinged. Indeed, it is not unknown for there to be little clear understanding of the specific cause of some mutinies. For example, as we shall see in Chapter 6, in February 1915 a mutiny by the 5th Light Infantry of the Indian Army, under British control in Singapore, led to the deaths of thirty-­one people, including British and Malayan military personnel as well as British, Chinese, and Malay civilians (plus one German POW). When the mutiny was crushed with the help of local military and police as well as Japanese and Russian military personnel, 205 of the Muslim mutineers were court-­martialled and 47 publicly executed in front of 15,000 spectators on the Outram Road in central Singapore. But the precise cause of the mutiny was unclear to those who put it down: there was a concern that the soldiers would be sent to fight Turkish (Muslim) troops, and there was an internal call for Muslims to join the jihad against the Allied Powers, but the contemporary accounts suggest it may also have been the internal ethnic conflicts within the regiment and/or the poverty of the British leadership of the regiment (Harper and Miller, 1984). One question, then, is why do authorities fail to enter into dialogue, to allow a min­imum Voice that would, or at least might, deter mutiny? Sometimes this is an issue of relationships. For example, on 26 August 1969, the relatively new commander of A Company, 3rd Battalion/196th US Infantry, Captain Eugene Shurtz, ordered his sixty soldiers down the Nuilon Mountain, south of Da Nang in Vietnam, thought to be defended by North Vietnamese soldiers. The American soldiers simply refused to go until Shurtz was relieved

Rethinking Mutiny  47 of command, and a veteran sergeant personally led the way. But many instances of mutiny like this were avoided in Vietnam by the officers ‘working it out’, which was a euphemism for officers managing to comply with their orders but translating them on the battlefield so that their own soldiers were not exposed to enemy fire (Cortright, 2005: 35). Given that half the GIs in Vietnam had taken some form of illegal drug and that 90 per cent of those addicted to heroin had first tried it in Vietnam, it is not surprising that infantry officers were so wary of enforcing strict codes of compliance. Moreover, Cortright (2005: 35) notes ten significant American mutinies in Vietnam, including when twenty-­one soldiers of the 1st Platoon, B Company, of the 2nd Battalion/27th Infantry refused to advance at Cu Chi in November 1969, and when C Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry refused to advance when ordered to do so by Captain Al Rice in April 1970. A month later, sixteen soldiers from two companies of the 3rd Battalion/22nd Infantry refused to move into Cambodia, and four days later GIs from 3rd Battalion/8th Infantry at 4th Infantry HQ refused to board helicopters. In December 1970, twenty-­three men of C Company, 2nd Battalion/501st Infantry, under Lt Fred Pitts, settled into a secure defensive position for the night and all of them refused an order to move out, and Pitts explained to his colonel that the move was both unnecessary and dangerous. His sergeant agreed and also rejected the colonel’s order. The next day both Pitts and his sergeant were removed; Pitts received a suspended sentence. In March, 1971 two platoons of Troop B of the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry, refused an order from Captain Carlos Poveda to retrieve a damaged helicopter and armoured vehicle under fire. Their CO, Lt Col. Gene Breeding, arrived and took the names of every mutineer; there were fifty-­one names. Poveda was reassigned, but no dis­cip­lin­ary action was taken against anyone.19 Throughout this period of wide-­scale dissent there were the usual familiar siren calls of what Collinson (2012) calls ‘prozac leadership’, when the leadership of an organization offer an interpretation of their situation so positive, and in the face of such glaring disparity between reality and their understanding, that they must have been taking the anti-­depressant in large dosages. Prozac leadership positively prevents the voices of dissent from emerging. As General Harkins (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam: MACV) suggested in 1962: ‘I am an optimist and I am not going to allow my staff to be pessimistic . . . I don’t care what you hear from anybody else. I can tell you without a doubt that we are going to be out of here with a military victory in six months’ (quoted Ward and Burns, 2017: 63).20

19  Often dissent takes a personal approach and, since mutinies require more than one individual, such cases are not illustrations of mutiny. However, they were very serious in Vietnam. For example, the US Army’s own records suggest that, by the end of the war there had been 551 ‘fragging’ incidents, involving the attempted murder of one’s fellow soldiers, often by dropping fragmentation grenades into their tents. Eighty-­six people were killed and over 700 injured, and around 80 per cent of the victims were officers or NCOs (Cortright, 2005: 43–4). But most of the troops seemed more concerned with surviving their tour rather than protesting about the war during active service. As one GI commented: ‘I just work hard at surviving so I can go home and protest all the killing’ (quoted in Cortright, 2005: 33). 20  British readers might note the striking parallel here with Boris Johnson’s first day as prime minister when he talked of ‘optimism’ for ‘the beginning of a new golden age’ for post-­Brexit Britain—‘the greatest place on earth’—against the ‘doubters, the doomsters, the gloomsters’; it was what George Sorel (1950) called a ‘mobilising myth’ (W. Booth and K. Adam, ‘New UK prime minister Boris Johnson promises a “golden age”—and Brexit’, Washington Post, 25 June 2019). On 1 October 2019, in an interview with the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, Prime Minister Johnson said: ‘And I urge you, Laura, to keep hope alive and not, to not, listen . . .’ Kuenssberg interrupted: ‘This is not about people feeling hopeful . . . This is not about telling people to cheer up, this couldn’t be more serious’ (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-­politics-­49894249).

48  Mutiny and Leadership He was wrong on both counts: the last US troops left South Vietnam in April 1975, ­without a victory. In 1963, after an operation had gone dramatically wrong, which resulted in eighty South Vietnamese and three American deaths—and an unknown but almost certainly smaller number of enemy combatants- Harkins reported a victory, and when reporters pointed out the discrepancies in his account, the reporters were told to ‘get on the team’ (quoted Ward and Burns,  2017: 77). Similarly, Lieutenant Matthew Harrison Jr 2nd Battalion/173rd Airborne, led C Company on an operation on Hill 1338 in the Central Highlands, where North Vietnamese troops were threatening a group of special forces in June 1971. On the morning of 22nd June, after a fire-­fight the previous evening with A Company, the North Vietnamese forces disappeared, leaving 78 Americans dead and 23 wounded. There were 10 North Vietnamese dead. The official American report noted that 475 enemy had been killed, and General Westmorland then told the unit that they had done ‘a magnificent job’. As Harrison recalled, By then, I had more than just a suspicion that this was a fairy tale, that Westmorland was wrong, and I didn’t know whether he knew he was wrong, or whether he believed what he was told and wanted to believe it. But this was the first time that I had come to grips with the fact that our leadership was either out of touch or lying. (quoted in Ward and Burns, 2017: 199)

Another argument that explains why authorities suppress Voice would be that mutinies encapsulate what Cohen (1973) called a ‘moral panic’—that is, when a person, organization, or phenomenon is defined by the establishment as a threat to itself. This threat can be in the form of witches, paedophiles, communists, hooligans, HIV, a few ragged refugees in an inflatable dingy, or anything else deemed a threat, but the important point is how the media and the establishment configure the threat rather than what the threat may actually be. Thus witches do not pose a ‘real’ threat to a community, but by configuring witches as a moral panic all the blame and responsibility for whatever crisis prompted the threat is then deposited at the door of the scapegoat. In our case, mutinies become moral panics in the sense that they must not be configured as legitimate stirrings of discontent by the exploited sailors and soldiers involved but rather as an existential threat to everything the establishment hold dear. Thus, for example, to accept that the Nore mutineers just wanted a similar deal to the Spithead mutineers ignores the moral panic that all mutinies at this time are really proto-­revolutions inspired by the French Revolution: to acquiesce to a mutiny is, in this frame, merely the first step along a slippery road to the guillotine for all nobles, officers, and ‘freedom-­loving’ people of Britain. The violent response of the authorities to mutiny, then, is often a reflection of the perceived weakness of the state. As Epstein (2012: 91) notes, ‘the 1790s marked a turning point as traditional regimes struggled to reconstitute and legitimate the basis for their authority’. One solution was for the British male elite, for example, to abandon their preference for the French language at court, and for wearing effete French fashion, and to start speaking English and wearing quasi-­military dress, to imply the nobility had a useful purpose and were not simply (like their French cousins) apparently living off the backs of the people (Colley, 1994: 170–2). The cult of heroism now took hold, as reproduced in the preference for portraits of military heroes at the (often fabricated) point of death: see, for example,

Rethinking Mutiny  49 the portraits of General Wolfe, 1770; Admiral Nelson, 1805; and General Sir John Moore, 1809. And it was not just language and uniforms that were affected by the revolution in France; as Mabee (2007: 133) notes, William Wordsworth, the English romantic poet (who was originally sympathetic to the revolution until the Terror), suggested in his work The Prelude (1805) that there was a direct connection between the revolution and the mu­tin­ ies, as a ship at anchor rocked by storms. Field Marshal Luigi Cadorna, head of the Italian Army in the First World War, would no doubt have approved of this metaphor, because the Italian army suffered some of the highest levels of disciplinary problems of any army at the time, with some 6 per cent of soldiers disciplined for some infraction or other (Strachan, 2003: xxx). Cadorna, a known martinet, had decentralized the disciplinary system of tribunals over the winter of 1915/16 in response to what he saw as a weak and bureaucratic centralized system, effectively ­giving regimental commanders at the rank of lieutenant colonel the power to convene Extraordinary Tribunals and order the death penalty for a variety of offences. These included mutiny, which was defined by Article 116 of the military code as occurring ­during wartime when ‘four or more soldiers refused an order or even made a complaint verbally or in writing’ (quoted in Gooch, 2014: 167). No appeal, or plea for clemency, was permitted. As Cadorna noted in his circular 3,525 of 18 September 1915, ‘Discipline is the spiritual flame of duty; the most disciplined troops, not the best, win . . . . The commanding officers has the sacred duty to execute immediately the recalcitrants and the cowards.’ In March 1916 a battalion of the 3rd Bersaglieri (light infantry) had been transferred, against their wishes, to another brigade after an incident that led to five soldiers being shot and over 300 others to five years’ imprisonment. On 26 May sections of the 141st infantry division fled before an Austrian advance on Monte Cimone, and Cadorna insisted that the disgraced General Lequio use summary executions to restore order. The next morning a lieutenant, three sergeants, and eight soldiers were picked by lot and shot without trial (Gooch, 2014: 168). On 19 June, sections of the 138th regiment panicked after their commanding officer was killed; in response, the commanding officers of the 137th regiment ordered his men to machine-­gun their brothers in the 138th. On 22 June the commanding officer of the 137th was commended in the Order of the Day by Cadorna. On 1 and 2 July some troops from the 89th Infantry Regiment deserted to the Austrians, and on 3 July two soldiers from each of the four battalions involved—but who had not gone over to the enemy—were shot out of hand, even though only one had faced any kind of trial and four had been selected by lot. After a subsequent inquest by the Italian parliament, Cadorna insisted that such punitive justice was ‘exemplary and sure’ (quoted in Gooch, 2014: 169). This does not seem to have resolved the disciplinary problems: between May 1915 and November 1916, 10,222 men deserted and two-­thirds of these remained at large. Cadorna responded by ordering his commanders to draw lots for summary executions, and when 125th infantry showed unwillingness to advance on 30 October they were forced to do so at the gun points of the Carabinieri, but after the successful attack five men were still selected by lot and shot. That same day, soldiers from the 1st battalion, 75th Infantry Regiment, who were protesting about not being taken out of the line, refused to eat their rations and began throwing stones at their officers. Two soldiers were chosen by lot and shot the next day. The day after, soldiers from the 6th Bersaglieri were accidentally hit by their own mortar fire, and they threw hand grenades at their own officers in protest. Five were chosen randomly and executed on the spot. By the end of 1916, 83 summary

50  Mutiny and Leadership executions and 242 ‘regular’ executions had taken place, with 761 soldiers sentenced to death in absentia (presumably for desertion). The largest mutiny occurred on 17 July 1917 amongst the 6th Company of the 142nd regiment of the Catanzaro Brigade, after which sixteen soldiers were immediately shot. The following day 124 soldiers barricaded themselves into huts and fired upon loyal troops. Once overpowered, twelve were drawn by lot and shot. The remainder were tried the following month and sentenced to varying lengths of prison service which were usually suspended until the end of the conflict to avoid soldiers committing such crimes to avoid combat. Of course, combat is not the only cause of mutinies, and not all mutinies occurred within warring nations. The Netherlands, for example, did not participate in the First World War, even though its army of a quarter-­million (in a country of 6.5 million) was mobilized for the duration of hostilities. But that did not insulate the country from the debacle that was occurring all along its borders, and in October 1918 a mutiny broke out. The Netherlands was involved in armed conflict prior to 1914, but most of these conflicts were with indigenous forces of Dutch colonies, and the state had no offensive strategy because the military was designed only for defensive operations. Hence, when war broke out in August 1914, the Dutch mobilized for what everyone assumed to be a short war between other European belligerents. When that did not occur, the Dutch government rejected the partial demobilization enacted by Denmark and Switzerland, primarily because they feared the effects of flooding an already stagnant labour market with yet more unemployed men (Blom, 2014). Despite labour market conditions, the Dutch army hardly seems to have been a contented organization, and three minor mutinies occurred in 1915, in Utrecht, Apeldoorn, and Tilburg, bringing changes in leave, now considered a right not a privilege, and an increase in family allowances. Nevertheless, desertions increased, as did a general indiscipline, and when the Russian Revolution generated soldiers’ councils (Soviets), the Dutch military experienced a related, if weaker, response, with the Dutch councils remaining small and covert, rather than large and overt, though a newspaper—the Soldaten-­Tribune—was published that focused on revolutionary politics, rather than addressing the material concerns of the troops. Nevertheless, a few other mutinies did break out during the so-­called Red Week of October–November 1918, not­ably at the Harskamp military base in the Netherlands, which was burnt down, and later, on 13 November, in Amsterdam. But the main concern was for demobilization, not for revo­lu­tion­ary or radical political change. In the Dutch East Indies, Dutch soldiers and sailors protested against the status quo but, again, with little support and to no avail (Blom, 2014). So what is the connection between violence and mutiny? As Scheidel (2017) suggests, the only significant changes to patterns of social inequality in human history have been associated with violence of some kind, whether transformative revolutions, mass-­mobilization warfare, state collapse, or catastrophic plagues. Inequality seems to follow the production of a surplus (and a state to control it) so that, for example, hunter-­gatherer societies are much more egalitarian than settled agricultural or industrial societies. At the micro-­level at which most mutinies occur, the decision to mutiny—and if necessary use violence— seems extraordinarily risky, but this assumes that the decision is rationally taken and that the result will be beneficial and worth the risk. Indeed, it also assumes that the hierarchy can predict whether the weapons often available to mutineers will—or will not—be used against them. Yet few mutineers demand an abolition of hier­archy or demand radically

Rethinking Mutiny  51 political changes, and more often they are ‘militant’ rather than radical in this sense. The Christmas Mutiny of 1914, for instance, began with a rash of spon­tan­eous demands for a temporary ceasefire over the festive season and, although it did not garner the enthusiastic support of the senior military hierarchy on any side, the demands were self-­evidently not for the permanent cessation of hostilities nor for the replacement of political systems. Consequently, the local officers sometimes either turned a blind eye or actively participated. But it was still mutiny, and it did not recur the following Christmas, partly because the authorities were wise to the possibility and planned for it, and partly because those engaged in it had changed from the professional armies in 1914 to the British volunteers and German conscripts in 1915. In other words, for the professional soldier, informal treaties and the ‘live and let live’ system had always been part of the culture of war, but the personal bitterness that came with the change in personnel changed the meaning of the act. Thus the British mutinies in 1919 were by the volunteers and conscripts trying to get out of the army, while the Christmas 1914 mutinies were professionals trying to reassert their unofficial conventions of war. However, it is also clear that during turbulent times militancy can spark a radical turn, once it becomes apparent that change is possible and ‘permission-­giving’ generates a much wider orbit of influence than the original developments might have suggested. For ex­ample, the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’ morphed into the Indian Revolt or War of Independence as the original resistance to the armies of the East India Company turned into a general political revolt against the British. So mutiny straddles various forms of dissent, from the seeking of improved food to increases in pay to the murder of officers and the taking of the ship, and quite often mutinies start at one end of the spectrum and travel—often very rapidly—to the other end. This travel is not unlike that in an industrial dispute where something begins as a dispute about wages and ends with demands for the sacking of managers or workers’ control etc. In other words, mutinies are, by definition, rebellions against military authority, but a rebellion is not the equivalent of a revolution. As Goldstone (2014: 3–7) notes, revolts, be they by peasants or by the military, are attempts to right perceived injustices, to right local grievances, but not to overthrow the government. A revolution, however, is the forcible overthrow of a government through mass mobilization in the name of social justice to create new political institutions (Goldstone, 2014: 4). Revolutions, as such, are rare events, while revolts are more common, and oppressive circumstances that lead to fatalistic acquiescence, rather than revolt or revolution, are the lot of many. Hence a coup d’état, often through a military uprising, is rarely a revolution, because the institutions of government usually remain the same and only the elite group at the top change. In some instances it appears that a mutiny can transition into a revolution or a coup d’état. For example, on 25 April 1974, about 200 junior officers in the Portuguese Army, who had formed the MFA (Movimento das Forças Armadas), started a military coup against the Estado Novo Regime, a right-­wing dictatorship that had held power since Salazar had seized power in 1933 from the previous dictatorship (that had itself seized power in 1926 from the First Portuguese Republic). With an apparently never-­ending series of colonial wars, a deepening economic crisis, and an increasingly despotic government, the initial ‘mutiny’ by the MFA was quickly supported by a mass movement of citizens, and the ‘mutiny’—which was actually a coup, since it was intended to replace the government and not simply to right a perceived wrong—turned into a popular and relatively

52  Mutiny and Leadership peaceful revolution: the ‘Carnation Revolution’.21 But this was not a conventional mutiny against conditions or perceived injustices that could be relatively easily put right; this was a clear attempt to displace the state—a rebellion with revolutionary intent and consequences. But, irrespective of a rebellious or revolutionary stand by the mutineers, the basic requirements for a successful mutiny remain similar: the control of time and space. Time here relates to both linear and cyclical time: In linear terms, mutineers are often mobilized by their leaders in terms of either returning to a prior time, when equity of some kind prevailed, or moving the mutineers forward to a future time, where all the problems of the present are reduced or removed. In cyclical terms, time is important in the sense that the temporary ‘window of opportunity’ does not last long because the fortuitous conditions might change, and because the establishment uses the time to acquire both resources and to learn how to deal with a particular kind of mutiny. This is the third refrain of mutiny we considered earlier. The popular accounts of mutinies may circle around some alleged charismatic hero, but it’s the spatial aspects of mutiny that often matter more—how the network of human and non-­human elements is mobilized into action for or against the mutineers. It is worth situating this within the temporal context developed by Clark (2019) to consider whether the original Portuguese mutineers were trying to turn back the clock to a previous time, presumably when they thought the moral economy protected them, or forward to a radically different form of moral economy. If the leadership of revolutions and mutinies is crucial to their success, do mutinies perfectly reflect the views of the mutineers in general or just their leaders? And where mutineers are profoundly militant but not politically radical, can we assume the mutiny is closer to an industrial strike than a revolution? Correspondingly, when we have evidence of the radical political intent of the mutineers can we accept that the mutiny is an attempt to overthrow the military system, rather than re-­stabilize it, irrespective of the leadership? These all assume an unmediated relationship between the stable and coherent ideology of the mutineers, their leaders, and the intended direction of the mutiny. But there is precious little evidence for such a relationship between non-­mutinous protests or rebellions or revolutions in civil society, but rather more that supporters of political parties and movements rarely exhibit a coherent understanding of their party aims or strategy, and much more evidence that often support is rooted in loyalty to the primary group (however flimsily defined, see Tajfel, 1982; Tajfel and Turner, 1979) above everything else (Achen and Bartell, 2016). Moreover, the support of a particular development may not necessarily be carefully thought through or evaluated, but when an external threat is perceived to the group then the group loyalty is likely to increase. In effect, both mutineers and their of­fi­ cers are likely to experience greater solidarity within their own ranks and against ‘the other’, at least in the early stages of a mutiny (Jasper, 2018). As Anderson (1987) suggested, any community is built upon a ‘leap of faith’ by its members that they share an identity which exudes internal affinities and excludes external similarities: that ‘we’ are more similar to each other than any of us is to ‘them’—even though we have little basis for making this claim. For example, as we shall see later, many of the supporters of the Bolsheviks in 21  Four people were killed during initial resistance by some elements of the loyalist military, but the coup was markedly non-­violent, helped by the crowds placing carnations into the muzzles of the soldiers’ guns. Most accounts suggest that the carnations were red and, as such, symbols of the left-­wing political allegiance of the MFA, but Varela (2019: 20) suggests that the initial flowers were both red and white carnations and that there were simply more red carnations available at the time.

Rethinking Mutiny  53 the Russian Revolution were not inspired by the works of Marx or Lenin (though a minority were), but rather they recognized that the Bolsheviks’ slogans of their local leaders, and the latter’s monopolization of the red flag, represented what many of them wanted: peace, bread and the distribution of the land to the peasants who worked it. That civil war, ­hunger, and the collectivization of the land were results of the Bolshevik victory is not the issue; what matters is what mobilized their support at the time, however incoherent or inchoate. In sum, whoever controlled the red flag, the symbol of revolt, controlled the revolution (Figes and Kolonitskii, 1999).22 At Christmas in 1972, several B-­52 bomber crews refused to fly further missions over North Vietnam for a whole variety of reasons: some thought the war was immoral, ­especially the blanket bombing of civilians; others thought the casualty rate amongst the  American aircrews was too high. Between 18 and 29 December, over 900 aircraft, including 140 B-­52s, had participated in the raids, and thirty-­four B-­52s, five F 111s, and forty-­two other aircraft had been shot down. Other dissenters just thought the tactics were wrong. But whatever their motivation for the mutiny, aircrews wrecked their officers’ clubs back at their airbases during two days of rioting. One pilot was discharged for making an anti-­war statement in public, and twelve other mutineers were reprimanded (The Veteran, 7 (4): 15). Explaining mutiny, then, is both simple and complex. In simple terms, because the relationship between the soldiers, aviators and sailors and their officers is essentially one of military subordinate and superordinate, any refusal to obey a legitimate order counts as a mutiny. In that sense ‘whispering’ amongst the crew of a nineteenth-­century warship stood as a synecdoche for mutiny—any form of dissent, however innocuous to the ­dissenter, counted as a threat to the entire hierarchical system, as far as the officers were concerned. But from the time of Cromwell the British Royal Navy generally operated as a more enlightened institution than the British Army so that, for example, both merchant ships and pirate ships adopted a much more consultative governance system that the British Army.23 Given the large proportion of seamen that had some experience of the merchant fleet, to be suddenly faced with a much more authoritarian command system 22  Most cloth that has been dyed since the sixth millennia BCE has been dyed red. So common was red that Latin word for ‘red’—coloratus—was also at one point also used to mean ‘colour’ more broadly . It was associated with power by the Incas, the Ancient Egyptians, the Romans, European kings, and cardinals. The association of the colour with the devil stems from the Middle Ages, and red was also the colour of martyrs for the Catholic Church. Military generals, from the Romans to the English New Model Army, wore red, and it became associated with radical political thought through the French and Russian Revolutions, probably because it was ori­gin­ al­ly a warning to the public to beware (Pastoureau, 2017: 163–76; St Clair, 2018: 138–41). 23  It is, then, deeply ironic that the organization that displayed the most transparent manifestation of the power relationship between leaders and followers in wartime conditions was probably that of pirates. Often a more egalitarian group, pirates operated in a flatter hierarchy than conventional naval forces (military or civilian) to the extent that authority was often determined by the situation, not the rank. In battle conditions the captain’s word was God, but outside of battle the captain often worked through a more consensual approach. Even the division of spoils provides evidence of a different approach to rewards (Parker, 2012: 42; Thomin, 2018). That said, we should be wary of romanticizing pirates; as Fox (2013) suggests, the rules that pirates actually operated on were much closer to the traditional naval regulations that we perhaps would like to believe. Nevertheless, the division of prize money in Admiral Nelson’s era was significantly more unequal, with the captain securing over a third of the entire prize money while ordinary sailors who would only get one-­eighth between all of them (Grint, 2000: 238). In contrast, Ropp (2014: 948) suggests that Bartholomew Roberts’ crew represented the typ­ ical system in the early eighteenth century (the ‘Golden Age’ of piracy, when Roberts took 400 prizes between 1719 and 1722): every member of the crew had an equal vote ‘in the affairs of the moment’; losing a limb would secure $800 in compensation; and while the captain and the quarter-­master received two shares of any prizes, the master, boatswain, and gunner took one-­and-­a-­half shares, and the rest of the crew one share each.

54  Mutiny and Leadership was yet another reason to avoid being pressed or volunteering and made the handling of dissent more difficult for all sides. We should not necessarily associate mutinies with an unusual, and (to the subordinates involved) an unacceptable, set of declining material conditions (slowly increasing poverty or number of lashings or hangings, etc.). It is a common myth that revolts, revolutions, and mutinies are generated by intolerable conditions, but most of the evidence fails to link material conditions to revolts of any kind and instead relates it not just to perceived in­just­ ices but also to the possibility of securing justice. Thus revolutions tend not to occur in the poorest, most deprived, countries, because those suffering from the status quo seldom have the resources to do anything about their problem, no matter how bad it seems to be. Instead, revolts tend to occur in situations where those in revolt are not so much starving as starved of—what they perceive to be—justice and with the ability to reset the situation in their favour. Hence the French Revolution precedes the Russian Revolution by a century, even though the Russian peasants in the eighteenth century were materially far worse that their French counterparts in the nineteenth century. Moreover, while the Russian military was willing to crush peasant revolts in the eighteenth century, they were not so minded in the nineteenth century (Goldstone, 2014: 10). De Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the Revolution was never completed, and ends before it gets to the French Revolution, but he was certain that the latter was a direct but unintended consequence of the former. In effect, the moves by the monarchy to undermine and gain control over the nobility eventually led to the replacement of the monarchy itself. Moreover, Tocqueville was convinced that revolutions did not usually begin when conditions were worst but when rising expectations were not met: It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more unbearable. (‘Letter to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853’, cited in Boesche, 2006: 103)

As de Tocqueville (1856: 214) insisted: Revolutions are not always brought about by a gradual decline from bad to worse. Nations that have endured patiently and almost unconsciously the most overwhelming oppression, often burst into rebellion against the yoke the moment it begins to grow lighter. The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches us that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

This captures the problem of military demobilization well, for the promise of a return home, subsequently dashed, is a precise mirror of the mutinous precondition of rising expectations. Relative deprivation (Merton, 1938; Runciman, 1972), then, might be a better ex­plan­ ation of revolt than absolute poverty or deprivation: the notion that conditions are worse than they ought to be—relatively speaking—and that an alternative is possible. The same might be said of mutiny: it is not when conditions are at their worst that the military

Rethinking Mutiny  55 hier­archy need fear their own sailors or troops, but when the latter’s perception of ­conditions implies some breaking of the social contract and a recognition that something can, and should, be done about it. That, in itself, often requires an ideological shift on the part of the mutineers, and, as we shall see, there are indeed patterns of mutinies that ripple out from some (but by no means all) radical ideologies. For example, one of the causes of the 1797 naval mutinies in the British Royal Navy was the perceived injustice of the pay system that had seen the British Army receive a pay rise but not the navy. But relative de­priv­ation can also explain the dashing of expectations, especially if coloured by perceptions of deceit. Thus the 1794 mutiny on HMS Culloden ended when the crew accepted Captain Pakenham’s promise of clemency, but, when that was ignored by the Admiralty, the trust in the Admiralty generally collapsed. and that played an important role in the 1797 mutinies. So beyond the concern for absolute or relative deprivation, can we conclude with a list of conditions that might generate a mutiny? There are none if we accept Pratt’s (1932: 531, quoted in Rose, 1982: 565) claim that ‘there is no such thing as a typical mutiny’. Similarly, Till (2003) argued: ‘Mutinies have such a wide variety of causes and aspirations that it is dangerous and usually simplistic to seek general causes, but there are common elements.’ Bell and Elleman (2003: 266) suggest a typology of naval mutinies that moves from ‘naval mutinies’ to ‘political mutinies’ to ‘secession mutinies’. Naval mutinies are relatively mundane in cause and consequence and are the equivalent of an industrial dispute. Political mutinies are aimed at political rather than naval authorities and seek demands that are beyond the authority of the naval authorities, though they are not revolutionary in nature. Secession mutinies involve the seizure of power, either of a ship or government. Coats and MacDougall (2011: 11–12) have a rather longer list of conditions and causes, with the latter embodying failed logistics; an imbalance of discipline; incompetent leadership; pay arrears or a pay cut; unfair distribution of prize money; unseaworthy ships; unreasonable cruelty; unacceptable food; and abnormal disrespect. If we borrow from the literature on revolution it is plausible to suggest that there are five preconditions (none of which determine a revolution, though a revolution is unlikely in their collective absence). These include a fiscal constraint that inhibits the ability of the state to either collect sufficient tax or, in the case of a mutiny, pay its soldiers or provide them with sufficient food. Second, and this is less apparent in mutinies, is a division within the ruling elite. Third is collective anger at perceived injustice. In a mutiny this may take many forms—for example, that a particular unit has been required to do more of the fighting than a neighbouring unit, but more often than not the injustice relates not to fighting but to the end of fighting—that is, a desire to either be demobilized as soon as possible or just to stop fighting. This is especially apparent in the twentieth century, when armies were comprised of conscripted troops rather than the more usual volunteers, and explains some aspects of the British mutinies in 1919. Fourth is a shared narrative, often ideological in flavour, which explains the causes of the injustice and a way to right the wrong. This became very apparent in the mutinies in Russia in 1917 and Germany the following year. Fifth is external support that disrupts the hierarchy’s response to the revolt. But, as Goldstone (2014: 16–21) concludes, a coalescing of all five aspects is both unusual and often only apparent in retrospect. We can add to this revolutionary preconditioning, similar explanations of strikes that might mirror some of the concerns of mutinous soldiers rather than revolutionary

56  Mutiny and Leadership citizens (Grint, 2006: 152–89). First is that a breakdown in the consensus generates a level of disorganization: what Durkheim called anomie, a moral disequilibrium. Second is a frustration model which suggests that some strikes are ostensibly about wages and conditions but might actually embody much deeper antipathies that cannot be addressed through conventional industrial action. In other words, the perceived arbitrariness or injustices of management cannot be resolved by a strike—but at least some material reward can be wrung from them by a strike. This might prove particularly important for mutinies where soldiers’ or sailors’ discontent is resolved through pay increases or better conditions only because a righting of the actual injustice that caused the discontent cannot be achieved without a much more radical revolt that threatens the hierarchy itself. However, there are many occasions where fiscal constraints, perceived injustices, shared narratives, frustrations, and disequilibrium do not generate strikes, and their equivalent in military situations do not lead to mutinies. As Rose (1982: 567) puts it very concisely: ‘Discontent alone does not make a mutiny. Discontent is a mode of thought, mutiny a mode of action, and some kind of catalyst is necessary to convert the one to the other.’ Brice (2015b: 107–8) suggests that mutinies usually follow four phases: (1) ‘strain’—continuous campaigning, for example; (2) ‘generalized belief ’ in the cause of the strain; (3)—that belief then leading to an actual mutiny—the ‘trigger’; and (4) ‘mobilization’. That mobilizing catalyst, which shall be apparent in the case studies which follow, and which also forms the centre of the final chapter, is leadership. For Brice the fifth and final phase is restoration of control by the authorities, but that relates to the Roman context, and, as we shall see, sometime there is no final phase because the mutiny leads to revolution and the ­displacement of the authorities.

Conclusion This chapter has examined some of the major theories, concepts, and explanations for mutiny as a precursor of what is to follow. A revolt in a school is not a mutiny, a strike in a factory is not a mutiny, but overt dissent on a ship of any kind—providing more than one person is involved—is a mutiny. A revolt within an army is a mutiny, but a revolt against a civilian political order is not: that would be a revolt, a rebellion or a revolution. Often, though, as we shall see, the authorities label mutinies as ‘strikes’ or ‘incidents’, but this is merely to obscure the seriousness of the dissent and persuade themselves that, unlike every other military force in the world, their military is supremely loyal and incapable of mutiny. Many traditional accounts of mutiny suggest it is an aberrant phenomena in an otherwise harmonious and stable situation, often explained by one of two causes: (1) the contagion of a revolutionary ideology or ‘fake news’ imported from outside and reheated by internal malcontents to mislead the otherwise contented masses; or (2) the unfortunate decline in material conditions brought on by war and thus beyond the direct control of the establishment. I suggest here that neither of these two accounts offers a viable explanation for most of the mutinies considered. Instead I suggest that mutiny is often a consequence of a perceived collapse in the moral economy—the delegitimizing of the social contract between subordinate and superordinate; the associated relative decline in conditions; and the presence of individuals or small cadre of informal leaders who explain the cause of the discontent, and provide a solution to it, that seems beyond the capabilities or interests of

Rethinking Mutiny  57 the establishment. Mutinies only occur in the face of sovereign power because the ideologies that undergird the establishment simultaneously delegitimize any form of dissent by the subordinates. But since the agonist nature of organizations generates quotidian dissent, it becomes self-­evident that antagonism is the likely consequence of suppressed resistance in military or naval organizations. That antagonism, in turn, is likely to lead to mutiny, rather than mere grumbles of discontent, if there are sufficient informal leaders that can channel the discontent into organized protests that explain the problem and generate a solution to and for the subordinates. We do not need to worry about whether a mutiny is ‘really’ a strike or a mutiny is ‘really’ a revolution because both these forms of development and explanation are elements of the malleable initial conditions that may lead to all kinds of outcomes, depending on the understanding and action of the various parties involved. In sum, what counts as a legitimate protest or a legitimate response to that protest lies not in any court of objective truth but in the perceptions of the main actors. Order and disorder in situations of military dissent are negotiated; sometimes that negotiation leads to universal improvements, and sometimes it leads to mass executions. In every case, the result remains undetermined by the conditions and relatively unpredictable in its outcome, but mutinies act as mirrors to the society from which they emanate: they are symbols of discontent, and how that discontent is dealt with is indicative of the cultural context. Mutinies are barometers of the state of the moral economy.

2

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times Spithead and the Nore, 1797 The Spithead Mutiny On 16 September 1793, four years before the ‘Great Mutiny’ at Spithead, as it became known, dissent smouldered amongst the crew of HMS Winchelsea, an English Navy 32-­gun frigate. They sent a petition to Admiral Sir Peter Parker, Commander in Chief of the British fleet at the Spithead anchorage, demanding the removal of their captain, for ‘he will use us in a More Crewel Manner than ever he did . . . we are determined never to go to Sea under Capt. Fisher’s command. French Prison will be more agreeable to us or Death . . . we all Remain With our Duty to our King’ (quoted in Neale,  1985: 5). The following day, forty-­four of the crew refused to go on deck and barricaded themselves into the forward gun bay until threatened by Fisher with a pistol. Three weeks later, on 7 October, two ­sailors were court-­martialled for ‘being concerned in the said mutiny, that being present, they did not use their utmost Endeavour to supress the same’; William Price received 131 lashes and Duggan 141, and they were ‘flogged around the fleet’.1 Captain Fisher, having asked for the removal of seventy-­five of his crew (one-­third), was himself removed by Parker, along with sixteen of his officers (Neale, 1985: 7). Spithead lay between Portsmouth (the largest industrial site in the world at the time) and the Isle of Wight, and it was also the largest anchorage for the Royal Navy; it was three miles wide and twenty miles long and could contain hundreds of ships if necessary. During the period of the Spithead mutiny there were eighty ships (a sixth of the total British fleet) at Spithead, with a combined crew of 30,000 (a quarter of the total), and this fleet was primarily responsible for securing the Channel and blockading the French ports in the on­going wars with France (Coats, 2011a: 31). If ever there was a time of discontent in the Royal Navy it was, ironically, during the time when Nelson was feted in the press. During the period of the Franco-­British wars (1793–1815), over a thousand mutinies occurred in the British Fleet (Grint, 2000: 73) as the size of the Naval personnel mushroomed from 16,613 in 1792 to 123,041 in 1797 (Coats, 2011a: 30). In fact the size, like the costs of the British state, rose and fell in line with wars (Mann,  1986), so that in 1746 the navy had 49,000 crew, but this reduced as peace returned. At the time of the Spithead mutiny, few people in Britain would have worked in factories of any size, let alone the 500–750 crew in the largest British warships. Indeed, as late as 1851 the average size of an industrial unit in Britain was 8.5 employees (Grint and Nixon, 2015: 46). As Frykman (2009: 76) puts it: ‘new recruits suddenly found themselves in a miniature mass society, physically isolated for long periods of time, with 1  Flogging around the Fleet involved dividing the number of lashes between the number of ships present and flogging the guilty seamen in full view of each ship’s company.

Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0003

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  59 extraordinary levels of internal stratification, 24-­hour work cycles, constant, close s­ urveillance, and a terroristic justice system. This regime shock-­proletarianized tens of thousands.’ The crew of a warship was usually divided into two watches and they alternated on four-­hour shifts with much of the time spent ‘holy-­stoning’ (cleaning) the deck—not because the deck was filthy but because, apart from training with the guns, there was nothing else for most of the crew to do, and it became a tradition to keep people per­man­ent­ly busy, lest they should engage in more dangerous activities, like thinking. And col­lect­ive thinking was best achieved in some form of public space, between the state and the private sphere, that had become the locus of developments such as coffee houses and newspapers or, in this case, below decks of naval warships (Favret, 1994). Much of the discontent in the British navy was laid at the door of revolutionary France, but the French Navy was not immune from mutiny: until the Committee of Public Safety reimposed order in 1793, French seamen basically ruled themselves through councils and regularly refused to go to sea while wage demands were left unmet and unpopular officers remained on board. Even the 1790 code pénal maritime (articles of war), which sought to standardize regulations and punishment and replace the previously arbitrary nature of both, was rejected by the crews. Further afield, the crew of the French ship the Léopard mutinied and joined the rebels in Saint-­Domingue, took on board mutinous soldiers, and sailed back to Brest where they were heralded as heroes of the Revolution. And when the port of Toulon mutinied against the French Revolutionary Government and allowed Nelson’s British Fleet into the harbour in support of the French Royalists, the French Atlantic Fleet mutinied in Quiberon Bay, demanding they be allowed to return to Toulon to root out the Royalists. They were too late: Napoleon had already done it (Frykman, 2009: 86–7). Nor was the Revolutionary Government about to allow the mutineers to determine state strategy: Jean-­Bon Saint-­André, the chair of the National Convention and leading Jacobin, had previously been a naval captain and successfully reorganized the French Navy, stripping out the aristocratic privileges of the officers, turning it into a meritocracy and greatly enhancing the size of the fleet. He started by doing what he thought necessary: instilling discipline back into the lower deck—and that began with the building of a floating guillotine which was used to execute four of the leading mutineers from the Quiberon Bay mutiny (Frykman, 2009: 86–7). The year 1797 was the most important year of dissent in Britain, and over 100 Royal Navy ships in five different anchorages around England were engulfed in a maelstrom that some in the Admiralty, and the government of the day, considered to be the thin edge of a revolutionary wedge. Two mutinies in particular gripped the country: Spithead and Nore (an anchorage off Sheerness), which one naval officer called ‘the most awful crisis this kingdom ever saw’ (quoted in Gilmour, 1993: 416), though the French had briefly landed at Fishguard on 22 February that year as part of a (failed) attempt to draw British troops away from Ireland (the main focus of the plan). In fact, the two mutinies were only weeks apart in terms of timing, and the concerns were almost identical, but the Spithead mutiny resulted in the removal of unpopular officers and a pay rise for the sailors; the consequences of the Nore mutiny were terminal for twenty-­nine of its participants, after 400 had been court-­martialled. In the Royal Navy, in theory, a captain could not order more than twelve lashes—the Danish equivalent was twenty-­seven (Frykman,  2009: 81)—but, as Admiral Duncan explained, ‘every captain has taken upon him to establish rules for himself ’. The French

60  Mutiny and Leadership Navy abolished corporal punishment after the Revolution, and they began calling British sailors ‘tigers’, not because of their ferocity but because their backs were scarred from innumerable lashings (Poulsen, 1984: 132). As John Daley from HMS Thames said, ‘it was a pity we were not like the French, to have no flogging at all’ (quoted in Frykman, 2010: 173). Yet a well-­run ship would not expect to see floggings every day—far from it. On board HMS Minerve, for instance, between August 1796 and February 1802 there were fifteen punishments for insolence or contempt and fourteen for mutiny—so twenty-­nine floggings in sixty-­seven months, or one every two months, though a disproportionate number of these occurred during the same time frame that encompassed the Spithead and Nore mutinies (Morriss, 2011: 117). Beyond the formal punishment system inflicted by the captain, an informal system executed by petty and warrant officers operated to maintain discipline, or at least authority, but even these were being challenged after the mu­tin­ ies of 1797, especially ‘starting’ with a rope’s end. It was not as if the British Admiralty were unaware of the pay problem—there had not been a pay rise in the navy for almost 150 years, since 1653—in the time of Cromwell’s Republic—though it was common for the pay of merchant sailors to double during times of war (Dixon,  1981: 18). In December 1796, Captain Thomas Pakenham, on behalf of other captains, suggested a pay rise was in order for all able seamen to 30 shillings a month, but George Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty and political head of the Royal Navy, rejected it (Coats,  2011a: 23).2 Underpaid, over-­coerced, and diverse, sailors saw a sevenfold increase in the size of the Royal Navy over the period of the French Wars, and some of the recent recruits were immediately under suspicion, often because they were lower-­deck ‘lawyers’—that is literate. As Admiral Sir Thomas Troubridge fretted, ‘Whenever I see a fellow look as if he was thinking I say that’s mutiny’ (quoted in Gilmour,  1993: 417). The year before, Troubridge had narrowly escaped court-­martial himself for losing HMS Culloden to the French (it had been recaptured within a fortnight), and he was released from captivity when the French ship, the Sans Pareil, was itself captured during the Battle of the Glorious First of June. But within six months the Culloden, then back under his control, mutinied at Spithead and—despite promises given to the mutineers—five of them were hanged on 13 January 1795 on the ship. Some of those hanged may well have been of Irish extraction because it had become a (short-­sighted) policy in Ireland to sentence Irish rebels to service in the Royal Navy rather than imprison them. But it’s understandable that Troubridge was so worried: by the time of the mutinies about 10 per cent of the Royal Navy crews were of Irish extraction and the works of Thomas Paine and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau had begun to affect the language of complaints (Grint, 2000: 77). As a letter found on HMS Repulse put it: ‘Liberty—This invaluable priviledge (sic) more particularly inherent to an Englishman—the pride and Boast of a Briton, the natural rights of all have always been denied to us—to us who they allow to be the Bulwark and Glory of Britain’ (quoted in MacDougall, 2011b: 261). The Admiralty knew that problems were likely: the crews of both HMS Weazle and HMS Naussau had delivered letters demanding an improvement in conditions to prevent a mutiny, but Spencer did nothing about it, even after Captain Pakenham told Spencer that, in the light of the pay increase to the army two years previously, the officers (and thus

2  Charles Spencer, is the 9th Earl of the line, and brother of Lady Diana Spencer, one-­time Princess of Wales.

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  61 the crews) would be doing the same. Spencer (whose godfather was King George II and who was one of the richest men in the country)3 responded to the demand saying it was ‘an utter impossibility . . . and absolute impracticality’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 26). Given that the annual salary of adult sailors varied between £10 and £14 and the prize money secured by Vice-­Admiral Sir George Pocock at Havana was £122,000 (almost enough to pay for a quarter of the entire navy’s wage increase wrung out of the Admiralty by the mutineers in 1797) we can be sure that money was not really that much of a problem, if the political will was there. Worse, within weeks of the navy securing the ­bitterly won pay increase, the government provided the army with another pay increase in their collective concern that the army would attack London if it was not granted (Coats, 2011a: 33). Admiral Howe, then about to retire from the admiralty, received eleven petitions4 from the ships5 at Spithead in February 1797, each demanding better pay and conditions and threatening mutiny, and he delivered them to Spencer. The First Lord of the Admiralty then told the Admiralty at a meeting on 22 March that nothing would be done, even though Prime Minister Pitt had just introduced income tax for the first time that would raise £10 million. Pitt had himself suggested that the amount necessary to pay the sailors an equivalent pay rise to that secured by the army before ‘is comparatively of no consequence’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 26).6 On 30 March the fleet returned to Spithead from their blockade of Brest to discover that nothing had been done about their complaints, and a twelfth petition arrived on the desk of Sir Peter Parker, Port Admiral at Portsmouth, this time signed by two ‘delegates’7 from each of the sixteen warships at Spithead, and threatening to ‘refuse duty’ if their demands were not met. But none of the petitions were shown to Admiral Hood, 1st Viscount Bridport and commander of the Channel Fleet, because the Commander-­in-­Chief, Admiral Howe, had a personal problem with Bridport, so Howe gave the petitions to Rear Admiral Seymour, who dismissed them as ‘the work of an incendiary’ (quoted in Coats, 2011a: 23). Indeed, Howe and Seymour seemed more concerned to establish the presence of a ­conspiracy rather than establish whether the concerns of the mutineers were legitimate (Orth, 2011: 98–106). On 13 April, Captain Charles Patton, the transport officer at Portsmouth, signalled to the admiralty: ‘Mutiny brewing at Spithead’, and the following day Vice-­Admiral Parker told the Admiralty that the crews would refuse to work on 18 April. On 15 April ‘Delegates’ from each ship rowed across to HMS Queen Charlotte where the mutiny was planned. The notes of the meeting suggested that the crews needed to get their petition direct to the government, rather than the Admiralty, and that the first signal would be the hoisting of the Union Jack aboard the Charlotte, followed by two guns. At that point, all officers and 3  George Spencer’s library—alone—was sold for £210,000 in 1892. See www.library.manchester.ac.uk/firstimpressions/Pioneers-­of-­Print/George-­John,-­2nd-­Earl-­Spencer/. 4  It had been common practice to send complaints to officers via a collective petition since 1654 in the British navy (Coats, 2011a: 23). 5  Queen Charlotte, Royal George, Formidable, Ramillies, Minotaur, Audacious, Juste, Sans Pareil, Triumph, and Bellepheron. 6  By this time the Royal Navy’s debt had risen to £12 million. 7  Howe suggested that the term ‘Delegate’ proved the French and American revolutionary connections, but the term had first been used by the New Model Army delegates in the 1640s, and the London Corresponding Society had also adopted the term (Coats, 2011c: 126).

62  Mutiny and Leadership women were to be sent ashore. The second signal, a red flag8 at the mizzen topmast head, and two guns, again on the Charlotte, signalled the beginning of the action. That same day Bridport was, at last, informed of the impending mutiny and the previous petitions, and reported to Spencer that the fleet—in the circumstances—was unable to go to sea. Spencer then ordered Admiral Gardiner, second in command of the Channel Fleet and in command of the squadron of ships at St Helen’s anchorage just to the south of Spithead, to sail north to Spithead, but Gardiner’s own crew on HMS Royal Sovereign refused. The action forced the crew of the Charlotte to bring forward the mutiny, and they requested all crews to send two Delegates to attend a General Assembly of the Squadron under the leadership of Valentine Joyce, a quartermaster’s mate from the Royal George. Joyce had— according to the Admiralty—previously been imprisoned for sedition and was allegedly a member of the United Irishmen (Neale, 1985: 166–7), but he was actually born in Jersey around 1769 and brought up in a military family in Portsmouth. Furthermore, he had already served seventeen years in the navy (Coats, 2011b: 58). Indeed, about 15 per cent of the crews at Spithead were Irish, but, despite the assumptions of the government, there is little overt evidence that the presence of United Irishmen was the cause of the mutiny nor that these were revolutionaries. Yet it seems unlikely that the 15,000 Irish prisoners that were drafted into the Royal Navy, most for political ‘crimes’, would have had no influence upon the proceedings. Indeed Admiral Duncan was certain of it, writing to Lord Spencer that ‘Quota men have been at the bottom of all this’ (quoted in Maybee, 2007: 136). The leaders of the mutiny were radical in that they practised democratic principles in a country where democracy was rhetorically present but materially absent (about 3 per cent of the population had the vote in 1780, all of them were men9), but they seemed to have no overt intention of overthrowing the undemocratic government which accused them of being revolutionaries (Coats, 2011b: 41). They were also overwhelmingly from the British maritime counties where industrial action by merchant sailors was commonplace. The 33 Delegates10 included thirteen Able Seamen (2 or more years experience), five midshipmen (most junior-­ranking officer), six quartermasters (helmsmen), a quartermaster’s mate, two quarter gunners,11 a gunner’s mate, a yeoman of the powder-­room, and four yeomen of the sheets, but no ordinary seamen. Most were English but some were Irish or Scottish and one was American.12 In short, they were professional sailors, and even their officers admitted they were ‘the good and leading men’ and ‘the best behaved and reliable’ of the sailors (quoted in Temple Patterson, 1968: 7). It should also be noted that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were periods of unprecedented growth in many European navies in response to the French Revolution, the persistence of war, and the quest for colonies, so the presence of non-­nationals in navies was very common. Many of the crews had been together for two years or more and, as Coats (2011b: 39) concludes, ‘They were experienced and professional seamen who knew and trusted each 8  The red flag was a common symbol of danger and warning, rather than necessarily associated with revolutionary politics. See St Clair (2016) for a history of the colour red. 9  See www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/citizenship/ . . . democracy/getting_vote.htm, accessed 19 June 2019. 10 HMS London had three Delegates, as one was only temporary. 11  A quarter gunner was subordinate to a gunner and looked after four guns. 12 Such multinationalism was typical of many military forces at the time. During the Seven Years War (1756–63) the British Army in America comprised 30 per cent English and Welsh, 27 per cent Scottish, 27 per cent Irish, 4 per cent Europeans, and 6 per cent Americans. In effect, an Irish male was twice as likely, and a Scottish male five times as likely, to serve in the British army as was an English or Welsh male (Way, 2014: 9–10).

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  63 other.’ Indeed, the delegates even banned ‘private liquor’ to try and keep discipline during the mutiny. To that effect, they agreed a set of procedures for the duration of the mutiny, including: keeping the watch (and punishment for those that failed); respect for officers; an oath to themselves and the fleet; no individual liberty from the ships; and no movement of the ships (Coats, 2011a: 24). So keen were the mutineers to reinforce discipline that ropes were hung from the yardarms, a reflection of the method of execution on board, to remind the crew that success—and the avoidance of capital punishment that would follow if they failed—depended on their self-­discipline (Holdstock, 2006: 6). On Sunday 16 April the fleet refused to sail and the 32 Delegates then camped out in the Admiral’s cabin on the Charlotte, agreed their own rules, and gave the Admiralty two days to reply to their genuflecting petition: ‘we beg leave to remind your August assembly’, it started; and it ended in similar style, noting that they were ‘loyal to our Sovering (sic) and Zealous In the Defence of our Countrary’ (sic) (quoted in Coats, 2011b: 51). While their initial petitions had just requested a pay rise, this one added six other demands: 1. that their pay should be increased (from 9¾d to one shilling [12d] a day); 2. that their provisions should improve and be raised to 16 ounces to the pound (this was to prevent corrupt officers and bursars from short changing them with ‘14 ounce pounds’ and selling on the excess); 3. that while in British ports they should be served vegetables and meat but not flour; 4. that sick sailors should be better looked after on board and their supplies not embezzled; 5. that leave should be granted when possible in harbour, recognizing that there are limits to this; 6. that a man wounded in action should continue to receive his pay until cured or discharged 7. grievances from individual ships must be addressed. (Pope, 1998: 123–4) The last demand demonstrates the importance of focusing upon the individual ships and the relationships therein, rather than just assuming that all ships were affected by the same issues. For instance, the crew of HMS Marlborough demanded the removal of their commander, Captain Nicholls, because he hit marines and mates and even flogged a sick man who could hardly walk. And, as Morriss (2011) notes, there were often ships in ­identical positions that had either very good or very poor disciplinary records, usually associated with officers perceived as good or bad by their respective crews. The request was polite, and though the Delegates insisted that officers were to be obeyed, that did not include orders to set sail. Moreover, only a statement in law about their demands would satisfy them, in addition to an act of parliament to secure their pay and a royal pardon. As the Delegates told Charles Fox, MP (leader of the official op­pos­ ition, supporter of the French and American Revolutions, and anti-­slavery campaigner), ‘we are not actuated by any spirit of sedition or disaffection whatsoever; on the contrary, it is indigence and extreme penury alone that is the cause of our complaint’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 45). But it is also worth reiterating that the process by which the mutiny was organized—democratically elected delegates—was both radical and, for the establishment, a dangerous refraction of the egalitarianism across the channel in revolutionary France.

64  Mutiny and Leadership It was also important for the mutineers to gain the support of the nation, and they attempted this by publishing an ‘Address to the Nation’ which set out their demands and their rationale for the mutiny, which explicitly noted their loyalty to the King. The ­ad­mir­al­ty insisted that the points would be considered, once the fleet had sailed, but the mu­tin­eers were adamant that nothing was going to move until their demands were met. Admirals Gardner, Colpoys, and Pole then tried to persuade the Queen Charlotte to accept a different offer—and when the Admirals then signalled to the rest of the fleet that the Queen Charlotte had accepted it, the Royal George hoisted the red flag (or the ‘bloody flag’ as many mutineers referred to it) that served as a warning to the rest of the fleet that something was amiss. That prompted the Delegates to be rowed over to the Queen Charlotte, and they were piped on board as if they were officers. As they then wrote, ‘We smile at the Simplicity of our Officers In attempting to divide us. We know the consequence of our oath and value it Equal to our lives’ (quoted in Coats, 2011b: 53). The London also threatened to sink any ship that departed from their collective resolve. On 18 April Earl Spencer arrived in Portsmouth, with his Admiralty Commissioners, and offered the crews a 15 percent pay increase—between 2 and 4 shillings a month—but nothing else. Predictably the Delegates rejected his offer the following day, and their pay demands went up to an extra shilling a day for every able-­bodied seaman, an increase in pensions, and the same pay for marines, whether at sea or on land, plus a general indemnity for all involved. Otherwise—and unless the French Fleet was actually sighted—they would not be going anywhere, except to Portsmouth to offload over 100 officers that were deemed tyrannical and/or unjust. Despite the frustrations, discipline amongst the mutineers was maintained, to the extent that a tour of the fleet by Prince Württemberg,13 accompanied by Spencer, was cheered by the mutineers, and even the London Chronicle noted that ‘the seamen conducted themselves throughout the whole business with a sobriety, steadiness, unanimity and determin­ation, that would do honour to a better cause’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 62), though the Times regarded the leaders as ‘known traitors’ (quoted in Coats, 2011a: 25). Indeed, a magistrate sent to Spithead to determine ‘the real cause’, reported that: ‘I am persuaded with the conversation I have had with so many of the s­ ailors that if any man on earth had dared openly to avow his intention of using them as instruments to distress the country, his life would have paid forfeit. Nothing like want of loyalty to the King or attachment to the government can be traced in the business’ (quoted in Pope, 1963: 126). The Admiralty, however, immediately ordered Bridport to arrest the ringleaders and put to sea so that the mutiny could be quelled—but when he responded that the fleet would not go anywhere, the Admiralty weakened and accepted that a pay rise would be awarded, but nothing else, and the pay rise would only be awarded if the fleet sailed immediately. Just as the mutineers appeared to accept the offer, Admiral Gardner turned up and warned all the Delegates (bar four that were missing) and his own crew that failure to accept now would lead to them all being brought ‘to condign punishment and suffer the utmost vengeance of the law’. As Gardner wrote to Bridport: I gave the necessary orders this morning to prepare the Ship for sea, and to hoist the launch in, which orders the Ship’s Company have absolutely refused to obey, and to a man 13  Current British Prime Minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a distant relation of an illegitimate child of Prince Württemberg.

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  65 they have declared, that it is their determined resolution and the resolution of the Seamen and Marines, of the whole of your Lordship’s Fleet, not to proceed to sea until such times as their grievances are redressed and the prayer of their petition attended to. When the ship’s company were all upon deck, and standing around me I made use of every argument in my power to convince them of the impropriety of their conduct, and stated to them in the strongest manner I was able, the disgrace and mischiefs they were about to bring upon themselves and their Country, and the encouragement which this very extraordinary and unexpected conduct would give to the Enemy, and I am sorry to say, my admonition and friendly advice was rejected in a manner which has hurt my feelings exceedingly.  (quoted in London, 2011: 65)

Joyce, and the other three missing Delegates, then returned from a meeting on land and insisted that the offer was unacceptable without ratification from Parliament and a direct pardon from the King; ‘Remember the Culloden!’ Joyce apparently shouted, reminding the Delegates that five mutineers had been hanged by Captain Troubridge with the support of Colpoys and Bridport, despite the promise to pardon them that led to their surrendering the ship back to the officers. That settled the issue, and the Delegates rejected the Admiralty’s offer, causing Admiral Gardner to seize one of the Delegates and to call him ‘a damned mutinous blackguard set that deserves hanging . . . Skulking cowards . . . I’ll hang you and every fifth sailor in the fleet!’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 62). The response of the mutineers was, first, not to comply and, second to publicly blame Admiral Gardner for his ‘endeavours to sow division in the fleet and in fact to separate our interest’ and to restate their original demands and to issue a threat: ‘We beg leave to remind your Lordships, that is a firm resolution, that until an Act of Parliament is passed and His Majesty’s gracious Pardon is granted, the Fleet will not lift an Anchor. This is our total and final answer’ (quoted in London, 2011: 65–6). They then replaced Bridport’s personal flag on the Royal George with a red flag, prepared the guns for firing, and moved the most westerly ships of the fleet further east so that they could not be fired on from the batteries in Southsea Castle and Fort Monckton.14 Spencer’s equally predictable response to that was to send 10,000 troops to Portsmouth and order those same shore batteries to prepare to fire on the fleet. While this was going on, another mutiny broke out in Plymouth, and that squadron sailed to join the Spithead mutineers. This sudden transition from a wage problem to an incendiary political situation is, as we shall see later, not unusual in mutinies and belies the attempt to label mutinies as industrial or political, militant or radical, because what starts as the former can easily transition to the latter if the response of the authorities is ill-­judged, as this one was. Spencer, despite his bluster, seems to have recognized his weak bargaining position and on 22 April went to Windsor to secure a royal pardon, along with a promise to address the issues pertaining to particular officers and, of course, the initial pay rise. The Delegates responded cautiously to hearing the pardon read out on 23 April, demanding to see the pardon in person and evidence of the King’s personal seal upon the letter. While they waited for this to arrive, it became apparent that a letter, dated 1 May, had been sent to all officers from the Admiralty demanding that the officers were to be ‘particularly attentive 14  The ships could have docked in Portsmouth, but the navy knew that having the fleet at the Spithead anchorage, a couple of miles south of Portsmouth in the Solent, would inhibit desertion.

66  Mutiny and Leadership to the conduct of the men under their command, and that they be ready, on the first appearance of Mutiny, to use the most vigorous means to suppress it and to bring the ­ring-­leaders to punishment’ (quoted in Temple Patterson, 1968: 10). On 3 May Parliament agreed to an increase of £370,000 in the naval wage bill but only after Howe had warned Parliament that it must not seem that they would not honour their promises to the ­seamen. The Duke of Clarence (Prince William and the future William IV) promptly responded that it seemed to him ‘with a view to the fundamental rules of discipline, to be improper to have complied with the demands of the seamen’ (quoted in London, 2011: 68). Those comments, reported in the newspapers and read by the mutineers, did not herald a ­positive response by the seamen to Bridport’s order to sail with the fleet to France to ­intercept a French fleet (the information about this alleged French fleet was false). However, the wind prevented that, and anyway the royal pardon had still not arrived, but what had was information suggesting that all the other demands (fresh meat, vegetables not flour, the removal of unpopular officers) were to be denied. On 6 May the wind changed and Bridport again ordered a squadron of four ships, including the Defence, to set sail, with a note from Spencer saying that he ‘was truly happy to find that at length tranquillity and order seem to be perfectly established in your squadron’ (quoted in Temple Patterson, 1968: 10–11). On 7 May three of the ships refused and, when the Defence appeared ready to weigh anchor, the other three trained their guns on it as the Delegates rowed across to Rear-­Admiral Colpoys’s ship, the London, to discuss the issue. At this point, and in response to the letter of 1 May from the Admiralty (written when the Admiralty assumed the mutiny was over), Colpoys’s called the crew on deck and asked if they had any grievances. When no one responded he sent them below deck, ordering his officers to load the four main deck guns with cannister shot as they descended, then ordered Lt Bover to fire at them with his pistols or be shot himself. Bover complied, wounding two of the crew. The Delegates then arrived, and Colpoys warned them that if they tried to board and hold a convention he would have the marines fire on them. The crew then forced their way into the gunner’s storeroom, took muskets and pistols, and exchanged fire with the officers, after which the latter surrendered. The now victorious crew subsequently demanded the removal of Admiral Colpoys and Captain Griffith of the Marines, who was involved in the shooting dead of three seamen (Orth, 2011: 103). Alternative versions of what happened exist. In the conservative Morning Post version it was one of the delegates who fired first; the Whig paper, the Star, suggested it was Lt Peter Bover who fired at the Delegates, and Colpoys tried to save him by suggesting that it was the heroic Admiral who gave the order to Bover. Indeed it was Colpoys that had ordered Bover to fire first, causing his own crew to storm the hatches which, in turn, led Colpoys’s own marines to throw down their weapons and join the crew. In the resulting battle three sailors, one officer, and one mid-­shipman were killed with several more injured, including one of the delegates now on board. The crew, now in control of the ship, and with Colpoys and his officers imprisoned, then tried to lynch Lt Bover, but he was saved by the intervention of a ‘common seaman’, almost certainly the Delegate John Fleming, aided by another, probably Valentine Joyce. Colpoys later wrote to Vice Admiral Martin and recounted Fleming’s speech to the crew: I am but a single individual among you, and before this hand of mine shall subscribe the name of Fleming to anything that may in the least tend to that gentleman’s (Lt Bover)

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  67 prejudice, much more his life, I will undergo the utmost violence and meet death with him, hand in hand. I am nevertheless, as unanimous as any member in the fleet for a redress of your grievances, and maintain that point with you all, so long as you are contented with your original demands, but the moment I hear of your deviating from these principles, that moment I become your most inveterate enemy.   (quoted in London, 2011: 77)

The Delegates debated whether to hang Colpoys or court-­martial him or send him ashore for civil trial; they chose the latter and, of course, Colpoys was never tried. Nonetheless, Parliament was stung into action, though Richard Sheridan, the playwright, complained that ‘some foul means unknown’ must explain the mutineers’ cowardice in the face of the enemy and in sharp contrast to the heroism of Admiral Colpoys (London, 2011: 73–4). Indeed, it is clear that the French Revolution and the Irish discontent did affect the course of the mutiny—but it was the authorities that saw revolution is every act of dissent, not the mutineers (London, 2011: 78). Despite that, Parliament passed the necessary legislation and the mutiny was over. The next day the London Oracle newspaper published ‘The Seamen’s Manifesto’, ­giving a version of events that explicitly contradicted official accounts and defending their actions against the right-­wing press and almost every member of parliament. Buoyed up by their apparent success, the mutineers also demanded a military procession through Portsmouth to honour their dead, while the Admiralty ordered the land ­batteries to prepare to fire on the fleet. As the stand-­off continued, the mayor of the city, Sir John Carter, negotiated a compromise route for the funeral parade while the mutinous fleet weighed anchor and moved from Spithead to St Helens, out of range of the land batteries. Finally, on 10 May, the Parliamentary Bill received royal assent, the Admiralty replaced Spencer with Howe (long regarded as a friend of the sailors) who visited the fleet, and, on board the Royal George with the Delegates, Howe personally agreed to the removal of additional unpopular officers. At precisely this moment, eight ships from the mutinous Plymouth squadron arrived, flying red flags and demanding the removal of sixty-­five of their own unpopular officers, in addition to over 100 officers from the Spithead Fleet (including twenty-­five midshipman as well as seven surgeons or surgeon’s mates). Admiral Gardner and Admiral Colpoys were also ejected, though no ship requested the removal of all their officers and several petitioned for some of their officers to be retained. Even Gardner received a request to return to his ship from the crew, after he had left (Orth, 2011: 105). On 15 May, and over a month after the beginning of the mutiny, the Delegates were feted in a parade through Portsmouth by Mayor Carter, dined with Howe, toasted the King’s health, and agreed to set sail two days later, though without achieving better shore leave or arrangements for the sick. As the last verse of a mutineers’ song, ‘The Seventeen Bright Stars’, put it: Drink a health to Lord Howe in a full flowing glass Confusion to Pitt, likewise to Dundas. The seventeen Bright stars in a bumper shall roar, Their Praises shall sound from shore unto shore, And they shall never be forgot until Britain’s no more. (quoted in Holdstock, 2006: 8)

68  Mutiny and Leadership The government responded to the end of the mutiny by sending magistrate Aaron Graham to Portsmouth to investigate the ‘real’ causes of the mutiny, and that process involved kidnapping Valentine Joyce’s family to ascertain his political views (Doorne,  2011: 180). It would, of course, have been impossible for the other fleets of the Royal Navy to be un­aware of events in Spithead, and on 26 April HMS Porcupine reached Plymouth from Spithead as the contemporaneous mutiny of the squadron at Plymouth broke out, with the squadron’s officers being sent ashore and HMS Atlas becoming the ‘parliament ship’. The Plymouth mutiny followed Spithead almost to the letter in process, intent, and resolution. The Spithead mutiny was, in many ways, the first of the ‘great’ Royal Navy mutinies. It pitted the usually loyal but now disgruntled sailors—led or at least influenced by the influx of educated and often radical quota men, against their own officers and most sections of the Admiralty. With the French fleet hovering in the wings, and the solidarity of the mu­tin­eers beyond doubt, the British Admiralty proved unable to find a way to break the mutiny, and it succeeded in its primary aim of improving the pay and conditions of the crews. The erosion of the economic contract had been stemmed and the Admiralty had accepted a fait accompli; but the bloody nose that the mutineers inflicted on their superordinates was not going to be forgotten or forgiven. The Nore started in the same way but, as we will see, it ended very differently because the establishment had learned more about the mutineers than the mutineers had learned about the establishment.

The Nore Mutiny As should be clear from the Spithead mutiny, although there is no evidence of an Irish plot underlying Spithead, there were sympathies with the French revolutionaries. The British government certainly assumed conspiracies were prevalent, and in 1794–5 suspended habeas corpus and passed the Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Acts in 1795, and some of this was in response to two attacks upon the King (Doorne, 2011: 180).15 In fact, in June 1797 a plot to circulate a petition for peace with France was discovered on board the Pompée that was to involve the Mars, the Duke, and an unnamed fourth ship, and it demanded peace with France—and the dismissal of the present government. In fact, the demand for peace was ever present in the letters of the mutineers (MacDougall, 2011b: 256), and to that end the crew of the Pompée had issued a new oath: ‘To ever stand true till Death in promoting the cause of Freedom with Equity . . . ’ which was enough to frighten the government into banning all unlawful oaths with a penalty of up to seven years’ transportation. In the event, the conspiracy to take the ship to France was discovered before it was enacted (Coats, 2011b: 55–6). Nevertheless, what the mutineers had long recognized (and the reason the authorities were so concerned by their presence) was that oaths acted to maintain the solidarity of the collective and prevent the authorities from selecting individuals—ringleaders—for punishment (Coats,  2011c: 131). Charles Cunningham (1829 IX–X), captain of the frigate HMS Clyde at the Nore, was in no doubt that revolution was afoot in ‘that awful crisis’ which ‘had a different object in view from that at Portsmouth, its

15  The act stipulated that any meeting with over forty-­seven attendees had to be licensed and gave magistrates the right to attend any meeting and arrest anyone deemed to have uttered seditious words (Thale, 1989).

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  69 language was conveyed, in all its most violent forms, encouraging insubordination, to the distant colonies . . . ’ Four of the delegates who were on board the Royal George (Charles McCarthy, Matthew Hollister, Thomas Atkinson. and Edward Hines) to hear Admiral Howe at the conclusion of the Spithead mutiny were not from the Spithead fleet at all; they were from the Nore. They were legally deserters (and Hinds did desert straight afterwards), but Howe wanted them to hear the good news and deter the ships at the Nore from following suit into mutiny. Besides the demands that had not been met there was one that wasn’t made at Spithead but which would ensure a much greater reward: peace with France. If the un­stable Pitt government could be forced down that particular road then the navy would demobilize most of its crews, with some impressed men free to return to their civilian lives and others free to secure their much more rewarding lives as merchant seamen. Such thoughts had not escaped the more radical mutineers aboard the Prince, the Mars, and the Pompée (MacDougall, 2011a: 148). When McCarthy (probably a member of the United Irishmen and thus already beyond the pale of legitimate politics in the eyes of the British government and certainly involved with radical Irish politics) and Hollister returned to the Nore on 19 May, they reported not just the disappointing end to the Spithead mutiny but that the Nore seamen would be offered even less: they would get a pay increase and improved food but could not remove their unpopular officers. From the very beginning of the mutiny at the Nore then, a different political flavour was present because—excepting the issue of unpopular officers— Spithead had already achieved the improvement in wages and conditions for all naval personnel (MacDougall, 2011a: 148). But was the Nore mutiny—in contrast to Spithead—a ‘revolutionary crisis’ or ‘a parochial affair of ship’s biscuits and arrears of pay?’ as E. P. Thompson (1963: 184) put it. Thompson’s point is not that the Nore was stuffed with British Jacobins, just waiting for the moment to revolt and overthrow the government, but  that the ‘conjunction between the grievances of the majority and the aspirations by the  politically consciousness minority’ is precisely the kind of conjunction that can, in prin­ciple, lead to a revolutionary moment. As we shall see in Russia 1917, this is exactly the kind of conjunction that overthrew the Romanovs and then the Russian Provisional Government. There probably never was a majority of politically aware Bolsheviks in the Russian rebel groups—but the leadership of the minority that were in that category, and the weakness of their opponents, did facilitate the revolution. In that sense the issue is whether the leadership of the Nore were similarly inspired and whether their opponents, amongst the mutineers and the Admiralty, were too weak or divided to inhibit them (MacDougall, 2011b: 261–2). Unlike Spithead, the Nore was not an anchorage for a conventional fleet but more of a holding area for ships undergoing repair or waiting for stores or a crew. As such, while Spithead held eighty ships and 30,000 crew, the Nore had three line-­of-­battle ships and eight frigates with barely 3,500 crew in total. Moreover, the seamen at the Nore were not the professional crews more common at Spithead but a group of more recently recruited men, probably less used to the harsh discipline of naval life and less trusting in their of­fi­ cers. And while the Spithead fleet could be moved out of range of the land batteries and faced no other major seaborne competitor of equivalent power, the Nore faced significant shore-­based guns and, because, of the nature of the estuary, could not escape should the government manage to bring other ships to bear down on them.

70  Mutiny and Leadership The Nore mutiny began on 12 May, five days before the return of the Delegates from Spithead. It started with HMS Sandwich, a depot ship that had served as Rear-­Admiral Rodney’s flagship in the Battle of Cape St Vincent in 1780. As a ninety-­gun ship it was designed to accommodate 750 crew, but this number had doubled as it served as a depot ship, permanently moored and, according to the ship’s own doctor, in a state of moral and physical decay. On 12 May the Commander-­in-­Chief at the Nore, Vice-­Admiral Buckner, and Captain Mosse of the Sandwich were on board HMS Inflexible to try Captain Savage and his officers for the loss of HMS Albion which had run aground and been lost off Maplin Sounds the previous month. With their captain away, the crew of the Sandwich mutinied, raised the red flag, removed unpopular officers, and gave three cheers to encourage the rest of the fleet to join in their demands. The crew of HMS Inflexible needed no encouragement and was always the more militant of the two lead ships, but the Sandwich was declared the lead, or Parliament ship, and two Delegates from each of the eleven ships involved met as the General Committee of Internal Regulation to agree their rules, which were very similar to those at Spithead: unanimity; strict discipline (including no private liquor); respect to officers and duties continued; early communications with all; no masters or pilots to go ashore; unsuitable officers to go ashore. That discipline was maintained by the mutineers is evident from the records: three men were flogged for drunkenness (Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 134–5). Captain Cunningham on board the Clyde would have known all this because one of their Delegates was Richard Hinds, who reported every­thing back to his captain. But Cunningham was never going to be dissuaded from his assumption that a revolution was afoot: even when the delegates dressed ‘in respectable clothing’ it was obviously ‘to disguise them, that they might not be recognized as sailors, and the intention of their expedition suspected’. And just to assuage the authorities that evil was afoot, Hinds reported that a mysterious ‘Man in Black’ provided the delegates with plenty of money (1829: 9). Richard Parker (see Figure 2.1), the leader of the Nore mutiny, may not have been the ‘man in black’, and there probably never was one, but Parker was quickly demonized by the local press. The Kentish Gazette deemed him ‘a very desperate fellow . . . exercising the most savage tyranny’ over his fellow mutineers, and a local pamphlet insisted that he ‘went over to France, and was a spectator, if not an active agent, in what passed there in the time of Robespierre’ (quoted in Hill, 2020). There is no evidence of any of these assertions, and, although he was elected the leader of the Nore mutiny, he always signed his correspondence to the Admiralty ‘by command of the Delegates of the fleet’. An ex-­schoolteacher born in Exeter to a grain merchant father and educated at the grammar school there, he had abandoned the family business, married a Scottish woman, Ann McHardy from Perth, in 1791, and joined the Royal Navy. Renowned as an intelligent but belligerent man, he challenged Edward Riou, Captain of HMS Bulldog, to a duel and was demoted as a consequence, before being discharged with rheumatism. He then taught in Perth, Scotland, for some time but ended up in debtor’s prison in Scotland and rejoined the navy with a bonus of £30 to escape prison as part of the new Quota system. Wells (2013) suggests that over 15,000 of the 114,000-­strong Royal Navy in 1797 were Quota men (13 per cent), and many of these would have been literate people, almost certainly familiar with Tom Paine’s Rights of Man and quite possibly associated with the radical groups of the time: the London Corresponding Society and the United Irishmen (Mabee, 2007: 136). Holdstock (2006: 4)

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  71

Figure 2.1  Richard Parker 1797: President of the Nore Mutineers’ Delegates (Royal Museums Greenwich)

72  Mutiny and Leadership puts the number of real volunteers as low as 15 per cent, revealing the size of the problem of maintaining discipline when 85 per cent of the subordinates were involuntary. On 13 May, only a month after taking up his new ship HMS Sandwich, Parker had taken it upon himself to warn the mutineers that they should avoid becoming violent and drop all talk of hanging people. Although arguments have been made that either the ‘Quota men’ or the significant presence of Irish sailors had some impact upon the mutiny, there  is  little evidence of this and rather more that British naval crews had a history of self-­representation that was quite sufficient to organize a mutiny as and when necessary (Coats and MacDougall, 2011). Parker, having previously served in both the merchant and the royal navy and being educated, had been chosen to serve as ‘captain of the maintop’ on HMS Sandwich where he had been for a couple of months. Following his intervention on 13 May, the mutineers elected him as ‘President of the Committee of Delegates’ on 14 May, and he seems to have done his best to hold the mutiny together and to dissuade the more radical members from the Inflexible from engaging in violent action against both officers and recalcitrant seamen. On that day Parker led the various ships’ companies through Sheerness, all the time (according to Cunningham, 1829: 8) playing ‘God Save the King, Rule Britannia and Britons Strike Home whilst waving their swords and marching behind a red flag . . . . In other respects their demeanour at this time was peaceable’; so hardly the actions of a violent revolution. One of the larger ships was HMS Director, a 64-­gun vessel. The Director’s crew included 100 sailors from HMS Defiance, a ship with a history of mutinies, the latest being in 1795 over money and leave, when Captain Sir George Home was rescued by William Bligh, survivor of the mutiny on the Bounty. Five men were hanged for that mutiny, four received 300 lashes and two received 100 lashes (Neale, 1985: 132–64). Bligh was now captain of the Director and had seen his own ship join the mutiny at the Nore, but he was not amongst the 100 officers listed for removal by the mutineers (Alexander, 2004: 380). The Nore Delegates then instituted a system of democratic elections for each ship to elect its own governing group, with one then elected by this group as ‘captain’. Above the ships’ governing groups sat a ‘general Committee of Internal Regulations’, complete with secretary and clerk that met every morning either in a public house in Sheerness or on aboard the parliament ship. As the Evening Post reported it: The Delegates go every day to Sheerness, where they hold conferences. They then parade the streets and Ramparts of the Garrison, with a degree of triumphant insolence, and hold up the bloody flag of defiance, as a mark of scorn to the military. At the head of these men marches the person [Parker] who is considered the Admiral of their fleet. No Officer had any command or authority whatsoever.  (quoted in Flannery, 2007: 71)

On 15 May, after a meeting at the Chequers Public house, the delegates reported their demands to the surgeon and surgeon’s assistant on HMS Swan, and, according to Cunningham (1829: 11), their language was ‘so threatening and terrifying’ that the as­sist­ ant cut his own throat. Cunningham (1829: 12) then claimed that the threat to Sheerness was so great that ‘many females’ escaped with their valuables, though he only names one of these women. Similarly, Cunningham speculates about the likely fate of the boatswain on HMS Prosperpine who was almost hanged by the crew but ended up being rowed from boat to boat in a replica of being ‘flogged around the fleet’, only this time the

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  73 boatswain had a rope around his neck, not across his back, and he was landed at Sheerness unharmed. A week into the mutiny, on 19 May, the two Delegates returned from Spithead with copies of Howe’s agreement, and on the following day Admiral Buckner met Parker—as an equal—and the delegates on the Sandwich to discuss their stated grievances: 1. To be granted the same conditions as granted at Spithead. 2. Shore leave when in harbour (this had been listed by the Spithead mutineers but not granted). 3. Payment of arrears before sailing (this had been the custom until recently). 4. No return of officers removed (Howe had agreed this at Spithead). 5. Pressed men to receive an advance where necessary (this was to prevent ‘credit shops’ ripping off destitute sailors). 6. A general indemnity for all involved (as had been obtained at Spithead). 7. A more equal distribution of prize money (no detail was supplied). 8. A more moderate set of Articles of War to prevent terrorizing the seamen (no detail was supplied). On 21 May a delegation from the Admiralty arrived and seemed to be more concerned with whether the mutinous crew showed them the correct level of respect than whether the demands would or would not be met. As it happened two marines who had sided with the mutiny were then arrested in Sheerness for being drunk that day, and when Parker landed there on the following day to demand their release he was rebuked by the Port Admiral who insisted that he alone had the authority to decide what to do. Parker al­leged­ly responded that, since the Admiral’s flag was not flying on the ships and the two marines belonged to the fleet, they should be immediately be released to him. Captain Cunningham (1829: 22) recalled later that he had wanted to arrest Parker there and then but was ­prevented by Captain Blackwood, and the two marines were indeed released. The Lords of the Admiralty rejected all the demands except the pay increase that had already been accepted at Spithead, and most importantly there was no mention of a pardon or indemnity, as had been promised at Spithead (in fact a new royal pardon was legally required for the Nore mutineers and Cunningham {1829: 26} suggests that a free pardon was offered to all those that acquiesced and returned to their duty). The mutineers responded, according to Cunningham, by taking eight small gunboats and anchoring them off the Isle of Sheppey where their guns were trained on the garrison there. Two days later, the authorities responded when two militia regiments arrived from Sheerness, but if their presence was intended to intimidate the mutineers, now sporting red ribbons in their hats, it failed because—since the militia was an irregular force comprised of local men—the mutineers knew many of them and rowed over to greet them. This highlights another important aspect of the mutiny, for while many from the labouring classes joined either the Sea Fencibles of the local army militia, they did not necessarily do so to demonstrate loyalty to the government and were more likely to have done so in support of what Cookson (1997: 302) calls ‘national defence patriotism’ and Rogers (2016) calls ‘play-­safe-­patriotism’. In other words, these sailors and soldiers were concerned to defend their own communities from invasion—probably from France—but they were not necessarily unsympathetic to the situation facing their fellow sailors and soldiers in terms

74  Mutiny and Leadership of poor terms and conditions of service; they were supporters of British ‘society’, ­especially embodied in the locality that they came from, not fanatically loyal to the British government (Gee, 2003). Hence, both supporters and opponents of the mutinies would have embodied a widely heterogenous array of motives. And as the mutiny hardened, so a mutiny broke out briefly at Woolwich amongst the soldiers of the Royal Artillery who imprisoned their own officers before being overwhelmed by loyal troops, just as dockyard workers refused to work until their own conditions were improved (Flannery, 2007: 79). While Cunningham (1829: 30–1) suggested that his crew on the Clyde were loyal (bar one), the crew of the Swan were different: ‘Every man on her quarterdeck had a red ribbon in his hat and every Woman on board had a similar decoration in her cap.’ In fact, by 28 May, all the ship’s captains (except Cunningham on the Clyde) were onshore, and all of them met the Port Admiral at midnight to discuss ways to end the mutiny. According to Cunningham’s account (1829: 33), whilst he was away from the Clyde, Parker came on board and tried to persuade the crew to move the ship closer to the rest of the fleet so they could begin a blockade on London, but his request was turned down, and Cunningham suggests that, so loyal was his crew, they even handed a recalcitrant sailor over to him for punishment rather than discipline him themselves, as had become the custom on the other ships. Indeed, in Cunningham’s own words, when he returned to the Clyde they ‘begged [that he would not leave the ship again’ (1829: 34, 130). Spencer, having already promised George III that there would be no more concessions to mutineers, refused to meet the mutineers but arrived at Sheerness on 28 May with the requisite new pardon in his possession. He asked Captain Bligh to travel to Yarmouth to ask Admiral Duncan whether the North Sea Fleet would assist in putting down the mutiny, and Duncan suggested not, though he was sure his sailors would not mutiny themselves, which is ironic given that the crew on his own flagship, HMS Venerable, had shown significant signs of an impending mutiny on 31 April. On 18 May, a petition requesting long overdue wages (twenty months in arrears) was delivered to Sir Richard Onslow, captain of the Nassau and Duncan’s second in command of the North Sea Fleet. On 22 May the crew of HMS Trent refused his order to set sail for the Dutch coast, and on 24 May Captain Charles Lock discovered a plot to take his sloop, HMS Inspector, to France. On 27 May the Nassau and the Montagu refused to weigh anchor, but nevertheless on 29 May, with one more exception (HMS Belliqueux), his remaining fleet did sail to intercept a Dutch fleet leaving Texel. However, that evening Duncan captured four Delegates from the Nore trying to muster support from the North Sea Fleet, and three ships—the Nassau, the Standard, and the Lion, promptly abandoned their mission to Texel and joined the Belliqueux in mutiny, the latter demanding not just their back pay but also that all unpopular officers be removed and not returned and that a royal pardon be obtained. By morning five more ships—the Glutton, the Ardent, the Leopard, the Isis, and the Agamemnon—mutinied, leaving Duncan with only four loyal ships, including the now loyal Trent. Four rebellious ships then sailed to the Nore in ­support of their comrades while the remaining Yarmouth mutineers constructed a list of demands identical to those at Spithead before sailing themselves to the Nore. This lent the Nore mutiny a rather more professional naval presence, both in terms of ships and crew, and that became evident in the better relationships between the seamen and officers of this group rather than those of the original Nore mutineers (Doorne, 2011: 191).

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  75 Meanwhile, Parker and the Delegates met the captain of the St Fiorenzo and Cunningham at Sheerness, where the mutineers gave the captains the courtesy of standing up as the ­latter entered the meeting room, though Cunningham considered this as merely a device to ensure that Parker would demonstrate his authority by requiring them all to sit whilst he continued to stand (along with the vice president of the Delegates, John Davis). The meeting broke up shortly afterwards, and Cunningham (1829: 38) suggests that the Royal Pardon was only delivered to seven ships (St Fiorenzo, Clyde, Iris, Brilliant, Grampus, Espion, and Niger), ‘but the other ships of the fleet were not allowed to have the Royal Declaration received and circulated among them’. This divide-­and-­rule strategy (coupled with a method for securing sufficient scapegoats to appease the Admiralty and the King) seems to have worked because, as soon as the declaration was read out, the crews of the St Fiorenzo and the Clyde hauled down their red flags and hoisted the traditional white ensign, though the other crews kept their red flags flying. At least on some of the ships the declaration was put to a vote before the decision was taken to continue the mutiny or give up. That evening two Delegates from the Director intimated to Cunningham that they would join the St Fiorenzo and the Clyde in leaving the mutiny the following day (Cunningham, 1829: 39–40). That day was the 29th May—Restoration Day—celebrating the return of the monarchy after Cromwell’s republican Protectorate when Charles II entered London in 1660, and the mutinous Delegates duly marked it with the usual royal salute—an important demonstration of loyalty at a time when even ‘imagining’ the monarch’s death was considered treason and carried the death penalty (Barrell,  2000). Yet even this act of loyalty was regarded by Cunningham (1829: 49–50) as ‘a striking act of inconsistency’ but also ‘negative patriotism’ and one that shows ‘that the spirit of disaffection had not supplanted the general feeling of  patriotism throughout the fleet . . . [T]hey never harboured any serious intention of transferring their allegiance to a foreign power.’ In effect, this was not a revolution in the making, unless the authorities chose to represent it as one for their own purposes. And yet it was Cunningham who also warned that if the mutiny was allowed to continue it would end up ‘encouraging the spirit of dissatisfaction amongst the men in the various squadrons in every quarter of the Globe’ (1829: x). Whatever the beliefs of the Director’s Delegates the previous day, the crew refused to remove the red flag, but Cunningham was warned by yet another spy amongst the Delegates (Thomas Yates from the Clyde) that Parker intended to row alongside both the St Fiorenzo and the Clyde, take off both captains, and admonish the crews for their loyalty to the Admiralty by punishing every tenth sailor (Cunningham, 1829: 43). When the dele­gates at the Nore heard of Spencer’s arrival they rowed over to the Commissioner’s House, where he was staying, and asked to see him. When he refused, they asked that he accept the same conditions given at Spithead, including a royal pardon, but Spencer rejected even this demand and insisted that if they wanted a royal pardon they must ‘humbly approach him’ by noon that day and unconditionally surrender (even though the pardon had already been read out to some of the crews). The President of the mutineers, Richard Parker (now with a reward of £500 on his head), asked for a personal meeting with Spencer, but this was also rebuffed at the same time as the mutineers were refused further supplies, and two, rather more dependable, militia regiments arrived at Sheerness and prevented the mutineers from landing there. On 31 May, under the orders of their captains, the Clyde and San Fiorenzo tried to slip away from the fleet, and, despite the professed claims that both their crews were loyal, four

76  Mutiny and Leadership riggers were secretly transported from the mainland to help sail the San Fiorenzo because the crew could not be relied on. However, the four riggers panicked halfway to the ship and turned back. In the confusion the Clyde escaped, but the San Fiorenzo was caught on the tide and was shot at by the loyal mutineers before escaping to Portsmouth, slightly damaged but with no one injured; it passed the incoming mutinous fleet from Yarmouth on the way. In response to the government’s actions, and in the face of reinforcements, the Nore mutineers threatened to blockade London, and Pitt introduced a bill on 1 June making ‘mutiny’ a much looser term and suggesting that the French revolutionaries were at the heart of the problem for ‘the whole affair was that of colour and description which proved it not to be of native growth, and left no hesitation on the mind of any thinking man to determine whence it was imported’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 27). Equally important, the new bill made it illegal to communicate with mutineers, effectively cutting off the Nore from any publicity of their own making. Thus the long note written by the Delegates and intended for public consumption never made its target, despite its rigorous description of their claim: The public prints teem with falsehood and misrepresentations, to induce you to believe things as far from our design as the conduct of those at the helm of state is from honesty and decorum. Shall we who have endured the toils of a long and disgraceful war bear the tackles of tyranny and oppression, while vile pampered knaves wallowing in the lap of luxury choose to load us with? . . . . Shall we . . . [w]ho guard your coasts from invasion, your children from slaughter and your lands from pillage be the footballs, shuttlecocks . . . of a set of Tyrants who derive from us alone, their honours, titles and fortunes. No – the Age of Reason is at length arrived, we have been endeavouring to find ourselves men. We now find ourselves so. We will be treated as such. Far from our very idea to subvert the Government of our beloved country we have the highest opinion of our beloved Sovereign and have to hope that none of the measures taken to deprive us of our Common Rights have been instigated by him . . . The British seamen has justly been compared to the Lion, gentle, generous and humane. No one would certainly wish to provoke such an animal . . . Let His Majesty but order us to be paid, and the little grievance we demand to be redressed, we shall enter with alacrity into any employment, for the safety of our country.  (quoted in Doorne, 2011: 188)

Aaron Graham (who had investigated the Spithead Mutiny, and whom we shall met again regarding the Bounty mutiny) and Daniel Williams, two magistrates, were sent by the Under Secretary of State, John King, to uncover the extent of Jacobinism and political sedition after the Nore mutiny and found none. Yet as the report to the Duke of Portland suggested: Several whose mischievous dispositions would lead them to the farthest corner of the kingdom in hopes of continuing a disturbance once begun have been in company with the delegates on shore, and have also (some of them) visited the ships at the Nore, and using inflammatory language endeavoured to spirit on the sailors to a continuance of the mutiny without, however, daring to offer anything like a plan for the disposal of the fleet or to do more than insinuate that they were belonging to clubs or societies whose members wished well to the cause.  (quoted in Doorne, 2011: 181)

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  77 Despite this, the report continued, the two magistrates had unremittingly endeavoured to trace if there was any connexion or correspondence ­carried on between the mutineers and any private person or society on shore, and they think that they may with the greatest safety pronounce that no such connexion or ­correspondence ever did exist . . . . Neither do they believe that any club or society . . . have in the smallest degree been able to influence the proceedings of the mutineers.’ (quoted in Pope, 1963: 126)

Nevertheless, the magistrates warned the Duke that the organization of the mutiny was strong, and contact with radical outsiders (especially the Corresponding Societies and the United Irishmen) had occurred, so the danger was not to be overlooked. This supported Admiral Collingwood’s claim that the Quota Acts of 1795 had brought into the navy ‘Billy Pitt’s men, . . . [r]uined politicians, who drank ale enough to drown the nation, talked nonsense enough to mad it . . . took the County’s bounty and embarked with their budget of politics and the education of a Sunday’s school into the ships, where they disseminated their nonsense and mischief ’ (quoted in Doorne, 2011: 182–3). In fact, of the 450 Nore mutineers court martialled, no more than between forty-­three and perhaps 100 Quota men were involved, and though Richard Parker was a Quota man he had previously been a midshipman so not technically an ‘outsider’ who so often took the scapegoating role for a navy that did not want to look too closely in the mirror for those to blame. Nevertheless, the structure of the Delegate and committee system mirrored that established by the rad­ ical Correspondence Societies, and the wording of the petitions showed more than just a hint of French and Irish influence. What role did the United Irishmen play in the Nore? Irish sailors and marines were definitely on board the Sandwich, as were some with sympathies for revolutionary France (MacDougall,  2011b: 258). They were also involved in the plotting of four mutinies on board the Captain, Defiance, Caesar, and Glory within the Channel Fleet the following year, and each plot involved the same plan: recruiting Irishmen (but not English sailors) to the cause and making them swear an oath, seizing the ship and (unlike the 1797 mutinies) killing all who opposed them, and sailing the ship to an enemy or to Ireland where a major uprising was planned. But in each case the plot was revealed by an Irish seaman, once again underlining the point that the conflation of Irish with rebellion was self-­evidently erroneous. There were United Irishmen amongst the Spithead and Nore ships, often via the Quota Acts, and 89 of the 450 Nore mutineers were Irish, but there is no clear evidence that any of these were United Irishmen or that this identity made a significant difference. Even one of the most prominent Irish mutineers, Thomas Jephson, who joined the navy before the Quota Acts, was a musician aboard the Sandwich and had refused to play ‘God save the King’ (‘I care nothing for Kings or Queens—bad luck to the whole of them’ is allegedly what he said), and spoke of taking the fleet to Ireland, was probably a member, but, since the evidence against Jephson was contradictory, he received 200 lashes rather than a death sentence (Doorne, 2011: 185–6). Whatever the importance or otherwise of the ethnic background of the Nore mutineers, it is important to recognize the diversity of the crews of most European navies at the time and how this played a role for both the establishment and the mutineers. As Frykman (2009: 92) concludes:

78  Mutiny and Leadership It probably appeared comforting to frame the problem in such national terms, but reality was rather different. Foreign-­born men were neither more nor less prone to rebel than native-­born, but they did have a particular kind of dangerous influence. Their presence on board built bridges between the lower decks of different navies, and so demystified the enemy. This, in turn, intensified the conflict between forecastle and quarterdeck, for not only were the men brutalised in order to kill and be killed, but they realised they were sent into battle against men very much like themselves.

A second bill in Parliament established that it was up to the Admiralty to establish whether any ship was in a state of rebellion, and if it was then any person on board would be declared a felon and a pirate and suffer death on capture. A third bill outlawed the administration of unlawful oaths. In desperation the mutineers released from their custody Captain Knight of the Montagu as well as his wife and insisted that ‘every Delegate has sworn himself that he has no communication with any Jacobins or people of that description’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 191), and they even celebrated the King’s birthday on 5 June. That was ironic, because it was the King who had persuaded Pitt to blockade the mutineers on 30 May, insisting that ‘the preventing of their getting fresh water will soon oblige them to submit’. Indeed, the Delegates on the Director asked their comrades on the Montague if they could ‘spare us the small quantity of 5 ton of water for our present use, as we are greatly in want of this useful article’ (quoted in Flannery, 2007: 85). In response to the blockade threat, the mutineers began blockading London, and within two days a hundred merchant ships were forced to anchor outside London (MacDougall, 2011b: 252–3). According to Cunningham (1829: 72) the mutineers’ response to the ­draconian legislation was to place effigies of Pitt and Dundas on the foredeck of their ships and use them for target practice. But the government blockade of the mutineers was much more effective, and within a week the mutineers had partially lifted their blockade of London. By this time several members of the mutinous crews had been punished for conspiracy against the mutiny, and a trial on board the Monmouth—which was more than most recalcitrant sailors normally received—saw five people lashed and one tarred and feathered. On the Brilliant the mutineers ducked several of the crew for ‘speaking disrespectfully to the Delegates’ (Cunningham, 1829: 61–2). With food now running low, the mutineers also began raiding the land and other civilian ships for supplies, actions which proved to Cunningham (1829: 62–3) that ‘they had no actual grievances to warrant their demands upon the government; but only that their only object was to gratify a cruel and rapacious spirit of oppression and disorder’. Fifty ill mutineers were then transported by the mutineers to Sheerness, but they were prevented from landing and returned to the ships. A last glimmer of hope appeared on 6 June when Lord Northesk, Captain of the Monmouth and a man known to be sympathetic to the sailors’ plight, agreed to meet the delegates on board the Sandwich, where they insisted that they were not a ‘floating republic’ of outlaws. But at the very time this conversation was happening, the Admiralty declared them all to be rebels and removed the buoys marking safe passage to the North Sea—and to America or Holland where some of the mutineers talked of escaping. Vice-­Admiral Keith suggested sending fire ships into the fleet of mutineers, Pitt talked of a chain across the estuary to prevent them from escaping, and a certain Captain Dixon offered to row over and assassinate Parker himself (Coats, 2011d: 220–1).

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  79 Cunningham (1829: 69) suggested that by this time the mutiny was already teetering and that discussions amongst the mutineers of going to Holland were clearly doomed because ‘as British seamen, [they] would have shrunk from the base and traitorous act of taking ships into an enemy’s port’. Yet he then contradicted himself by noting that the ‘government, after having every conciliatory means without effect, at length determined it was time to take more decisive measures. In short it had become necessary to act with some vigour to suppress this Mutiny, which was fast spreading itself into a general rebellion.’ Spencer, aware that dissent amongst the mutineers might be increasing, decided to take advantage of the possible fissures, and two days later Captain Knight returned with a note from the Admiralty promising a pardon for all, except the ringleaders. The next morning, 8 June, Parker toured the fleet and insisted that their best hope now was to sail to Holland, but his reception on the Ardent was hostile, and when Parker raised the signal for the whole fleet to sail on 9 June no ship moved. Later that night four ships slipped their anchors and sailed away from the mutiny, including the Leopard, where a fight broke out between those loyal to the King and those loyal to the mutiny; it ended with twenty-­five of the mutineers in chains and the rest of the crew on deck under armed guard. The Repulse followed suit and was shot at by the mutineers on the Director but escaped. The Standard was boarded by the Warwickshire militia and the whole crew detained, except William Wallace, who shot himself with a pistol rather than be taken alive (Cunningham,  1829: 78). On the Isis, battles continued throughout the day with first the Blue flag (Royalist) and then the Red flag (mutineers) gaining supremacy; it ended with the mutineers ­winning after five loyalists were killed, including a midshipman, shot through the head by a woman mutineer (MacDougall, 2011a: 157). Parker then requested another meeting with Knight saying they would accept the pardon for all and the pay rise and return to duties—if the officers already removed were kept away and the crews kept together. The authorities were, at this point, only interested in unconditional surrender. On 13 June, Parker chaired a meeting of the delegates on the Sandwich and oversaw the vote to terminate the mutiny on that ship; he then sailed the Sandwich back to Gravesend, handed the keys of the magazine back to the newly released officers, and was himself arrested and imprisoned in Maidstone Jail on 14 June. The crew of the Inflexible—always the most radical and with a higher proportion of Irish seamen than any other ship involved—refused to sacrifice the lives of their delegates to save their own lives, and nine of them ‘borrowed’ a smaller ship and escaped to France, sending the boat back with two boys. The crew of the Montagu did the same, with the delegates landing in Holland, while the crew of the Swan could not decide whether to go to France or to Ireland. On 16 June the Montagu, the Inflexible, and the Belliqueux, the last ships in the mutiny, surrendered. Three days later Richard Parker was one of 412 court-­martialled for the Nore mutiny. Parker was charged with High Treason on 15 June at Maidstone jail—a civil prison—and under civil law should have been tried by jury. But Admiral Keith, second in command to Buckner and now effectively in control of the post-­mutiny process, reported to Spencer that ‘A printed paper was yesterday circulated in the Fleet setting forth that Mr Fox would be Minister in the course of a few days and that he and his friends approved of the ­seamen’s conduct and would certainly grant them trial by Jury and a full redress of all their grievances’ (quoted in Coats, 2011d: 211). Parker was thus moved to the Sheerness Garrison so

80  Mutiny and Leadership that a military court martial could try him instead. Nepean, Secretary to the Board of the Admiralty, told the President of Parker’s court martial, Vice Admiral Pasley: ‘You may prove anything you like against him, for he has been guilty of everything that’s bad’ (quoted in Coats, 2011d: 212). Parker was tried (without legal counsel) on HMS Neptune on the River Medway between 22 and 26 June in front of thirteen Royal Navy captains, including Captain Edward Riou; the court was chaired by Vice-­Admiral Thomas Pasley. The prosecutor was Captain Mosse, who charged Parker with ‘[m]aking and endeavouring to make mutinous assemblies on board the Sandwich . . . on or about the 12th of May; disobeying the lawful orders of his superior officers, and treating his superior officers with disrespect’. Parker was also charged with leading the mutiny and ordering the firing of guns on board the Monmouth and the Director at the Leopard and the Repulse. Parker denied he had any political intentions, saying he was not a Jacobin or a traitor but had merely followed the decisions of the Committee of Delegates, and insisted that his leadership had prevented much violence. Mr Snipe, surgeon on the Sandwich, insisted that the red flag which replaced the Admiral’s flag was ‘the most daring outrage I have ever seen in the course of my life’, and Parker had, indeed, declared that the Admiral’s rank meant nothing to him: ‘I am not to be intimidated . . . [Y]our flag is struck, you have no authority here. We command the fleet’ (quoted in Flannery, 2007: 72). Captain Payne wrote to Spencer, arguing that ‘the character of the present mutiny is perfectly French. The singularity of it consists in the great secrecy and patience with which they waited for a thorough union before it broke out, and the immediate establishment of a system of terror . . . [and is] therefore a revolution of the fleet, and should be opposed with the whole vigour of the country . . . . I cannot help thinking that this should be accompanied with mounting mortars on the batteries and Fort Moncton’ (quoted in Flannery, 2007: 75–7). Two days later, and inevitably, Parker was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but he remained calm: I have heard your sentence—I shall submit to it without a struggle—I feel thus because of the rectitude of my intentions. Whatever offences may have been committed, I hope my life will be the only sacrifice. I trust it will be thought a sufficient atonement. Pardon, I beseech you, the other men; they will return with alacrity to their duty. (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 236)

The King accused Parker of a crime of ‘so heinous and dangerous a nature that I can scarcely suppose there can be any legal objection . . . to order his body to be hung in chains on the most conspicuous land in sight of the ships of the Nore’ (Coats,  2011d: 224; Guttridge, 1992: 72). But, since there was no legal precedent for this in Britain (though it was common practice in the West Indies) and the government feared a further mutiny if that happened, it did not. Instead Parker was sentenced to be hanged from the yardarm for personally commanding a gun to be fired by the Monmouth at the Repulse as the latter tried to escape. In fact, Parker was probably not on the Monmouth at that time, but this was an inconvenient truth that the Admiralty chose to ignore. Parker claimed that he died ‘a martyr in the cause of humanity’ (quoted in Manwaring and Dobrée, 1937: 265). He dressed in black and drank a glass of white wine, saying, ‘I drink first to the salvation of my soul and next to the forgiveness of my enemies.’

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  81 A noose was placed badly around his neck, and Parker asked for it to be positioned properly and, while resisting the conventional hood over his head, asked for a white handkerchief that he could drop at the appropriate time to mark his execution. Traditionally, condemned men were hauled up to the first block of the yardarm by their comrades and were left to die a long and painful death from strangulation,16 but accounts suggest that after climbing the steps on the especially erected platform on the starboard side under the yardarm, designed to show the execution to onlookers on the Isle of Grain, Parker leapt earlier than the authorities planned from the platform—and, since the rope was still attached, his fall ended with him breaking his neck, experiencing an instant death and robbing the authorities of their ritualized moment of symbolic retribution. Even at the moment of his death, Parker seems to have recognized that choices are still available. But, not to be short-­changed of their moment of revenge, the gun marking the time for execution was then fired, and the hanging crew then untied the rope and hoisted Parker’s lifeless body up to the block on the yardarm for all to see. Parker left a small inheritance to his wife, Ann, who had tried to save him but eventually watched the hanging from a small boat. As ‘President Parker’, a popular song at the time went: I thought I saw a yellow flag flying, the signal for my husband to die. A gun was fired as they required when they hung on the yard so high. I thought I saw his hand a-­waving, bidding me a last farewell; The grief I suffered at this moment no heart can paint, no tongue can tell. (quoted in Holdstock, 2006: 15)

Ann was refused permission to retrieve her husband’s body and, after its display, it was hauled down and buried near Sheerness fort, but she and three other women secretly dug it up and took it back to Rochester and then London. Unfortunately for her, the authorities discovered the act, and Richard Parker’s body was displayed in a tavern in London for a week before being buried in St Mary Martfelon’s vault in Whitechapel.17 Just before he leapt to his death, Parker asked that his death be the only one. It wasn’t. Fifty-­nine other mutineers were sentenced to death and twenty-­nine executions carried out, leaving the others to be imprisoned or flogged. None of the accused were given legal counsel or allowed access to trial transcripts to prepare their defence. Admiral Viscount Keith, despatched to Sheerness to oversee the Nore court martials by the Admiralty, gave an order that ‘the ten most guilty men’ be arrested from each ship regardless of their

16  Hurren (2016) suggests that death from strangulation was often a long, and sometimes an ineffective, ­ rocess, and there are several examples of hanged prisoners regaining consciousness (especially in winter) and p surgeons being required to complete the sentence by slitting the ‘Dead-­Alive’ prisoner’s throat. The usual checks for signs of life included having a mirror held to the prisoner’s mouth to check for breathing, or blowing snuff up their nose to make them sneeze, or standing a cup of water on their chests to check for movement. The Royal College of Surgeons’ archives suggests that in ten out of thirty-­five cases evaluated the ‘executed’ prisoner was not dead when cut down from the gallows, even when the method of hanging involved a short drop of between four and six feet to ensure the neck broke. See also Hooper (2012) for a fictionalized account of the role of Oxford University surgeons in saving the life of a woman from Middle Barton, ‘hanged’ for infanticide. 17  St Mary Matfelon’s church was damaged during the blitz in 1940 and demolished in 1952. It is now the site of the Atlab Ali Park, named after a Bangladeshi clothing worker who was murdered by three teenage boys on 4 May 1978 nearby. Along the path down the centre of the park are letters that spell out a fragment of poetry from the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: ‘The shade of my tree is offered to those who come and go fleetingly’— a suitable epitaph for Richard Parker too.

82  Mutiny and Leadership degree of involvement in the mutiny—so hardly the ‘most guilty’, and much more in line with the Roman decimation policy. We might conclude, as others have done (see the discussion in Grint, 2010a: 95–9) that the Nore was always doomed because its leadership was weaker than that exercised at Spithead, its strategic goals too excessive, and its political ambitions too dangerous to the government, but there is precious little evidence for any of these claims and rather more that the Nore failed because the government was emboldened by its original failure at Spithead and that it chose to see the Nore as a Jacobin conspiracy in order to gain popular support for its draconian response. Moreover, the state had learned how to cope with a mutiny rather better than the mutineers had learned how to cope with the Admiralty. While the Spithead mutineers persuaded the Admiralty that their dissent was con­struct­ ive, the Admiralty generated a moral panic and persuaded the population, the media, and themselves that the Nore represented the thin edge of a Jacobin or, as the parliamentary Committee of Secrecy report suggested in 1799, an Irish wedge. And the Admiralty used a wedge to divide the mutineers, telling those on the less recalcitrant ships that they would be pardoned if they surrendered but keeping that information from the more militant ships. As for public opinion, that was always ‘volatile—apt to protest when economic circumstances were rough or when victories were not forthcoming, but tending to support or remain quiet for enough of the time that no serious threat of insurrection ever arose; and this quiescence may have been partly natural and partly the economic and propaganda work of government and loyalists’ (Macleod, 2007: 705). Whatever the case, the crushing of the Nore mutiny undermined the level of dissent towards the establishment but, in the main, the conditions that generated that dissent persisted.

Hermione 1797 In 1797—the same year as the mutinies at Spithead and the Nore—the 32-­gun British Royal Navy frigate HMS Hermione (see Figure 2.2), then serving in the West Indies in the Anglo-­French Wars, was under the command of Captain Hugh Pigot. Pigot had a history of accidents and brutality. In 1794, the first year of his first command on the sloop HMS Swan, he had collided with a Canadian merchant ship in the English Channel and blamed the other captain. In September of that same year he was promoted to command HMS Success, a 32-­gun frigate, and managed to have eighty-­five sailors flogged in his first year— the equivalent of half the crew. One sailor, John Charles, received three lots of twelve lashes within twenty-­six days, dying eighteen weeks later, and Jeremiah Walsh was given twenty-­four lashes on 4 August for Neglect of Duty, with twelve more on 11 September; he was dead by the end of the month. Martin Steady, an Irish man, was flogged eight times in ten months. As Pope concludes about the utility of flogging, given the recalcitrance of the victims ‘a bad man was very little the better; a good man very much the worse’ (1998: 70). Perhaps just as important, Pigot habitually awarded idiosyncratic punishments: forty lashes to one man attempting to desert and twelve to another for the same crime; while two actual deserters recaptured was awarded twelve and thirty-­six. Desertion was commonplace: between 1793 and 1797 there were 129 desertions from Hermione from a standard complement of 180 (Frykman, 2009: 84). On 22 October 1794, Pigot had five of his crew flogged and then oversaw the flogging of Marine Omeburg from the Europa; he

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  83

Figure 2.2  HMS Hermione 1799: ‘cut out’ at Puerto Cabello 25 October (Chronicle/Alamy)

was flogged around the fleet for mutiny with a total punishment of 300 lashes. But Pigot was not an outlier in a navy known for its tolerance. On the contrary, Pigot was far from the worst flogger. That label went to Captain Harvey on the Triumph who oversaw 433  floggings in sixteen months—almost every day. Yet he was exonerated by the Admiralty for ‘no-­one was ever punished in the Ship who did not really deserve it’ (quoted in Frykman, 2010: 166–7). In 1795, Pigot’s ship collided with another, this time the Mercury, an American merchant ship, and he had the captain of that ship flogged, causing Pigot to be court-­martialled and returned to England, though Admiral Parker allowed Pigot (one of Parker’s favourite Captains) to transfer to HMS Hermione instead (Tracy, 2006), taking twenty-­one seamen of the crew of the Success with him (who would have forfeited their £10 prize money, about a year’s salary for a seaman, had they decided to stay). Twelve of these were English, three Irish, three Scottish, one from the Isle of Man and two American (Pope, 1963: 73–80). On 22 March 1795, the Hermione attacked French privateers off the coast of Puerto Rico and towed a prize vessel back to Port Royal, where the transferred crew of the Success were paid their prize-­money from previous captures and then told they could go ashore for a day—much to the chagrin of the original Hermione crew who got neither reward. Pigot also lost eight sailors who were American and were released by the actions of Parker, though one previous deserter, Thomas Leech, surrendered himself to Pigot. In the middle of May 1797, Pigot was ordered to patrol the Spanish Main (off what is now Venezuela) alongside his junior, Captain Otway on board HMS Ceres. One evening the Hermione struck a reef but survived while the Ceres grounded for a week, although a boat of seven seamen deserted the ship and rowed ashore. Otway’s report blamed the crew of the Ceres for the damage but praised Pigot for saving the ship. In turn, Pigot blamed Lt Harris, the lookout on the Hermione, for not warning both ships in time (even though it was Harris who had saved the Hermione). The court martial began on 16 June under

84  Mutiny and Leadership Rear-­Admiral Rodney Bligh (not Capt. William Bligh of the Bounty). In fact, the court not only found Harris not guilty for the groundings but praised him for keeping such a good lookout that neither ship was ultimately lost. The following day Thomas Harrington, the Boatswain of the Hermione, was tried for being drunk and neglecting his duties, and he was found guilty and dismissed from the ship. The third court martial was of Thomas Leech for being a deserter. He was found guilty and sentenced to thirty-­six lashes. This coincided with the end of the mutiny at Spithead on 15 May 1797, but news of that did not reach Admiral Parker until the middle of July, first from Earl Spencer’s letter, dated 21 April, and then on July 18 from an Admiralty letter, dated 3 May, both of which warned him to take preventative measures to avoid similar disturbances in the Caribbean. It was already too late. On 19 July Parker was informed that the HMS Marie Antoinette, a British schooner, had already mutinied off Haiti on 7 July, long before any news of the Spithead mutiny might have ‘infected’ the crew. They had thrown their two officers overboard and sailed to the port of Gonaives where the surgeon and five of the crew were now prisoners of the French. (One of the mutineers, William Jacobs, was recaptured and hanged and gibbetted in February 1799.) In the middle of August, Pigot was ordered by Parker to take the Hermione, the Renommeé, and the Diligence (under Captain Mends) on a seven-­week patrol through the Mona Passage, the main route between the Spanish Main and the Atlantic, where they stopped and searched all vessels, seeking out Spanish and French prizes but allowing British and American merchant ships to continue. On 1 September the squadron captured a Spanish schooner, and within the week the Diligence had captured a Spanish packet ship. With the crews of all three ships now reduced to sail the prizes, it was fortunate that in the second week of September they captured a French ship full of British prisoners who were immediately impressed to serve on the squadron. The next day, 14 September, a squall damaged the Renommeé, and Pigot order it to return to their naval base at Cape Nicholas Mole, leaving the Hermione and the Diligence to continue the patrol alone. The next evening (15 September), as was the tradition, the sails were reduced to make for easier night sailing, but one of the ropes used to tie up the sails had not been properly knotted, and Midshipman Casey—whose responsibility this was—sent a seaman back along the spar to retie it. Pigot, overseeing the operation, berated Casey and, according to the latter, ‘in very harsh language desired to know the cause’. Casey then attested that Pigot abused him in front of the crew, both as Casey was in the rigging and when ordered down. When Casey protested his innocence, Pigot ordered him to be silent ‘or I will instantly tie you up to the gun and flog you’. Given that David Casey was 19 and a midshipman, such a threat was both atypical and extraordinarily humiliating. Casey was from Kinsale in Ireland and had been in the navy since the age of 11. Moreover, he was an Acting Lieutenant on board the Ambuscade when he was transferred to the Hermione for the second time. Because he had not reached the normal age for the Lieutenant’s position, he lost his rank and returned back to Midshipman but proved a reliable man and had, until this point, been regarded well by all, including Pigot. Casey again protested his innocence but was ordered below by Pigot, who then met his own officers in his own cabin to discuss the matter. None mentioned anything against Casey, and Pigot then ordered Casey to his cabin where he told Casey (in front of several officers) he would never dine at the Captain’s table again and, if Casey did not go on his knees in front of the entire crew the following morning, then he would be flogged. Lt Reed, who had witnessed Pigot’s decision, then

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  85 went to see Casey in the latter’s berth and, as a friend, tried to persuade him to accept the Captain’s decision, but Casey refused. On the morning of 16 September two other officers tried to persuade Casey to accept the humiliation of begging for forgiveness on his knees rather than a flogging, but Casey demurred, and at 11.00 all 150 hands were piped on deck to witness the punishment. Pigot read out the Articles of War and then said, ‘For your contemptuous and disrespectful ­conduct yesterday evening, I insist on your going down on your knees and begging my pardon.’ Casey responded: ‘I assure you, sir, that I had no intention of offering you the slightest insult: I am very sorry that you should think I did; I can only beg your pardon.’ ‘I insist you go your knees’, responded Pigot; but Casey refused and again Pigot demanded the supplication. When Casey again refused, Pigot ordered him to strip off his shirt, and Casey refused but insisted he would not resist anyone who tried to strip him. Pigot then ordered the Master-­at-­Arms and the Sergeant of the Marines to strip and bind Casey to the bar of the capstan and ordered Martin, the Boatswain, to give him twelve lashes; which he did. Casey was then ordered to remove his belongings and hammock from the midshipmen’s mess and be prepared to leave the ship as soon as possible (Pope, 1963: 136–8). About 18.00 on 20 September, four days after Casey’s flogging, the Hermione was hit by bad weather off Puerto Rico, and Captain Hugh Pigot ordered men aloft to reef the topsails, threatening to flog the slowest man. In the confusion and panic three of the youngest sailors fell from the rigging and died instantly. Pigot ordered the three bodies to be tossed overboard immediately and without ceremony and the maintopmen to get back to work, but, still in the rigging, they began ‘murmuring’. When they did not instantly get back to work Pigot ordered his boatswain’s mates, Jay and Nash, to ‘start’ them—that is, beat them with short ropes—and ordered their names to be taken for flogging the next day. That night the crew discussed mutinying against Pigot, but nothing came of the threat, and the next day between twelve and fourteen men were duly flogged for ‘murmuring’. That evening, at 23.00, the crew mutinied, attacked Pte. McNeil, the Marine guard outside Pigot’s cabin, and then attacked Pigot, who tried to defend himself with his dirk. As the attack continued and the noise reached the quarterdeck above the cabin, the officer on duty, Lt Foreshaw, ordered the sailor at the wheel, Thomas Osborne, to change course to seek out the other frigate, HMS Diligence; when Osborne refused, Foreshaw knocked him down. At this point a second large group of mutineers (whose attack was supposed to coincide with the assault on the Captain but was slightly delayed) seized Foreshaw, and Nash insisted they throw him overboard. As he pleaded for his life the mutineers drove him closer to the side of the ship, and Foreshaw then disappeared over the bulwarks. The group then returned to the Captain’s cabin to find Pigot wounded and slumped against a cannon, whereupon they attacked him again, smashed in one of the stern windows, and shoved Pigot out into the Caribbean. Casey, who played no part in the mutiny, was then told by the mutineers that they wished him no harm and that he should go below and play no part in the events. The mutineers then broke into the gun room, opened the arms chest, and distributed the muskets. Lt Douglas was then hunted down and attacked by a group of about twenty mutineers armed with tomahawks and boarding pikes before he, and the 13-­year-­old midshipman, John Smith, who was universally hated, went overboard. Lt Foreshaw then reappeared on deck, having clung to the side of the ship, and, while the mutineers were deciding what to do with him, Thomas Nash and John Farrel threw him overboard. Nash then sought out Casey and insisted that the Midshipman join the mutiny

86  Mutiny and Leadership and become their leader, but Casey refused, and Nash then took the role himself and got his fellow Boatswain’s Mate, Thomas Jay, to pipe the order for ‘every man to his station’. Pope (1963: 167) suggests that at this point about 40 of the 150 crew were actively involved in the mutiny, but once the rest had obeyed the order, given by the mutineers, and thus infringed the twentieth Article of War that warned of their duty to use ‘their utmost endeavours’ to suppress a mutiny, they were all technically mutineers. Eighteen mutineers, half of whom were English, then met in Pigot’s cabin to determine what to do next, in particular whether to kill all ten of the remaining officers and warrant officers. No decision was made at this meeting, though there were angry scenes elsewhere as various groups attempted to kill them all but were prevented by mutineers ordered to protect them. Casey even went to talk to the imprisoned officers and tried to bargain with the mutineers for their lives but to no avail. Meanwhile those members of the crew not really involved in organizing the mutiny broke into the spirit room and began to consume the large quantity of rum there. Lawrence Cronin, an educated, Belfast-­born, 35-­year-­old republican who worked as the surgeon’s mate, then took centre stage and insisted that all the remaining prisoners should be killed. The purser, Stephen Pacey, was dragged up from the gunroom where he was being held prisoner and dumped overboard by a group somewhat detached from the main mutineers; Sansum, the surgeon, and Lt Reed followed him into the Caribbean. Richard Redman then dragged Martin, the Boatswain, out of his cabin—and away from Martin’s wife—and threw Martin overboard, returning to spend the rest of the night with Martin’s wife (the only woman on board). Captain Pigot’s clerk, John Manning, was the next over the side, this time through a gun port; Marine Lieutenant McIntosh, already dying of yellow fever, followed Manning’s exit, and the group then headed for the Master, Southcott, being guarded by mutineers who managed to save him. Meanwhile Casey, the ship’s Gunner, and the Carpenter were ordered onto the deck, where the mutineers spared them all. It is important to note here that the mutineers did not murder all their officers but decided their fate democratically, something the officers would never consider appropriate (Frykman, 2010: 174). Nash then announced to the crew that William Turner, the Master’s Mate, was to be the captain and Casey the first lieutenant, though again Casey refused without further recrimination. Three leading mutineers, Farrel, Bell and Elliot, then became lieutenants and the fate of the remaining officers was once again debated, while Cronin organized a special oath for all the mutineers to take to prevent them revealing any information about the mutiny in future, including the officers, ‘Not to know one another in any part of the globe, man or boy, if they should meet, nor call each other by their former names. This is my oath and obligation, so help me God’ (quoted in Pope, 1963: 189). The crew then debated what to do next. While some wanted to sail to the nearest island, Spanish or French, others realized that such a move would trap them and that it was better to risk the longer voyage to the Spanish Main, in particular La Guaira, in the Spanish colony of what is now Venezuela, once they had worked out where they were. The following day, the new lieutenants shared all the possessions of the officers equally amongst the crew who had taken active roles in the mutiny. The muster book, which listed the crew, was destroyed and all encouraged to take new names as they approached La Guaira, where each mutineer would need a letter explaining their action to the Spanish authorities. With four surviving prisoners, the mutineers reached La Guaira on 27 September. Leech and Elliott shaved off their beards, put on their newly acquired officers’ clothes, and

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  87 rowed ashore under a white flag in a boat with Antonio Francisco, a Spaniard, and ‘Captain’ Turner. There, Don José Vasquez y Tellez, the Spanish Governor General of La Guaira, received the four men and they explained that they had been forced to rebel against the tyranny of their captain and his officers (whom they said had been set adrift in a well-­supplied boat near Puerto Rico). They insisted that they now sought sanctuary in Spanish territory (or French or Dutch if that was impossible) but that they should not, on any account, be surrendered to the British. In return, they would surrender the ship to the Spanish. The Governor forwarded the information to his superior, Don Pedro Carbonell, Captain-­General of the Caracas province, who was visited by Leech, Turner and Elliott, and in the meantime the crew would be paid by the Spanish government and would be allowed onshore. Each mutineer was paid $25 and housed in the army barracks, while the four officers surrendered to the Spanish as Prisoners of War, along with one mutineer, the ship’s cook, Moncrieff. The remaining six Marines, and several mutineers, tried to surrender as Prisoners of War but, since they were not on the original list of those seeking to surrender, the Spanish refused their request. The Spanish authorities in Caracas then decided to accept (and refit) the Hermione to be renamed the Santa Cecilia, to give asylum to the crew, and to accept the crew as Spanish subjects—all subject to the agreement of the Spanish King. In the meantime, twenty-­five volunteers were necessary to crew the ship, imminently due to sail to Puerto Cabello, and the remaining mutineers were marched off to Caracas and then informed that they could seek work throughout the province, though most worked in the saltpans of Macuto, and all were forbidden from leaving it. In November, several mutineers were press-­ganged to work on their old ship, the Santa Cecilia, though several refused and were imprisoned as a result. In the absence of any other work, many complied; the alternative was the Spanish army, which all the marines and one sailor joined, while between eight and ten were given passes to find their way to  America. Others boarded ships where they could and wound their way around the Caribbean, sometimes on French privateers. William Bower signed on to an American ship headed for Philadelphia, but at Charleston he saw posters offering $1,000 rewards for the capture of the Hermione mutineers. On 20 October came the first news of the whereabouts of the Hermione to the British, when the Diligence intercepted the Spanish schooner, San Antonio, whose captain told Captain Mends, of the Diligence, that the Hermione’s crew had mutinied and taken the ship to La Guaira. The day before this, Admiral Parker at the Mole had received the grain ship HMS Grampus straight from the Nore, where six of its crew had been amongst the 412 court-­martialled for the Nore mutinies. The Grampus’s crew had then shown seeds of discontent on arriving at the Mole, and Captain Carne had arrested two of his sailors for mutiny. On 23 October Parker reprieved one mutineer and hanged the other—Colin McKelley—while at the same time ordering ‘a full allowance of all species of provisions’ to all the crews of the ships under his watch; a direct reflection of the Spithead concession of allowing 16 oz to the pound and rescinding the right of the bursar to cream off—that is steal—supplies. On 29 October, Parker ordered Captain Carne to put ashore (maroon) two further men, accused of fomenting mutiny (but whose ‘guilt’ could not be proved in a court martial), ‘near some Spanish territory . . . . As characters unworthy of remaining in His Majesty’s service, with certificates annexed to their discharges of the crimes with which they are charged. These examples, I trust will damp the infection that appears to have been so near taking place, of the destructive licentiousness which threatens the very

88  Mutiny and Leadership existence of the Navy . . . ’ (quoted in Pope, 1963: 214). Two days later, Captain Mends arrived at the Mole to tell Parker of the mutiny on the Hermione, and Parker immediately despatched Captain William Ricketts to the Governor of La Guaira with a letter for the Governor demanding the Hermione’s crew be returned to the British (since the two countries were at war there was no chance of the ship being returned peacefully). Parker also reported the mutiny to the Admiralty, and the news of ‘a most melancholy event’ was made public on 15 December. The previous week Captain Mends arrived in La Guaira with Parker’s note demanding the return of the crew and noting that the officers, who the mutineers had said were off-­loaded into a boat, were actually off-­loaded into the sea. Despite that, the Governor insisted that the decision lay with the King and they would have to wait. Admiral Parker, meanwhile, notified all his subordinates of plans to capture the mutineers, offering rewards for their capture, pardons for those turning King’s Evidence to implicate their comrades, and ‘condign punishment’ for the rest. Two of the mutineers were black, and both disappeared somewhere in the West Indies, never to be seen again. The first mutineer to be recaptured (five months later) was Mason, the Belfast-­born carpenter’s mate on the Hermione, who pointed out four others, who were taken after a French privateer, La Magicienne, was captured on 1 March 1798 by HMS Valiant sent to chase the ship by Admiral Parker the day before. Mason also listed the ringleaders as Turner, Nash, McReady, Farrel, Bell, and Cronin but suggested that the death of the three topmen the day before the mutiny had been the main cause. Be that as it may be, Admiral Parker, informed that a mutiny on board HMS Renommée had just been foiled, had the four mutineers from the Hermione (the Italians Marco and Montell; the Frenchman D’Orlanie; and the English man Delaney) charged with three separate capital offences: murder and mutiny; piracy (giving the Hermione to the Spanish); and taking up ‘arms against the King’ (sailing on La Magicienne). The three non-­British sailors protested that their allegiance was not to Britain (even though they had sworn oaths to defend the King when they entered the Royal Navy). Mason’s evidence against his former comrades made no reference to any particular action taken by any of them, nor was there any, but all four were found guilty of ‘mutiny, murder and running away with His Majesty’s ship Hermione and delivering her up to the enemy; and being found actually in arms against His Majesty’. The charge sheet actually said ‘and were actually on board . . . at the time the mutiny, murder and piracy were committed’, and they were sentenced to be hanged—and, ‘as a further example to deter others from committing, or being accessory to, such shocking and atrocious crimes, that, when dead, their bodies be hung in chains upon gibbets on such conspicuous points, or headlands, as the Commander-­in-­Chief shall direct’ (quoted in Pope, 1963: 231). On 19 March 1798, at 09.00 on board HMS York, the yellow flag and the single cannot shot marked the hanging of the four mutineers, after which the bodies were hung in chains until nothing but the skeletons remained. On 20 March the four mutineers from the Renommée were court-­martialled and three sentenced to death, one to jail for three months. Parker again wrote to the Spanish demanding the return of the mutineers but was rebuffed, just after half the crew of the British privateer, the Kitty Sean, mutinied over the division of spoils and sailed to La Guaira, where they negotiated for passage to North America and a cut of the value of the ship. At the same time, the remaining officers from the Hermione, along with a few Marines and the Captain and non-­mutinous crew of the Kitty Sean, were put on board a Spanish schooner and taken to Grenada where a prisoner

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  89 exchange took place before the British passengers went onto to Martinique. There, Southcott from the Hermione identified two further Hermione mutineers (Thomas Leech and William Mason) that had been taken from a ship by HMS L’Amiable. The court-­martial could have been held in London but Admiral Harvey decided an execution in the West Indies would be more of a deterrent than one in London and so, on 1 May 1798, a court martial tried Leech and Mason. All the witnesses (officers and Marines and the ship’s cook) from the Hermione spoke of Leech as a ring leader and Mason as a mere follower. Leech was hanged on HMS Alfred on 3 May and Mason was acquitted (Smith,  2011: 183–4). Two days later another court martial of four more Hermione mutineers occurred, this time on HMS Carnatic. John Brown, a Scottish main-­topman, turned King’s Evidence against three former comrades—Benives, Herd, and Hill—as well as naming twenty-­five other mutineers. Brown insisted that only Herd (an Irishman) was guilty, and even that was only of going into the Pigot’s cabin, not of killing him or even carrying a weapon, but to no avail: all three were hanged on 6 March on board the Carnatic. Two weeks later, Pigot’s cook John Holford and his son sailed to Jamaica and surrendered to the British authorities, while the Irishman James Irwin was picked up off an American ship bound for New York. The court martial was chaired by Rear-­Admiral Rodney Bligh and it found Irwin guilty of mutiny and deserting to the enemy, but not murder, and while he was sentenced to be hanged the court recommended mercy; he was subsequently transported to New South Wales for life. The Holfords were acquitted of all charges. Admiral Parker threatened to resign at the verdicts if Bligh was not dismissed and was incensed that the ‘men’ (Holford’s son was 12 years old at the time of the mutiny) had done nothing to resist the mutiny and that Irwin had been involved in refitting the ship under Spanish control and was therefore guilty of taking up arms against the King. Moreover, since—according to Parker—‘imposing discipline by terror’ was necessary in crises, it did not really matter whether those charged were guilty or not: what mattered was whether their executions served as a deterrent. In August 1798 two more from the Hermione were captured and tried: Adam Lynham from Dublin and Thomas Charlton from Stockton. On August 10 Lynham and Charlton were hanged and then exhibited on a gibbet on Gallows Point, Port Royal, Jamaica. On 10 December 1798 John Coe from Norfolk was also hanged next to the rotting corpses of Lynham and Charlton, to bring the total caught to seventeen, with eleven hanged, one transported for life, two turned King’s Evidence, and three acquitted. Ten more were ­captured in 1799, and in January Croaker and Ladson were hanged and gibbetted, and Stewart acquitted. In March 1799 five more from the Hermione were caught and court-­martialled: John Williams, John Slushing, James Perrett, Richard Redmond, and Jacob Fieldge. Fieldge claimed he had deserted before the mutiny and was arrested in Portsmouth; Williams had found his way back home to Liverpool and had given himself up to the Mayor; Perrett, the ship’s butcher, had travelled with Redman in a Spanish ship heading for Vigo and was almost there when a British frigate, HMS Aurora, intercepted them, at which point Perrett surrendered to the captain and pointed out Redman. At the court martial it was Southcott, Casey, Price, and Jones who gave evidence and in response Slushing declared that he had slept through the mutiny, while Perrett protested his innocence and told the court that he had betrayed Redman, who suggested that he favoured Captain Pigot and had tried to prevent the murders. The court was unimpressed: Slushing and Redman were found guilty

90  Mutiny and Leadership and sentenced to death; the other three were acquitted. One of the captains involved in the trial, Sir Edward Pellew, demanded that the execution of Redman occur immediately to set a good example to the rest of the fleet, though since the trial occurred on home soil they should have secured a warrant from the admiralty. But within the hour Redman was hanged. Quite why the timing was so important became clear later: on 4 August 1799—23 months after the mutiny on the Hermione—Admiral Parker wrote to a Captain Smith in the West Indies, ordering him to convene another court martial to try Timothy Donovan, Edmund Lawler, and Hans Peter for organizing an attempted mutiny on HMS Volage (Pope, 1963: 272). James Barnett, a 15-­year-­old youth, was pressed from an American ship near Florida and, once recognized, was the twenty-­fourth mutineer court-­martialled, this time on the evidence of another mutineer (John Holford). He was found guilty of murder and deserting to the enemy but with a recommendation for mercy on account of his age; Barnett served four months in jail. But the leaders of the mutiny remained at large until February 1799, when William Portlock, an American sailor, reported to the British Consul in Charleston that a sailor calling himself Nathan Robbins, on the American Schooner Tanner’s Delight, was probably a Hermione mutineer. Robbins was arrested and on 17 April John Forbes, now a lieutenant and formally Master’s Mate on the Hermione, identified Robbins as Thomas Nash. Nash claimed he had American citizenship and had been pressed onto the Hermione, but, despite significant protests by Americans on behalf of ‘Robbins’, Nash was given over to the British on board HMS Sprightly and taken to Port Royal to be court-­martialled for ‘mutiny, piracy, desertion and murder’ on HMS Hannibal on 13 August. Nash made little attempt to defend himself against the charges and within the week he was hanged and gibbetted. The American press was outraged that one of their citizens (Nash was actually Irish) could be so treated, and many suggested that American citizens who were illegally pressed into British service had the right to mutiny and murder their oppressors. On 1 June 1799, in the Firth of Forth, Captain Lydiard on board the sloop HMS Kite reported to the Admiralty that he had James Duncan, one of the Hermione mutineers, on board. Over a year later Duncan was court-­martialled on HMS Gladiator in Portsmouth, and on 10 July, now three years after the mutiny, Duncan was hanged. He was followed on 7 August by John Watson and James Allen; the latter had been Lt Douglas’s servant and was sixteen at the time of the mutiny but had been directly involved in murdering Douglas. Over a year later, in September 1800, William Johnson and a Dane, Hadrian Poulson, were tried. Johnson had surrendered to Captain Watkins on board HMS Néréide in Curaçao and was found guilty of taking the ship to the enemy but pardoned; Poulson was found guilty of murder and mutiny and hanged. A year later John Pearce, a Marine, was found guilty of mutiny and hanged. William Bower found his way from the Hermione to an American merchant ship that he sailed on for two years, in the full knowledge that the captain recognized him but said nothing to the British authorities. However, late in 1801, Bower was pressed onto HMS Minerva at Malta under the pseudonym William Miller. In January 1802, while the Minerva was at Portsmouth, Bower was spotted and arrested. He was hanged for handing the Hermione over to the Spanish. Two months later Thomas Williams, then serving on HMS Bittern in the West Indies, returned to Portsmouth, and Williams was recognized in town as David Forester by Pigot’s former steward, John Jones. Forester stood trial on

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  91 30 March on HMS Gladiator and was found guilty of murdering Pigot, as well as mutiny. He was hanged on 1 April. In 1806, nine years after the mutiny, thirty-­two mutineers had been tried but, with the exception of Nash, the ringleaders (Jay, Cronin, Turner, McReady, Smith, and Bell) were still free. In October that year, the ship’s doctor’s servant, John Hayes, 14 at the time of the mutiny and now 23 years old, was court-­martialled on board HMS Salvador del Mundo in Plymouth for assisting in the murder of the doctor and mutiny. At 11.00 on 17 October 1806, the yellow flag was hoisted on board the Salvador del Mundo, a gun was fired, and the last of the thirty-­three (22 per cent of the 150) mutineers to face trial, and the twenty-­fourth (16 per cent of the 150) to be hanged, swung from a platform specially built on the fo’c’sle. The Hermione, renamed the Santa Cecilia by the Spanish, was cut out from its moorings on 25 October 1799 by the aptly named HMS Surprise under Captain Edward Hamilton, leaving 119 Spanish dead and taking 231 Spanish prisoners. Eleven British sailors were injured in the attack, including Hamilton. The Santa Cecilia was renamed first the Retaliation and then the Retribution and was eventually broken up at Deptford in 1805. Chasing down the Hermione’s mutineers did not seem to quell resistance elsewhere: In March 1800 the crew of HMS Danae mutinied and sailed the ship to France, and in November that same year the crew of HMS Albanaise followed suit, this time sailing to Spain. Seven months later HMS Gaza was sailed to Italy by its mutinous crew. If the Hermione mutiny was never the political rebellion that the British Admiralty feared, a century later the most famous Russian mutiny was about to unfold into the first act of a long-­delayed revolution.

Potemkin 1905 The problems of the Russian navy were not that radically different from those of the British navy a century before, but the Russian case was exacerbated by the austerity measures forced upon it: between 1898 and 1904 only one third of the requested military budget was realized, and much of that was spent on new technology rather than improving the food and conditions for the serving soldiers and sailors. By the turn of the century the navy had started to recruit better-­educated men from the industrial classes, and that meant inducting some of their radical politics too. On 19 April 1902, Order No. 227 was issued by the Admiralty which warned all ‘vile traitors’ to stop reading illegal political propaganda and to hand it over to their officers. In July 1903, sailors on board the Berezan stopped work in protest against the tainted meat in their borscht (traditional beetroot-­based red soup), but the food issue was really just the symptom of a much deeper problem. As one sailor noted, ‘Relations between officers and lower ranks were unbearably onerous, most of the officers viewed the sailors as two-­legged farm animals who could be beaten or abused’ (quoted in Zebroski, 2003: 12). If Russian society was still rooted in the shadow of serfdom, the Russian Navy was still overshadowed by the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905, which led to 10,000 Russian dead, wounded, or captured and twenty ships lost—two thirds of the fleet—at the hands of ­better equipped and trained Japanese opponents, who only lost three torpedo boats and 117 sailors. This deeply unpopular war over Korea, between February 1904 and September

92  Mutiny and Leadership 1905, fed the latent hostilities and resentments in the army, navy, and society, and although the political left tried to make inroads into the forces in 1904, it was not until the revolutionary upsurges of 1905 that the links between radicalism in society and the military became fused. In early 1905, desertion rates soared, and mass dissent in military units involved in the war became common, but the greatest political unrest was on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in St Petersburg on 9 January. This was well away from the front line, where civilian protesters tried to present a petition to the Czar about increased wages and reduced hours, as well as universal suffrage and an end to the Russo-­Japanese War. They were shot down in their hundreds by soldiers of the Imperial Guard, leading to general unrest across Russia and the use of the army to patrol the cities of major cities. The Russian police now began to conduct extensive surveillance on several Social Democratic groups in the Black Sea Fleet, and the latter responded by forming (with the Sevastopol branch of the new Russian Social Democratic Labour Party) Tsentralka, a covert naval committee, including A.M.  Petrov from the Prut, G.N.  Vakulenchuck, and A.N.  Matiushenko from the Potemkin—the largest and most modern battleship in the Black Sea Fleet, complete with 12-­inch guns (see Figure 2.3). The Tsentralka began planning a mutiny in the Black Sea Fleet to commence on 21 June 1905, during fleet exercises in Tendra Bay, that would, they hoped, spark a greater revolution in the country. The plan called for control to be exercised through the Rotislav, the flagship of the fleet, so that, while the active mutineers would initially be low in number, most sailors would comply with signals from the flagship.

Figure 2.3  The Potemkin 1905: Mutinying sailors (Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  93 On 12 June the Potemkin, escorted by Torpedo Boat No. 267, left Sevastopol heading for Tendra Bay on its maiden voyage. They reached Odessa on 13 June, and the Torpedo Boat landed to collect provisions, only to discover the town was in the grip of a general strike that involved armed stand-­offs between strikers and the police, supported by Cossacks. Securing provisions proved very difficult but eventually over a thousand pounds of meat was bought by Warrant Officer Makarov, a butcher, who insisted it came from animals that had been slaughtered just a day or two before. The meat was returned to the Potemkin on the morning of 14 June just as the crew were eating breakfast, and the foul smell from the meat drew their attention, as did the number of maggots crawling over it. At 10.00 a cook reported the problem to Makarov, and eventually the ship’s captain, Evgenii Golikov, accompanied by the senior surgeon, Dr Sergei Smirnov, inspected the meat and the latter told the crew that if the meat was washed in salty water to remove the maggots it would be edible, indeed ‘excellent’ for borscht. Captain Golikov concurred, ordered everyone back to their stations, and told a sentry to note the name of anyone coming to look at the meat. At lunchtime the crew refused to eat the borscht containing the meat, and, when ordered to do so by Captain Giliarovskii, twenty-­five sailors still resisted, so Golikov ordered the marines to ‘restore order’. That usually meant to open fire, and Vakulenchuk and Matiushenko, among other resisters, ran for cover amongst the gun turrets while the of­fi­cers, led by Captain Giliarovskii, herded the rest of the resisters together in preparation for their arrest and possible execution. At this point those rebels by the gun turrets took over the bridge, seized the rifles of the sentries, and then tried to rescue their crew mates held captive by Giliarovskii and the marines, and Matiushenko struck an officer with a rifle butt. In the subsequent exchange of fire, Lt Neupokoev was killed and a first officer wounded, and the mutineer Vakulenchuk was also shot in the head and back. Matiushenko then took control of the mutineers, and five officers, including Captain Golikov, were hunted down and shot; the rest were arrested and kept under armed guard. The mutineers then informed the crew of their actions, the causes and intentions, and formed a ship’s commission to run the ship and organize the mutiny in the rest of the fleet. It comprised ten petty officers and eighty sailors, and it appointed Ensign Alekseev to be the new captain of the ship. On the evening of 14 June it anchored at Odessa for refuelling and then used Torpedo Boat No. 267 to put Vakulenchuk’s body ashore and to link up with local revolutionaries. The following day thousands of Odessa’s citizens visited the harbour to witness the mutiny and see the body of Vakulenchuk, and some of the local revolutionaries urged the mutineers to seize Odessa, but this was rejected by the ship’s commission who preferred to wait for the fleet mutiny to occur. Overnight the authorities in Odessa attacked the protesters in the city and about 1,000 people were killed; three of the mutineers were killed the next day when they attended the funeral of Vakulenchuk. In response the Potemkin fired three shells aimed at the temporary HQ of the troops in Odessa, but the shot missed and the bombardment was abandoned. Two days later the Potemkin left Odessa and headed out to meet the task force, led by A.K. Krieger, to put down the mutiny and regain control of the Potemkin; the task force consisted of five battleships, a light cruiser, two destroyers, and four torpedo-­boats. When the fleet approached the Potemkin, Krieger signalled the mutineers to surrender but they refused twice, and then the Potemkin sailed through the middle of the loyal fleet—twice—without any gunfire from either side, and on the second occasion it did this the crew of the battleship St George mutinied and joined the Potemkin, leaving the

94  Mutiny and Leadership loyal fleet to retreat.18 Embarrassed by the overt failure of his fleet, Vice-­ Admiral Chukhnin (Chief Commander of the Black Sea Fleet) then ordered a volunteer crew of officers to board the destroyer Stremitelny to destroy both mutinous battleships. In fact, the St George faced a mutiny of its own—against the original mutiny—and the ship was run aground in Odessa where the mutineers surrendered to the authorities, leaving the Potemkin to sail to Romania to try and find resupplies. Just after it had left, the small training ship the Prut, with Petrov on board, mutinied and arrived to join the Potemkin, only to find it had already sailed. Petrov then persuaded the crew to head to Sevastapol to initiate the mutiny there, but it was intercepted by the Stremitelny and forty-­four mutineers were arrested. On 24 August Petrov and three accomplices were executed by firing squad, eighteen others were im­prisoned, six sent to penal battalions in the army, and the remaining sixteen exonerated (Zebroski, 2003: 21). On 19 June the Potemkin arrived at the Romanian port of Constanza, but the mutineers failed to persuade the authorities to re-­provision them, and, having refused the offer of surrender, they steamed back to the Russian port of Feodosiia, arriving on 22 June, now low on provisions and desperate. The authorities there also refused to help, and when armed sailors went ashore to steal some coal barges they were attacked by loyal soldiers with several casualties and eight prisoners taken. After this debacle, the Potemkin returned once more to Constanza where it surrendered the ship to the Romanian authorities. All the mutineers were required to sign a letter agreeing not to engage in political agitation in Romania, and while most of them stayed, forty-­seven sailors, including the elected captain, Ensign Alekseev, surrendered themselves to the Russian consulate. Eventually 868 crewmen and three officers from the Potemkin were court-­martialled in Russia and three were sentenced to death, subsequently commuted to fifteen years’ hard labour; the rest were sentenced to various prison terms. Between then and 1917 the Sevastopol court martial handled forty-­two more cases of sailors who had returned from Romania, including Matiushenko who had lived in Odessa (via New York) under an assumed name since 1907. Matiushenko was hanged on 20 October 1907; the others received prison sentences. Approximately 4,000 other sailors involved in the various mutinies at the time were transferred to disciplinary battalions in other parts of the Russian military. Of the 600 sailors who elected to stay in Romania, some were arrested and deported for engaging in political activity. Others either stayed on or returned to Russia when the Provisional Government issued a general amnesty for all involved in March 1917.19 By September 1905, the war with Japan was over and settled through the Treaty of Portsmouth, but by this time the war had acquired such a high degree of unpopularity that soldiers and sailors began mixing with the strikers that seemed to proliferate across Russia. In October, sailors at both Krondstadt and Vladivostok mutinied, and the Czar’s reluctant response to all the unrest, under great political pressure, was the October Manifesto (1905) which promised freedom of speech and an elected (and powerful) parliament, the Duma.

18  This is the point in Eisenstein’s movie Potemkin where the film ends. When asked why he did not complete the narrative to its rather ignominious end, he suggested that he had ‘lost all interest in the wandering ship’ as soon as it lost its revolutionary potential (Trotter, 2019: 33). The romance of the revolution often looks better from a distance. 19 The Potemkin was recovered by the Russian navy and renamed the Panteleimon (the lowly peasant); it was broken up by the Soviet government in 1923 after the British Navy destroyed its engines in 1919 to prevent the Bolsheviks from using it.

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  95 Once it became clear that the Czar had no interest in actually fulfilling his promises, the social unrest returned with a vengeance. A mutiny in Sevastopol involved thirty-­four ships and 12,000 sailors, along with 10,000 soldiers—too late to save the Potemkin, though some of the sailors from the Potemkin were involved. On 26 November a sappers’ battalion mutinied, refusing their officers’ demands, and when the 2nd Grenadier Rostov Regiment was ordered to disarm the sappers, they too mutinied, taking two officers hostage and forming the first ever (Russian) soldiers’ committee. However, there were few links between the civilian and the military dissenters and within a week the Rostov Regiments’ mutiny had collapsed, leaving fifty tried for mutiny and nine condemned to life imprisonment, while the rest received lesser sentences. But the unrest was more significant in the east, in Siberia and Manchuria, where ­demobilization was desperately slow and discontent consequently high. On 20 November a Soldiers and Cossacks Strike Committee was formed in Irkutsk which demanded instant demobilization, the end of the death penalty, freedom to demonstrate and strike, and a ­constituent assembly. A 100,000-­strong protest march trailed through the city, but the return of a battle-­hardened Siberian regular rifle regiment soon put paid to any further thoughts of mutiny or rebellion. A Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies in Krasnoiarsk suffered the same fate when the local regiment returned from the front, this time with nine mutineers imprisoned for four to eight years, with shorter sentences for the remaining 116. In Chita, a Bolshevik-­inspired mutiny—supported by a significant proportion of the officers—saw the railway workers and soldiers unite in armed resistance which lasted until January 1906 when the fledgling soviet was compelled to surrender to two official forces that summarily executed several of the political and military leaders. Nevertheless, unrest continued in the countryside into 1907 in places, as the government delayed the demobilization for fear of adding further petrol onto the fires of discontent. But the embers continued to burn long after the surface revolt had been extinguished, and the government became increasingly reluctant to order military units to fire upon peasant communities for fear they would simply refuse. Indeed, in June 1906 first several different guards regiments refused orders, and even the Czar’s own Preobrazhenskii Regiment ­initially refused to march to Krondstadt in case they were asked to fire upon mutinous sailors in the Krondstadt fortress (Wildman, 1980: 38–74). This simmering rebellion would continue to burn underground for another ten years, by when the revolution would prove unstoppable.

Conclusion This chapter considered mutinies in revolutionary times. When the world has been turned upside down it might be expected that mutinies are the inevitable reverberations of pol­it­ ical discontent in the wider society, but this is not always the case. As Frykman (2010: 159) has suggested, when we move from the historical perspective rooted in individual naval heroes (of the likes of Nelson) to that of the crew, ‘from the quarterdeck to the forecastle’, we begin to notice that mutinies in the revolutionary times of the 1790s were not ­unusual events but unusually common: ‘Conservatively estimated, about a third of all ships deployed by these three navies [British, French, and Batavian/Dutch] experienced some form of collective revolt in the course of that decade’. This is the sixth refrain writ large: dissent is quotidian, not atypical.

96  Mutiny and Leadership In the Spithead and the Nore mutinies there are self-­evident murmurings of revolution in the background and in some of the language of the mutineers, but, ironically, the revolutionary rhetoric is more evident in the fears of the authorities than in the demands of the mutineers. And this is the point: whether those fears were ever legitimate or not is a moot point; what is less contested is that painting dissent as revolution allows the authorities to justify their ferocious response. When the authorities were unable to inflict the terror that cauterized a mutiny, as they could not at Spithead, then they generated a rhetoric much closer to that of the mutineers, where ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘negotiations’ are appropriate. Here we can see the first refrain at work, where what precisely the acts of the sailors meant was always the subject of dispute. This also points to the role of leadership that we shall return to in the final chapter: the odds against a successful mutiny are very high, and the punishment for failure is often terminal, so getting the right leadership is both critical and difficult to source. The importance of this refrain is painfully present in each of these mutinies: the purpose may be clear and considered justifiable by the mutineers, and the strategy may be appropriate, but if the tactical nous of the leadership is inadequate to the task then the consequences are dire, especially for those same leaders or at least those scapegoated to save the rest. In terms of success and failure, then, we might note that having good cause is seldom sufficient to ensure success: both the Nore and Spithead mutinies were rooted in the same stock of complaints, and the only real violence occurred at Spithead not the Nore, but the latter was a catastrophe for many of the mutineers whereas the former was a success for almost all of them. What differentiated the one from the other is not the legitimacy of the discontent but the ability of the leaders of both sides to acquire an array of supporters and undermine the supporters of their opponents, and this is not restricted to human sup­ porters. This is the seventh refrain: we may focus on Parker as the root cause of the Nore’s failed mutiny, or Spencer as the establishment hero who faced down the mob, or on the collective leadership of the Nore or that of the Potemkin, but the more robust explanation would highlight the much more difficult geographic and temporal conditions within which the failed mutinies occurred, rather than just the actions of their leaders. The Spithead mutiny also succeeds because it comes before the Nore, and the ante­ cedents are much more conducive to mutiny, and because it operated from a stronger network of social capital, with long-­term crews who knew each other better than those at the Nore. In addition, the geography of Spithead also facilitated the mutiny and undermined the Nore, and because the leadership of the mutiny at Spithead is more cohesive than at the Nore. Parker was abandoned by the Nore mutineers on board HMS Sandwich, and, unlike Admiral Howe at Spithead, Parker’s opponent, Earl Spencer, was a ruthless authoritarian, out for blood to disguise the reality that his allegedly sovereign power depended on the mutineers’ acquiescence not their loyalty. The Spithead mutineers had forged a strong bond of relational leadership amongst themselves and disenthralled themselves for the period of the mutiny; Spencer was much more adept than Howe at undermining the relationships at the heart of the Nore and much more interested in ­re-­enthralling the mu­tin­eers there. The Hermione mutiny fits much closer to the stereotype of a malignant captain flogging the crew literally to the end of their tether and then finding they had nowhere else to go but to flee, in the hope of escaping the clutches of the Royal Navy who, as ever, were set upon a ferocious revenge. But the crew of the Hermione may not have mutinied in the

Mutinies in Revolutionary Times  97 early 1780s when the ship was new because the context was different, so the critical issue is perhaps to focus less on Captain Pigot and more on the revolutionary times, when crews were less tolerant of brutal authority. Nevertheless, we should recognize that there does not seem to have been any long-­term conspiracy to murder Pigot and the mutiny was, to highlight the eighth refrain, a contingent effect of a whole sequence of events. Perhaps the most important point to note is the role of the third refrain: time and space are everything. The timing of the Potemkin was premature because the necessary supportive space was absent. The Hermione mutineers were successful because at the time of the mutinies they were in safe space and continued to elude their posse. The Nore failed because the timing was wrong and the space too dangerously exposed. Of course, this conclusion is framed by a hindsight that is irrelevant to the mutineers at the time, but while history does not repeat itself, it does rhyme, and oftentimes one side is aware of the rhyme while the other is deaf to it. The Nore, like the Potemkin, was always going to be difficult for the mutineers’ leaders to pull off, especially given the success of Spithead and the frailty of the Russian revolutionary forces respectively. In contrast, the leaders of the Hermione had a much more restricted goal—dispose of Pigot and escape—and more space and time to achieve that. Whether this was always their plan or it was simply a consequence of the previous day’s actions we shall never know. We should also be wary of assuming that the success of the Hermione’s mutineers—or rather those that escaped retribution—and that displayed at Spithead was a consequence of superior leadership compared to that present on the Potemkin and at the Nore; it may have also had something to do with luck, the eighth refrain.

3

Mutinies in War The Christmas Mutiny 1914 On 28 July 1914 ‘the war to end all wars’ started. It was, according to most of the main belligerents, going to be over by Christmas; it wasn’t, but at one point it looked like it might, not because one side was on the verge of an overwhelming victory but because a large proportion of troops on both sides along the Western Front stopped fighting on Christmas Eve and began fraternizing with each other, rather than shooting at each other. This was the Christmas Mutiny, or Christmas Truce, depending on your perspective and your nationality. Corns and Hughes-­Wilson (2002: 379–80) imply that during the First World War the British Army suffered less than one-­tenth of the mutinies that the French suffered, and they put this down to the superior discipline and cohesion. But it might also be down to what we count as mutinies, because if we include all the British troops involved in the Christmas Truce/Mutiny—who refused orders to fight in the face of the enemy— then the imbalance is much less significant. Indeed, perhaps as many as 50,000 British troops were involved (and an equivalent number on the German side), putting the numbers of mutinying troops as roughly the same as the French experienced between 1914 and 1918. Yet the mutiny was not hushed up by an embarrassed establishment but rather accepted as a fait accompli and relabelled as a ‘truce’. So, was it mutiny on a grand scale? The British and the Germans may have had little love for each other when the war started in 1914, but the mutual loathing ran contrary to a whole array of links. The Royal Navy had been invited to attend the Kiel Yachting week in June 1914, and few people seem to have assumed the summer of 1914 was going to be the last peaceful holiday for many years. Their Royal Families were directly related: the Kaiser was cousin to Nicholas II of Russia and George V, and the British royal family’s name was ‘Saxe-­Coburg-­Gotha’ via Albert, Prince Consort and husband (and cousin) of Queen Victoria. In July 1917, however, four months after German bombers, called Gotha  G.  IVs, began bombing London, King George, mindful that Nicholas had already been removed from his throne in Russia in March of that year, changed the family name to ‘Windsor’ (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 1–11). By late September 1914, the Western Front had stabilized, and a stalemate of trench warfare, interspersed with bombardments and sniper fire, became the norm. On 9 November 1914, the Garhway Rifles of the Indian Corps made what was probably the first ‘raid’ into enemy territory, but by December 1914 all the initial enthusiasm for victory by Christmas had waned on both sides, as the belligerents dug in and waited for the re­inforce­ments to fill the huge gaps cut into the original armies. On the British side, the regulars in the British Expeditionary Forces (BEF) became a beleaguered minority as the territorials and the first of Kitchener’s volunteers made up the numbers ensconced in the land of mud. Unofficial truces began to play out along the lines as both sides struggled to construct an implicit social contract of mutual survival. As Andrew Todd, of the Royal Engineers, wrote in a letter published by The Scotsman: Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0004

Mutinies in War  99 Perhaps it will surprise you to learn that the soldiers in both lines of trenches have become very ‘pally’ with each other. The trenches are only 60 yards apart at one place, and every morning about breakfast time one of the soldiers sticks a board in the air. As soon as this board goes up all firing ceases, and men from either side draw their water and rations. All through the breakfast hour, and so long as the board is up, silence reigns supreme but whenever the board comes down the first unlucky devil that shows as much as a hand gets a bullet through it.  (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 27–8)

The exchange of tinned food was also an occasional treat, British newspapers were thrown over on request, and the exchange of news was not an unusual event, with so many English-­speaking Germans on the front line. Indeed, the singing that preceded the Christmas Truce itself was already relatively common at some points of the front and calls for encores from the enemy usually fulfilled. This is what Ashworth (1980) called the beginning of the ‘live and let live’ system, in which opposing troops came to a tacit understanding that, since attacking an entrenched defensive position seldom achieved anything except huge losses on the side of the attackers, why not avoid overtly hostile acts and survive as long as possible until some new strategy changed the landscape? Such ‘live and let live’ systems were often silenced by the presence of an officer who demanded the soldiers exchanged fire not songs, but, as one Queen’s Westminster’s noted, ‘We used to be sporting and fire high with the first round—and so did Brother Boche’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 30). In fact, shooting matches at inert targets were relatively common (so much so that the London Illustrated News spoke of an Anglo-­German Bisley competition). There is even an account of a fight breaking out on top of the British trenches between two soldiers of the Leinster Regiment that was cheered on by the Germans, keen to support the general assumption on both sides, at this time anyway, that they were engaged in a sporting game. Similar events occurred on the French-­German lines with informal truces, one meeting in no man’s land on 29 November 1914 with German troops from Schleswig-­Holstein, and even an evening of musical entertainment put on by French troops in honour of a particularly brave German officer. He had been forewarned of the purpose of the event by a note attached to a stone the previous day and stood on top of the trench and saluted at the end of the soiree. When the commander of the British II Corps, General Sir Horace Smith-­Dorrien, who had escaped from the British disaster against the Zulus at the Battle of Isandhlwana in 1879 (Grint, 2000), became aware of such events he was concerned enough to note in his diary on 2 December 1914, Weird stories come in from the trenches about fraternizing with the Germans. They shout at each other and exchange certain articles . . . there is a danger of opposing troops becoming too friendly . . . I therefore intend to issue instructions to my Corps not to fraternize in any way whatever with the enemy for fear one day they may be lulled into a state of confidence as to be caught off their guard and rushed.  (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 2009: 34)

II Corp’s Document G.507 duly noted the development of the ‘live and let live’ system that was common amongst enemy troops at a stalemate and requested all subordinate commanders to ‘encourage the offensive spirit . . . Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and the exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing, are absolutely prohibited’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 36).

100  Mutiny and Leadership Given that the live and let live system was tacitly agreed, and very difficult for the ­leadership to prevent, it became clear that changes needed to be introduced to inhibit it; these would later include encouraging raiding parties and centralized decision-­making on artillery fire, so that local forces could no longer avoid shelling their enemy ‘comrades’ just past no man’s land. Two official attempts were made to broker a Christmas truce, one by Pope Benedict XV and the other by an American Senator, William S. Kenyon, but to no avail. A year later Henry Ford chartered a ‘peaceship’—the Oscar II—to do the same thing, but that was equally improbable, and someone put a cage with two squirrels on the gangplank at Hoboken, New Jersey, with a note saying ‘To the Good Ship Nutty’.1 And if peace looked a forlorn hope, the run-­up to the Christmas period was marked by public appeals for food and warm clothing for the troops of all sides. Socks were in particularly high demand, and Kitchener himself was credited with the so-­called ‘Kitchener Stitch’ that enabled the toe of a sock to be finished seamlessly (the technique was actually popular long before this period, according to Phillips, 2015). In fact, so great was the flow of Christmas parcels and cards to the front, to say nothing of the 335,000 Princess Mary gift-­boxes, that several officers became worried that essential supplies of munitions and supplies were being disrupted by the Christmas post. The Germans did the same, only adding Christmas trees to the list of supplies to be sent to the front. Despite the approaching season of goodwill, the British then engaged in a series of small-­scale assaults, mainly at the request of General Foch and General Joffre, that achieved little except increase the list of casualties on both sides, causing even Churchill, as First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, to ask: ‘Are there no other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ (quoted in Weintraub,  2001: 172). After the failed attack of the 2nd Battalion the Queen’s Regiment at La Chapelle d’Armentières on 18 December, which cost the one company involved six officers and seventy-­seven men, the Germans initiated a truce with candle-­lit Christmas trees and the traditional Stille Nacht Helige Nacht Christmas carol. At first the Queen’s troops fired at the trees but, when no fire was returned, they stopped, and then the Germans asked for a truce, whilst both sides retrieved and buried their dead the next morning, stopping to exchange cigarettes (Weintraub, 2001: 48). At other places, similar short truces occurred, often interrupted by rifle fire from adjacent regiments, but as the Christmas food parcels arrived—and were often immediately consumed—troops on both sides, including junior officers, began to launch singing concerts late at night, accompanied by the general lighting of German Christmas trees which had then arrived at the front. On 23 December, Lieutenant Malcom Kennedy of 2nd Battalion, the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), was informed that the Germans opposite were walking towards them, unarmed, waving and shouting; they were not allowed to approach the trenches directly, but a conversation in no man’s land did occur. On Christmas Day itself both sides exchanged friendly greetings as the Cameronians 1  Ford spent US$500,000 charting the Oscar II, and, when it failed, he threatened to burn down his Highland Park factory rather than turn it over to war production. Then he turned it over to war production, producing helmets, aeroplane engines, and tanks but promising to make no ‘blood money’ from it, if the US Government gave him $3.5 million to turn it over to war production. He made $29 million from the war production and said he’d donated it all to the US Treasury. He didn’t donate any of it. Ford is the only individual to be awarded medals from opposing sides in the two World Wars: the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938, for his anti-­Semitism; and the Franklin Institute’s Elliot Cresson Medal in 1928, for revolutionizing the car industry and for industrial leadership (Grint, 2000: 187–224).

Mutinies in War  101 were replaced by the Devonshire Regiment. Next door, the 1st Battalion, the Cameronians, did not experience any truce and alleged that this was because they were opposite Prussians—though in fact they were Saxons (Weintraub, 2001: 148). That same night, German soldiers from the XIX Corps put Christmas trees up and, on being quizzed by British soldiers about their purpose (Christmas trees—a German trad­ition—were to remain relatively unusual until the 1920s in Britain) informed their officers, and a private truce was agreed across the lines for 24th and 25th December. The growing spirit of goodwill was no doubt aided by the arrival of a frost on Christmas eve that did three things: reminded all sides that Christmas had arrived; turned the muddy blood bath into a scene of innocent snow; and suppressed the usual stench of chloride of lime (used to disinfect water), cordite, and corpses. Christmas Eve was, according to many reports, a really beautiful day, but it was also a good day for snipers, and several soldiers on both sides were shot, though the ‘goodnight kiss’—the last shot of the snipers at night— was given by 18.00. After that, no gunfire was heard in many areas, though the officers of both sides feared that this was just a prelude to an all-­out attack. Despite this, all along about two thirds of the German trenches, from about 19.00 to 20.00, Christmas trees were raised about the parapets, complete with lit candles, and German carols, especially ‘Stille Nacht’, were sung. Generally the British responded positively with calls for more German carols, their own carols, fireworks, and banners reading ‘Happy Christmas!’ At Ploegsteert, Major Arthur Bates of the London Rifle Brigade gave orders that his men were not to fire unless fired upon and, despite the counter-­offers to come over and join them, nobody left that trench that night. But the 1st Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire regiment had a different response to the same call to leave their trenches, and a British sergeant met two Germans in no man’s land and exchanged two tins of Maconochie’s stew and a tin of Capstan tobacco for some German cigarettes and cigars, plus an offer not to fire until Boxing Day. The Germans also agreed that if they were forced to fire by their officers they would start by firing high to give the British a chance to find safety. Although most truces were initiated by the Germans, not all were. The 1st Battalion the Somerset Light Infantry, also at Ploegsteert, began the conversation to bury their dead (Weintraub, 2001: 65). (See Figure 3.1). Just north of Ploegsteert Wood, it was the Scots of the 2nd Battalion the Seaforth Highlanders that began the singing, and once that had been established the Germans called on them to meet halfway to exchange gifts, which Corporal John Ferguson and two others did, soon accompanied by the rest of A Company. As Ferguson commented later, ‘Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill!’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 62). The 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade had the same experiences, only there it was two captains that met German counterparts. The brigade, containing the 2nd Battalion the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and 2nd Battalion the Royal Welch Fusiliers, at Houplines, included Lieutenant Ian Stewart, one of two from the British side, who exchanged cigars for bully beef with their German counterparts. The Royal Welch truce had started when Frank Richards and a colleague stuck a board with ‘A Merry Christmas’ written on it and, when it was not shot at, they jumped out of the trench and walked towards the Germans, where two Germans reciprocated and started a mass movement to the centre ground (Weintraub, 2001: 92–3). Close by, Major Buchanan-­ Dunlop, of the 1st Battalion the Royal Leicestershire Regiment, was the highest ranking officer to actually instigate a singing exchange. To the

102  Mutiny and Leadership

Figure 3.1  Christmas Day 1914: British and German Soldiers fraternizing at Ploegsteert, Belgium (© Imperial War Museum)

south, the 13th Battalion of the London Regiment did not respond to the German ­overtures, but the next battalion, the Royal Irish Rifles, were much more eager to engage and organized a meeting in no man’s land for Christmas Day. Captain R.J. Armes, from the 1st Battalion the North Staffordshire Regiment, became aware that his men were sat on top of the trenches on Christmas Eve chatting to the Germans and promptly organized a singing exchange, before agreeing to meet an officer midway to let both sides bury their dead, exchange gifts, and agree not to commence firing until midnight on Christmas Day; they even agreed to replicate the arrangements on New Year’s Day. Not everything went to plan: three riflemen from the Queen’s Westminster Rifles were found missing on Christmas Day, and it eventually transpired that they had got drunk and wandered into German lines, where they were made POWs because they had seen the layout of the German trenches and that posed a security risk. In the end they were released from military custody and imprisoned in civilian prisons for the duration of the war. Similarly, Pte. Murker, a German-­speaking scout from the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards, was instrumental in organizing a truce with the 158th Saxon Regiment, but he disappeared over the Christmas period (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 63–79). Along the Belgian and French front lines there are similar stories of songs being exchanged and German Christmas trees, but fewer accounts of any direct fraternization in no man’s land, perhaps because the French and Belgians regarded it as not no man’s land but theirs. Despite this, there were truces by the French 254th Regiment at Braine and by the 99th Regiment at Foucaucourt, where a German dog brought the original offer of a temporary ceasefire. Indeed, Weintraub (2001: 73) notes that the diaries of the 12th, 15th, and 20th Bavarian Regiments facing the French along the Somme noted the truces, as did the diaries of the 20th, 22nd, 30th, 32nd, 43rd, 52nd, 99th, 132nd, 137th, 142nd, 162nd, 172nd, and 254th French Regiments. Even the French Foreign Legion, noted for its ­belligerence, held a truce on Christmas Day, prompting the French newspaper Le Matin to remind French soldiers that ‘any soldier found guilty of holding conversation with the

Mutinies in War  103 enemy would be court-­martialled and shot for treason’ (quoted in Weintraub, 2001: 73). Sometimes the truces were not officially recorded but took place nonetheless, so, for example, both the French 29th and 74th regiments held truces of varying lengths and degrees of fraternization. That truce lasted even after the French Lt Colonel responsible for the 74th Regiment area ordered French artillery to fire over their own troops fraternizing in no man’s land but at a height that would not kill either side. Both sides quickly worked this out and continued the fraternization as the artillery burst harmlessly overhead (Weintraub, 2001: 76). The Algerian troops of the 45th Division of the Armée d’Afrique were clearly bemused by the sight of a German chef cooking in plain view and attempted to shoot him on Christmas Eve, whereupon he grabbed a Christmas tree and ran, undeterred by the rifle fire, to the centre of no man’s land where he stopped, set the tree down and lit a candle. At this point the Algerians were informed of the Christian tradition and the consequent ­temporary truce and stopped firing. At Pervyse, Belgian troops set up a makeshift altar and organized a Midnight Mass; for the duration of the service, no shot was fired by the German troops opposite them (Weintraub, 2001: 29, 32, 46). There are also accounts of fraternization being stopped by a single rifle shot from either side, though agreements were made that single shots would generally be taken as mistakes and apologized for rather than manifestations of bad faith. Indeed, the Frankfurter Zeitung talked of the original ‘daredevils’ from both French and German lines that began the fraternization but were often driven back by occasional firing until there were simply too many troops in no man’s land to make them return—except when the artillery of either side started up. Elsewhere Ernst Jünger noted that one of his colleagues was shot through the head by a British sniper on Christmas Day, and when the British then made overtures to call a truce for the rest of the day they were fired on in response (Weintraub,  2001: 61–2, 140). On Christmas Day itself, many of the British trenches began with either a religious ­service or soldiers from both sides just walking into no man’s land to continue the conversation from the day before, though it would seem that few understood just how widespread this practice had become. Sometimes, boards were painted and hoisted suggesting a continuing truce before anyone risked the walk to the centre ground, but other times it just seems to have happened without any prerequisite conditions, more often than not from the German side with one brave individual taking the initiative and walking into the ­centre unarmed. Sometimes the movement was lodged into arguments that, since both sides were fundamentally ‘Saxons’ (unlike the Prussians that the British apparently disliked considerably more), they should stop killing each other or, at the very least, bury their own dead. Of course, the division between the ‘good’ Saxon and the ‘evil’ Prussian often made little sense of the makeup of the German divisions (Cron, 2013), but it fitted the British to divide the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’ Germans when faced with contradictory behaviour and became a classic example of what psychoanalysts called ‘splitting’ (see Klein, 1997). Thus Major Buchanan-­Dunlop of the 1/Leicesters, who suffered three wounded and two killed on Christmas Day, explained it in a letter back home in terms of being placed between Prussians—‘very vicious indeed’—and Saxons—‘jolly fellows for the most part’—and while the former continued the fighting throughout the period, the latter did not. At La Basseville, the 134th Saxons were ordered by their officers not to fire on the enemy unless absolutely necessary and, following whistling and shouting, attempts were

104  Mutiny and Leadership made to engage in conversations with the British, only for their efforts to be stymied by German troops from the 106th Regiment, from Leipzig (in Saxony not Prussia) who con­ tinued to fire (Weintraub, 2001: 53–4). And when Corporal Ferguson, of the 2nd Battalion the Seaforth Highlanders, was wounded on Boxing Day, having spent Christmas Day fraternizing with the ‘friendly Bavarians’, he was then caught in an attack that caused him to lose an arm and complain that he ‘had six pieces of shrapnel and two bullets removed . . . I knew it was not our new-­made friends the Bavarians who shot me, but the artillery of the Prussians . . . . The dogs’ (quoted in Weintraub, 2001: 168). It may well have been the Prussian artillery that caught him, but the bullets could only have come from his erstwhile friends, the Bavarians opposite him. Sometimes recovering the dead reignited the pre-­existing hostilities, but often both sides maintained their friendly relations for the rest of the day, and it was usually soldiers, NCOs, or junior officers that initiated and continued the fraternization and senior officers that tried to restrict or prevent it. Lt Col. McLean, of the 6th Battalion Gordon Highlanders, made several attempts to order his men back into their trenches but to no avail, so great was the extent of the fraternization. However, the Chaplain of the neighbouring Battalion (Adams of the 6th Gordon Highlanders), who was with McLean at the time, smoothed the problem out by insisting that this was a good time to collect and bury their dead, and that seems to have given McLean the face-­saving mechanism to allow the latter to step away from the disciplinary issue. Next along the line from the Gordon Highlanders, Captain Giles Loder, adjutant of the Second Battalion the Scots Guards, noticed his neighbours retrieving their dead from no man’s land and at about 11.00 walked with a white flag to a farm building between the two lines to try and arrange the same with his German equivalent, Major Baron von Blomberg. The German was unable to secure the agreement of higher command on Christmas Day but still agreed to a two-­hour truce to recover the dead on both sides, an event that was marked off by a joint religious ceremony nearby at Fleurbaix. Along the line, the 2nd Battalion of the Bedfordshires also faced the 17th Division Bavarians who has asked for a ceasefire to bury their troops: the Bedfordshires agreed not to fire but did not leave their own trenches until a single German lieutenant approached them unarmed, shouting that his life was in their hands and asking if a British officer would meet him halfway. One did, and the truce was on, again because leadership in such conditions required an immense amount of courage, which has ­little to do with the formal hierarchy where seniority determines what happens (Weintraub,  2001: 64–7, 86). Elsewhere, German and British troops buried dead French soldiers together, and everyone later remarked on the eerie silence that prevailed everywhere: no shell fire, no rifle fire, and no aeroplanes; just peace and conversation. Many who witnessed the day would later note it as the most extraordinary day of their lives, as men from both sides left their trenches and joined in the festivities, helped by the fact that so many Germans spoke English and had indeed worked in Britain before the war. Once the food and cigars had been exchanged, many men seemed keen to swap buttons or belts or cap badges. For some British soldiers, the German spiked helmet, the picklehaube, was the prize, but these had recently been replaced by a different helmet so they were few and far between.2 However, a 2  No side used metal helmets until 1915 when the French first introduced them to reduce the number of head wounds, primarily caused by the preponderance of shrapnel artillery shells that burst overhead. The British used

Mutinies in War  105 soldier from the London Rifle Brigade managed to exchange one for bully-­beef and jam, only to be informed the following day that the original owner needed to borrow it back for a parade; it was duly returned and then given back to its new owner in exchange for another tin of bully beef after the parade. It was also on this section that a Londoner, on recognizing his (German) barber from pre-­war London, had another haircut in no man’s land by the same German barber. What was also noticeable was how few of the conversations seemed to bring up the war itself, or at least the guilt of aggressors, and how often the cause of the war was laid either at the door of their own newspapers or of the Prussians. But not all the front lines were peaceful, and approximately one third remained as they had been for months, often unaware that, close by, troop fraternization was common. The 2nd Battalion the Grenadier Guards had lost many men on Christmas Eve and responded to the German request for a truce with rifle fire, and in some places the Germans did the same to British overtures. In other places, soldiers were still being shot and killed on Christmas Day: Private Ernest Palfrey and Sergeant ‘Blackwood’ Jones, both of the 2nd Battalion the Monmouthshire Regiment, were shot and killed after burying dead comrades and during an agreed truce. On the same day, Sergeant Frank Collins was shot after exchanging cigarettes with the Germans, an event that caused the Germans to apologize soon after the event (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 80–106; Weintraub, 2001: 146–7). Faced with a situation that was beyond immediate resolution, simply because the numbers ‘mutinying’ were so high, senior officers on both sides either just accepted the state of affairs facing them or rationalized the action as one compatible with improving defensive building—work that could not be done safely under normal conditions. Brigadier Walter Congrieve VC, CO of 18th Brigade, was one of the former and wrote that having noted the ‘extraordinary state of affairs, the men had arranged a truce between themselves . . . the officers also walked and smoked, even to a colonel. At 4 p.m, it was arranged that all were to be back in their trenches and, at midnight, firing would commence’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 108). The latter case of rationalization in which, in effect, rather than the truce being a problem, it was actually advantageous, is exemplified by Major Arbuthnot, OC 24 Battery, 38th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery at La Chapelle d’Armentières, who allegedly put on a German uniform and entered the German lines to note the position of machine-­gun posts. It was common for officers to use the truce to collect and bury their own dead and strengthen their own defences, even to the point of sharing tools with the enemy and improving both defences simultaneously (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 130–1). By and large ‘enemy’ troops were not allowed into the trenches opposite them, but there are several accounts of even this being broken, sometimes with officers involved, including two from the Scots Guards who dined with their opposite numbers in the British trenches, while six soldiers of the Worcestershire Regiment visited German trenches for Christmas lunch (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 129). Sometimes these visits were not welcomed and the 2/Lancashire Fusiliers imprisoned a German who had not been blindfolded before entering British lines. On the other hand, two Germans from a Landsturm Regiment were made POWs by an extra-­keen British soldier, only for their release to be ordered by his own officer. soft Service Dress Hats until September 1915, when Brodie Helmets were introduced, but they did at least use khaki as camouflage from the beginning of the war; the French began the First World War still dressed in their nineteenth-­century blue coats and red trousers.

106  Mutiny and Leadership And it does seem to be the case that football, of some variety, was played by some troops against their enemy but, given the state of the trenches in no man’s land, and the likelihood of footballs being available, it is more likely that the games were unorganized mass kick-­abouts, with improvised footballs made of bully-­beef tins or their German equivalent or caps stuffed with straw, rather than proper games between teams with real footballs. Nevertheless, it should be noted that one Royal Army Medical Corps major suggested that in his area a game did occur and the Saxons won 3–2 (he made no mention of penalties), and Ernie Williams, a territorial soldier from the 6/Cheshires, did describe a real football being used in his area near Wulverghem (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 138–9). Elsewhere there are mentions of football games by the Bedfordshires, Lancashire Fusiliers, Welch Fusiliers, Sherwood Foresters, Warwickshires, London Rifles, Queen’s Westminsters, Argylls and Sutherlanders, and 133rd and 134th Saxon Regiments. In fact, there were several professional players on both the German and the British sides, with some Germans claiming to have played for British sides before the war. In the event, real footballs were issued to each platoon on the British side, but not until the winter of 1917 (Weintraub, 2001: 111, 117–35). As light faded on Christmas Day, most troops returned to their own trenches, and while there are few accounts of small arms during the night, it was the case that long range artillery—from troops on both sides that had not engaged in the truce—returned to break the spell. The same thing happened the next morning, Boxing Day: many woke up to peace, except from the distant artillery, and even where war was recommenced it was preceded by an array of antecedent niceties. At 08.30 Captain Stockwell of the 2/Royal Welch Fusiliers fired three shots in the air, climbed onto the parapet, and raised a flag saying ‘Merry Christmas’ on it; a German Captain responded by clambering up on his side with a sheet saying ‘Thank you’, the two officers bowed to each other, the  German fired two shots in the air, and hostilities were supposed to resume (Weintraub, 2001: 157). In the event, not a single shot was fired all day, and although troops did not reconvene in no man’s land, they continued to talk to each other across no man’s land all day. Elsewhere some desultory firing did occur but it was usually into the air, and only when senior officers were present to ensure hostilities had resumed. A vizefeldwebel (staff sergeant) from the 107th Regiment of the XIX Saxon Corps, on leave in Leipzig, recalled: The difficulty began on the 26th, when the order to fire was given, for the men struck . . . while [the officers] stormed up and down, and got, as the only result, the answer, ‘We can’t—they are good fellows, and we can’t.’ Finally the officers turned on the men with, ‘Fire, or we do—and not at the enemy!’ Not a shot had come from the other side, but at last they fired, and answering fire came back, but not a man fell. ‘We spent that day and the next . . . wasting ammunition in trying to shoot the stars down from the sky.’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 149)

Indeed, the truce continued on 27 December and beyond in several places, with an occasional outburst of fire to placate senior officers doing their rounds. As Lance Corporal Bell noted, on 30 December, ‘The other day the German CO opposite expected a visit from a general, and said he would be opening fire between 11 and 12, and we had better keep our heads down’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 166). Lt H. Wyllie of the 9/Hampshires recalled:

Mutinies in War  107 A party of unarmed Saxons [107th Regiment] continued to wander about between the lines after the prescribed time was up. They were duly warned by our men but took no notice, whereupon one of our officers ordered some men to fire over them. This had no effect so a German officer sang out, “Fire at them, I can’t get the beggars in!” The English officer would not do this as they were unarmed but he rang up a battery to put a few shells over the German trench which they did, but the Saxons, quite unperturbed, sat down just outside our wire line and watched their pals getting shelled. (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 168)

Elsewhere the reluctance to fire upon ‘new friends’ was less significant: Vera Brittain recalled a British officer telling her that a replacement company commander for the one who had agreed to the truce ordered his soldiers to fire upon a group of German soldiers who began openly mending wire after the first truce—and they did so without compunction. General Sir Horace Smith-­Dorrien, having already warned his subordinate commanders to maintain ‘an offensive spirit’ in the approaching Christmas season, three weeks prior to Christmas Day, was, with the exception of the Royal Engineers, ‘considerably disappointed with the state of affairs’ he found. On the evening of Boxing Day, having been carefully shown two parts of the line that had not seen any fraternization, he wrote another memorandum after reading about the various friendly gatherings . . . recounting that many officers had taken part . . . This is only illustrative of the apathetic state we are gradually sinking into, apart also from illustrating that any orders I issue on the subject are useless, for I have issued the strictest orders that on no account is intercourse to be allowed between the opposing troops . . . I am calling in particular as to names of officers and units who took part in this Christmas gathering, with a view to disciplinary action.  (quoted in Weintraub, 2001: 168–9)

This was little more than a bluff: no serious action was taken against any officer or unit on either side because the deceit of enthrallment had been exposed and shown to be a paper tiger in the face of subordinate solidarity and dissent. Opposite the London Regiment, or Kensingtons as they were known, on the evening of Boxing Day, a German deserter informed them that a German attack was planned for 11.15, so the whole line went on alert and waited while the artillery began pounding the German lines to destabilize the pending attack. The Germans, in turn, on receiving the shell-­fire assumed they were about to be attacked and also went on alert. In the end both sides spent the while night on alert when, in the event, no attack was planned by either side (Weintraub, 2001: 55). By the morning of 28 December the dry cold weather had turned back to wet cold weather, and the covering of the bodies and mud in no man’s land with white returned to gruesome normality, but there was little significant combat along the British German line until March 1915 and the battle of Neuve Chapelle, and in some area the truce continued in all but name for several days and sometimes weeks. Field Marshall Sir John French, on hearing of the fraternization, recalled a similar experience in the Boer War in December 1900, and this captures the dilemma of high command well: When this [fraternization] was reported to me I issued immediate orders to prevent any recurrence of such conduct, and called the local commanders to strict account, which

108  Mutiny and Leadership resulted in a good deal of trouble. I have since often thought deeply over the principle involved in the manifestation of such sentiments between hostile armies in the field. I am not sure that, had the question of the agreement upon an armistice for the day been submitted to me, I should have dissented from it. I have always attached the utmost im­port­ ance to the maintenance of chivalry in war which has almost invariably been characterized in every campaign of modern times in which this country has been engaged. (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 158–9)

This represents a good illustration of the problem of power, for once the truce was in place the assumption that rank ‘possessed’ power was already undermined, and it was clearly impossible to arrest all the soldiers engaged—because they were almost all involved and there was no one left to do the arresting. In the end, the Field Marshall released a press statement covering the return to combat in January that nicely captured the rationalization of a wide-­scale if temporary mutiny: ‘After a comparative lull, on account of the stormy weather, the Allies and the Germans are again actively engaged in Northern France and Belgium’ (quoted in Weintraub, 2001: 177). In contrast, Major-­General J.A.L. Haldane, GOC of 3rd Division, issued orders to his officers as Christmas approached to discourage fraternization, and he had a copy of a report alleging German atrocities against Belgium citizens distributed to the troops. As he suggested, ‘I had no fear of weakness as regards the behaviour of the Scottish and Irish soldiers, but their more tender-­hearted and forgetful comrades of the southern kingdom could not be trusted to exhibit the proper attitude. On my front, therefore, no fraternization took place’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 160). There appears to have been no fraternization along the front of the British I Corps (commanded by Haig who became head of the new British First Army on Boxing Day 1914; Smith-­Dorrien took over the new Second Army the same day), but Lt General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s IV Corps did experience several truces along the lines held by 7th Division and 8th Division (though Rawlinson was unaware of the latter). As Rawlinson noted in his diary entry for 27 December 1914: ‘There has been a certain friendliness between our men and the Germans in the trenches— Xmas day was looked on mutually as a peace day and both sides went out freely in front of their trenches and buried their dead . . . [T]hey conversed freely and exchanged cigarettes— I am rather suspicious of them—but many of them expressed themselves as heartily sick of the war’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 161). Major-­General Thompson Capper, CO of the 7th Division, was equally sanguine about the truce: ‘Recently, I have purposively kept things rather quiet, as so much work has to be done at close range from the enemy, that I could only carry it out by exercising a certain amount of forbearance’ (Quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 161). The German high command took an equivalent line of rationalization, arguing that they needed to strengthen their defences, and therefore decided on an informal truce until they were ready to defend themselves better. So, having decided not to fight until both sides were better prepared, or because neither side could actually coerce their own side to fight, the Christmas truce—or Christmas Mutiny, because that’s what it was in all but the official literature—continued for the Germans until 29 December when an official army order forbade all fraternization with the enemy as high treason, punishable by death. Even this did not stop an odd German visit on New Year’s Eve, often by inebriated Germans who were usually returned ‘home’, and many sections celebrated the start of the New Year by firing into the air and singing.

Mutinies in War  109 On the British side, an order of 1 January 1915 directed that ‘informal understandings with enemy are to cease. Officers and NCOs allowing them are to be brought before a court martial’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 163). Some truces persisted well into January and in certain places into February and even into Easter. No British soldier, of any rank, was seriously disciplined and certainly not court-­martialled, though a couple had their leave stopped. Even Major Buchanan-­Dunlop of the 1/Leicesters, whose singing with the Germans made the headlines in many British newspapers at the time, seemed underwhelmed by the prospect of facing Smith-­Dorrien, as he wrote at the time: ‘I have no ­military career to blast [he was a territorial officer, thus only there for the duration of the  war] . . . Also I don’t mind generals, and am not at all afraid of them’ (quoted in Brown and Seaton, 1994: 180). Brigadier-­General Ingouville-­Williams accused Major Buchanan-­Dunlop of disobeying orders by leaving his trench, despite explicit orders to the contrary, to which the accused responded by saying that he had not disobeyed orders because he left the trench securely guarded, and anyway he had already told the General what he had done and had received no rebuke at the time (he was subsequently promoted to Lt Col. of his battalion). As Christmas 1915 came around, and the lines were almost identical to those of the previous year except better established, deeper, and ostensibly impregnable, the war appeared to have changed little, except open submarine warfare was now established, gas was part of several attacks, and Zeppelins had begun to raid Britain. In November there were short-­term truces south of Ypres between the Germans and two consecutive British battalions: the 1/10 Liverpool Scottish and the Northumberland Battalion. But the authorities were already aware of the potential rerun of Christmas 1914 and strict instructions were delivered by the new Commander-­in-­Chief, General Haig, to the British troops not to fraternize with the enemy, a warning that was enhanced by some local commanders insisting that the death penalty awaited anyone breaking this order. On 12 December 1915, the Germans issued an order insisting that anyone fraternizing with the enemy would be guilty of a crime ‘verging on high treason’. Indeed, although German troops in several places made some efforts to re-­engage the truce they were almost invariably frowned upon and often answered with gunfire by the British. There were occasional cases of Franco-­German truces, but they were small-­scale and short-­lived. There is even one account of a German unit (235th Reserve Infantry Regiment) providing a carol concert for their British enemy at Langemarck, but that did not lead to fraternization, though at least it ensured that no shot was fired on Christmas Eve. The only record of fraternization between British and German troops occurred between Major General Lord Cavan’s Guards Division involving the 1 and 2/Scots Guards, the 1 and 4/Coldstream Guards, and the 14 and 15/Royal Welch Fusiliers on the British side and the 95th Bavarian Reserve Infantry on the German side. Two of the British officers involved, Captain Miles Barne and Captain Sir Iain Colquhoun (whose wife was the niece of Margot Asquith, wife of the Prime Minister) of the 1/Scots Guards, had agreed to a German officer’s request for a 45-­minute truce to bury their dead. Having finished the burials in thirty minutes the troops fraternized for the remaining fifteen minutes before returning to their trenches as ordered when distant artillery fire opened up from both sides, but no small arms fire occurred for the rest of the day. Barne’s brigadier was unconcerned by the events, but Lord Cavan was, and his report led to the arrest of both officers on 4 January 1916. Colquhoun’s ‘Prisoner’s Friend’ was none other than Raymond Asquith, son of the Prime Minister and

110  Mutiny and Leadership an officer in the Grenadier Guards. The court martial occurred on 18 January 1915 and Barne was acquitted, while Colquhoun was sentenced to be ‘reprimanded’, a sentence subsequently commuted by Haig because of Colquhoun’s distinguished war record (he later became a brigadier general and survived the war; Barne was killed in a friendly fire incident by a British aeroplane in 1917) (Brown and Seaton, 1994: 197–206). By Christmas 1916 only a vague refraction of two years previously showed itself: the 5/King’s Liverpool Regiment were asked by the Germans opposite them in the Ypres area for a truce but were rewarded by sniper fire ordered by one Major Gordon—who was himself called a ‘dirty dog’ for his unsportsmanlike response to a genuine request made at great risk, and no further firing occurred by either side for the whole of the day. By Christmas 1917 even this mere morsel of humanity had been extinguished by a year of blood-­letting on an industrial scale, though again one or two attempts were made by the Germans for a temporary truce, notably opposite the 1/Royal Marines at Cambrai, but all were rebuffed, though gifts were exchanged in no man’s land again, for the last time. As Weintraub (2001: 177) concludes, by this time it wasn’t a question of who was right but who was left, after 6,000 deaths per day for the forty-­six months after the 1914 Midwinter Mutiny. And this might be the most important point: that the professional soldiers who had begun the war, and maintained some level of chivalry towards combat, had themselves been consumed by the war and been replaced by short-­term civilians whose only interest was not to fight the war ‘properly’ according to some ancient and now irrelevant code of ethics but to get the war over, using whatever means necessary. But perhaps the most important aspect of the Christmas mutinies for us relates to the sheer scale of the undertaking and the dispersed and decentralized nature of the leadership involved. In that most coercive of organizations, a military unit at war, individuals and small groups had taken the initiative to lead their comrades and their opponents in mutinous acts of dissent without any form of subsequent punishment or discipline. They had exposed the weakness of the hierarchy when faced with mass dissent without threatening the coherence of the war efforts on either side, and perhaps that was the key: know your enemy.

Russia 1917 While the 1914 Christmas mutinies on the Western Front had nothing to do with Russia or with radical political ideology, the mutinies of 1918–19 across the warring parties in the west almost certainly did. That was either in terms of providing permission to other soldiers, providing an example, or, from the opposite direction, initiating fear on the part of the authorities that any manifestation of dissent—of any kind—was merely the preamble to a full-­scale mutiny and an attempted revolution. So what made the Russian soldiers, most of whom historically had been illiterate or at least uneducated peasants, such role models for the western mutineers in 1917? With 15 million soldiers in the Russian army, 2 million of whom died, the first three years of war on the Eastern Front had strained the already fragile loyalty of the troops. Before the reforms instigated by Count Dimitry Milyutin (Field Marshall and Minster of War for most of the 1860s and 1870s), the army had indeed proved a loyal, if not subjugated, force, led by an officer corps totally reliant upon the Czar for their positions and

Mutinies in War  111 dominant in the state to the extent that the state bureaucracy was militarized in both name and functionaries. The army itself was totally controlled by noble families whose ranks both fed the officer corps and reflected the status of the families, with the most senior dominating the guards and cavalry, and most of their activities related to the pageantry of the Czar. Not unlike the British officer class around the First World War, riding and parading were the main focus of the officer corps, and professional interest in strategy, technology or combat itself was deemed ‘bad sport’. For instance, in the 1924 British Cavalry Training Manual, consisting of 377 pages, 56 per cent was dedicated to equitation, 25 per cent was on ‘drill and ceremonial’, and only 9 per cent had anything to do with ‘weapons or field operations’. The 1926 British Infantry Manual had nothing on combat at all, preferring to concentrate on drill (153 pages) and ceremonial (64 pages) (Grint, 2014: 248). But short-­term conscription, and the opening up of military schools to non-­aristocratic sons, started a slow liberalizing of the social make-­up and character of the Russian army, though not Russian society. As Wildman (1980: xvii) suggests, ‘the war greatly aggravated the deepest cleavage in Russian society—not between the autocracy and the political forces, but between the cultured and non-­cultured layers’. In fact, by the time the Czar was toppled in the first revolution, in February/March 1917, the army was no longer full of illiterate and bonded peasants,3 involuntarily recruited to a lifetime in the army and slavishly loyal to the orthodox Christian church and the Czar, but actually comprised a significant proportion of educated intellectuals, workers, and literate peasants. But the officer corps was still dominated by the sons of the upper nobility, especially in the guards’ regiments, yet that same leadership had overseen two catastrophic military defeats in Crimea (1853–6) and against the Japanese (1904–5). Czar Nicholas I (1894–1917) had allowed some reforms, under Kuropatkin’s tenure as War Minister at the turn of the century, ­especially of the military schools, thereby opening up the non-­elite officer regiments to non-­nobility, but, apart from making some inroads into professionalizing the junior officer ranks, it was too little and too late for an army still grounded in the assumption that wars were not won with modern technology and contemporary planning but by morale. If anything, the Czar was even more favourably inclined towards, and dependant on, the senior aristocracy as time progressed and the political situation deteriorated. As Solzhenitsyn insisted, ‘the ruin of the Russian Army was the system of seniority’ (quoted in Wildman, 1980: 3–40). One might add that the ruin of the Russian monarchy was the conscription of somewhere between 20 and 25 per cent of the eligible male population, which provided trained soldiers not just for the army but also for the mutinies and revolutions. For although the standards of food in the army (often a ‘hygiene’ factor of great significance, implying that good food did not improve morale but bad food undermined it; see Herzberg, 1966) were adequate, the reintroduction of corporal punishment—whipping with birch rods—at the officer’s discretion and with no recourse to the courts played a role in undermining trust between officers and followers, as did the free use of fists and insults that soldiers thought had been abolished alongside serfdom. This, supplemented by the myriad terms of honorific address that soldiers needed to learn depending on which grade of noble and officer they were addressing (‘your honour’ up to Colonel; ‘your Excellency’ for generals; ‘your 3  Serfdom was abolished in 1874, the same year that the conscription law made serving in the military universal, though in peacetime only 25 per cent were likely to be conscripted.

112  Mutiny and Leadership radiance’ or ‘your most high radiance’ for titled officers), generated a fatalistic acquiescence far more than a positive engagement. Moreover, while many still revered the Czar, that did not translate into support for the army hierarchy (Wildman, 1980: 35–7). The Russian Navy also wrestled with a problem of recruits; it had attempted to respond to the failure in Crimea with a modern navy built with western technology, but the ori­ gin­al source of sailors recruited to run this modern fleet remained the uneducated peasants of old. Yet to lead this naval labour force, the Russian naval leadership was even more aristocratic than the army. In 1895 only half of the army officers were noble in origin, but in the 1914 navy the proportion of midshipman in the Naval Cadet School from the aristocracy in St Petersburg was 93 per cent.4 Social relations still resonated with the divisions of serfdom so that officers never dined with sailors, a model reproduced in the Imperial German Navy. Equally divisive, sailors were only permitted to walk on one side of the pavements in towns and cities and were barred from most bars, restaurants, and public parks; they could only travel by train, and then only in third class (Zebroski, 2003: 13). Despite the social retardation, the Russian Army did eventually begin to recover from the Japanese misadventure and started to adopt new technology in terms of motorized transport and aircraft, but the Czar effectively centralized all decision-­making to himself, ignoring the new Duma when he could. Moreover, the modest improvements in the Russian Army came nowhere near what the German Army was doing, and by the time the Russians responded to the armaments race in the West it was already too late. While Russia had 25 per cent of its potential manpower trained, the Germans had 52 per cent (Wildman, 1980: 73), and, coupled with the economic resources that supported Germany, it was self-­evident that a war would be a calamity for the Russians and, more particularly, for the Russian soldiers. But it wasn’t self-­evident to the Russian establishment, many of whom supported the call to arms in 1914, as indeed did every other combatant nation. Many of the Russian soldiers, still peasant in origin for the most part, seemed to have looked upon the coming war with fatalistic resignation rather than enthusiasm, and there was some significant disorder, especially when it became clear that the promised subsidies for the families of mobilized breadwinners were nowhere to be seen. For those soldiers conscripted into the Russian 1st and 2nd Army the war was both brief and brutal: between 26 and 30 August 1914, at the Battle of Tannenberg, the German 8th Army inflicted 70,000–80,000 casualties on the Russians and took 92,000 prisoners of war; in return, the Germans suffered under 15,000 casualties themselves. Tannenberg aside, the Russian armies acquitted themselves well elsewhere, but the attrition rate on both soldiers and munitions in 1914 were heralds of serious supply problems in the future. Wildman (1980: 85–6) suggests that by the end of 1914 approximately half of the Russian Army was either dead, wounded, or captured. Those that replaced them were often short of rifles and training and under increasingly coercive discipline. Prince Lobanov-­Rostovsky’s (1935/1985) autobiography recounts how a soldier was court-­martialled for striking an officer, tied to a post all night, and then shot in front of his regiment, which nearly mutinied in response (Wildman,  1980: 88). By April 1915 the German 9th Army had inflicted almost a million casualties on the Russians and captured a million more as the Russians retreated eastwards through Poland in the so-­called Great 4  ‘St Petersburg’ was renamed ‘Petrograd’ on the outbreak of war in 1914 to eliminate the Germanic connections. In 1924 it was renamed ‘Leningrad’ and in 1991 returned to its original ‘St Petersburg’.

Mutinies in War  113 Retreat. By the autumn of 1917 over 15 million Russians had served in the army and 1.7 million of these were dead, nearly 5 million wounded, and 2.5 million either missing or POWs. New recruits were fed straight into the ‘meat grinder’ so that the size of the Russian Army remained more or less constant, and in 1916 the government extended the draft to include older men up to 40 years of age, even those who were the sole breadwinner of their fam­ilies. The response was a predictable increase in riots and general disorder, especially when it became clear that educated people could receive exemption, particularly those involved in the railways or munitions industries, so that Wildman (1980: 99) estimates that no more than 2 per cent of the army comprised the traditionally defined industrial proletariat by the end of 1916. Casualty rates amongst officers were almost 50 per cent, and many of their replacements were younger and better educated than those they replaced (indeed only just half of those in Greater Russia were ethnic Russians, with Ukrainians proving the largest proportions at almost one quarter of the total). By the end of 1916, even though the various shortages in rifles and munitions had been addressed, the morale of the Russian Army appeared to be on the brink of collapse after over two years of failure and retreat. Analysis of soldiers’ letters home suggested an overwhelming desire for peace—at any cost—as well as a constant demand for better food and a threat to root out those responsible at home for the inflation, the incompetence, and the shortages. Chief amongst those held responsible for all three was Rasputin, the (German-­born) Czarina, and the Czar’s ministers. Even army officers at the front began to sympathize with such sentiments, and a small number of mutinies occurred as the winter of 1916 drew on, often associated with political agitation from both outside and inside the army. Elements of the 22nd Infantry Division, the 20th Siberian Rifle Division, and the 56th Infantry Division were all involved in mutinies in December 1916, and in the latter division (which had been on the front line for a year continuously and had participated in three major offences) twenty-­three agitators were court-­martialled and five were executed. Some of these may have been from the recent replacements sent to make up the numbers which included ‘political exiles’ and penal companies drafted to the front as punishment, but Wildman concludes that it was more the general battle fatigue than the revolutionary politics that tipped the discontent into mutiny: ‘Politicization, when it did come about on a massive scale in 1917, emanated from the rear, from whence it found its way to the front. The mutinies, on the other hand, reflected primarily the desperate situation at the front: the grinding effect of unending casualties, costly and futile attacks, and deteriorating organization and leadership on the most battered units’ (1980: 120). Discontent from behind the front lines became most apparent in Petrograd, where a huge one-­day strike on 9 January (old calendar) 1917 involved more than 150,000 workers from 114 factories and marked the anniversary of Bloody Sunday in 1905. On 14 February, a further strike was called in protest against the lack of bread, and within a fortnight around 250,000 were on strike as the state secret police, the Okhrana, reported the widespread political discontent stoked by an increasing number of political agitators, as well as the increasingly recalcitrant Duma. While the revolutionary political parties, notably the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, and the Mezhraiontsy (Social Democrats) that sat between them, began preparing for an all-­out struggle on 1 May, both they and the government were caught out on 23 February when, marking International Women’s Day, women workers left their factories in droves and encouraged their male counterparts to do the

114  Mutiny and Leadership same and to cross the Neva river to get to the more prosperous side of the city where ­traditionally protests had been held in the large public squares. A confused response by the Czarist authorities to the strikes and political protests on the streets of the city saw a repetition of the strikes and protests on the following day, this time demanding not just bread but an end to the war and the overthrow of the government, though again the protests were ­broken up without firearms on either side, and there were some reports of Cossacks beginning to side with the protesters. By the third day, 25 February (10 March in the new calendar), a general strike paralysed the city, and reports spread that a Cossack had killed a police officer trying to arrest a protester in Znamenskii Square; while there were some deaths, the use of firearms again remained relatively small. At this point the Czar was informed of the unrest and his response was unforgiving, ordering the new ­military commander of Petrograd, Khabalov (against the latter’s better judgement), to ‘put an end to the disorders in the capital which are impermissible at a time of war with Germany and Austria’. Khabalov’s military order to his troops could not have been clearer: ‘If the crowd is small, without banners, and not aggressive, then utilize cavalry to disperse it. If the crowd is aggressive and displays banners, then act according to regulations, that is, signal three times and open fire’ (quoted in Wildman, 1980: 136). On 26 February, a Sunday, the same protesting groups began taking significant casualties from police and some military units in the early afternoon, and about 100 protesters had been killed. Soldiers from the Pavlovskii barracks, on hearing that their own training company was one of the units shooting down the protesters, took weapons from the barracks’ armoury intent on joining the protesters but were driven back by fire from the police and a rival regiment. Twenty mutineers were arrested and imprisoned immediately. But it was the action of the Volynskii Regiment the following day that sparked the major revolt: led by dissident sergeants, who armed themselves and refused to obey the orders of their officers, they then encouraged the two other guards’ regiments in the barracks to follow suit. All was not quite lost, for there was still the 1st and 2nd Machine Gun Regiments and the 2nd Artillery Regiment to fall back on, and they were ordered from their bases twenty miles from Petrograd to march on the city. On 27 February they did, but only after lynching their officers and gathering similarly mutinying units on their way. By dawn on 28 February, 50,000 armed mutineers entered Petrograd, under the control of a Bolshevik officer and to the cheers of the Putilov workers. Khabalov then ordered his men to start shooting the crowds while he organized aircraft to bomb them, but neither order was obeyed and he was relieved of command shortly after this by General Zankevich. Nor were the orders of other generals to protect the Winter Palace obeyed, and, even if they had done so, the loyalist forces were almost out of ammunition and food; with no prospect of resupply and reduced to 600 infantry and 500 cavalry, the game was up. The Great Mutiny of 27–28 February 1917 had toppled the Romanov dynasty, and it was replaced by the Petrograd Soviet and (more reluctantly—having been frustrated by various members of the Romanov family from accepting an alternative political system) the Temporary Committee of the Duma, led by Kerensky. As Wildman (1980: 156) concludes, on the previously loyal role of the Russian soldiers, in ‘not in a single instance did they lead to anything like determined resistance’. It did not help that many of the troops in Petrograd were either recovering wounded or newly recruited older men, whose desertion rate was even higher than the already high patterns witnessed amongst the younger troops, or, even more problematic, newly drafted ex-­workers from the factories whose

Mutinies in War  115 punishment for engaging in strike activity had been to enter the very army they were now being asked to defend. Indeed, at this point in the war, only around a third of the new recruits were from traditional peasant backgrounds where a sullen loyalty might have been expected. And if Petrograd was the centre of radical political power, it was the Russian naval bases, especially Krondstadt, where the most violent and revolutionary action took place and over two thirds of the lynchings of officers occurred. As a telegram on 4 March insisted to naval HQ: ‘Mutiny on battleships Andrei, Pavel and Slava. Admiral Nebolsin murdered. Baltic Fleet as fighting unit no longer exists’ (quoted in Wildman, 1980: 212). But the real battle for post-­Romanov power—between the Petrograd Soviet and the Duma—was yet to come. On 1 March the Petrograd Soviet, including over 1,000 soldier representatives, debated whether officers should be allowed to return to the army and whether the soldiers should be under the control of the Soviet or the Military Commission of the Duma. After a heated debate ‘Order Number One of the Soldiers’ Section of the Petrograd Soviet’ was passed to tumultuous applause and insisted that: 1. all military units were to elect their own committees; 2. one representative from each of the company committees was to attend the Duma; 3. the military committee of the Duma was subordinate to the Soviet and the orders of the former would only be complied with to the extent that they did not conflict with those of the Soviet; 4. all firearms were to be controlled by the company and battalion committees and not handed over to officers; 5. strict military discipline was to be maintained on active duty, but off duty equality of rights prevailed—there was to be no saluting, or standing to attention; 6. the use of titles in personal address was abolished forthwith and replaced with ‘Mister General’, ‘Mister Colonel’ etc., and the use of ‘thou’ towards other ranks by officers was prohibited. The Duma refused to even consider the order but, as Wildman (1980: 194) concludes, ‘Order No. One simply legitimized an impulse that had already assumed shape by force of circumstances’. Whether cause or effect, Order No. One marked the end of the radical turmoil and the beginning of the return to some kind of normality as the selection of committees, representatives, and officers was accomplished. In most regiments the latter selection involved the return of some, but by no means all, of the old officers and the election of new ones to supplement those permanently removed. At about the same time, 1 or 2 March, the front line would have got wind of the tumultuous events in Petrograd; indeed, by 3 March many of the German and Austrian troops facing the Russians posted boards above their trenches or dropped leaflets from aeroplanes telling the Russians that the Czar had gone. The senior leadership of the Russian army seemed to have recognized the fait accompli and generally supported a Duma-­led new government, especially if the likely alternative was not a return of the monarchy but a revolutionary government that would threaten all of them. On that basis, they ordered the troops at the front to comply with the orders of the new provisional government. Most did but, in a telling comment about the relationship between subordinates and superordinates, one lieutenant noted the response of his soldiers to the new regime: ‘They don’t laugh at

116  Mutiny and Leadership my jokes anymore’ (quoted in Wildman, 1980: 220). They did, however, wear red ribbons in their uniforms, and their barracks were apparently resplendent in their red banners, as saluting was abandoned and attempts by officers to return to the traditions of martial dis­cip­line were met with vigorous resistance by the soldiers that included the arrest and dismissal of many unpopular officers, sometimes with violence. As discipline teetered on the edge of further unrest, with the railways in chaos and desertions rapidly increasing, the authorities issued Order Nos. 114 and 115 which abolished any outward signs and practices of the inferiority of other ranks and introduced new ones rooted in equality. That said, the army remained steadfast in its will to resist the enemy—internal or external— though with the death penalty abolished on 12 March and field courts martial replaced by committees of elected soldiers and officers on 27 March, many of the latter believed dis­ cip­line could not last. That the army did not disintegrate, ironically, may well have been due to the soldiers’ committees that proliferated everywhere in March, and, once ratified by the higher command, they managed to maintain some level of discipline and focus and bridged the gap between the revolutionary expectations of the other ranks and the more conservative desires of the officer corps and the Duma. Initially, the committees had officer representatives on them but as April progressed, and the troops learned of developments in Petrograd, the officers were often removed. Not that the committees were necessarily hotbeds of Bolshevism; on the contrary, many of the members were relatively well-­educated Mensheviks and military specialists (often of Jewish origin, because anti-­Semitism made it impossible for Jews to become officers in the old Russian army) who had only marginal connection to front-­line troops. That led, inexorably, to a tension between the Soldiers Committees and the soldiers, allowing the Bolsheviks to influence the latter against the so-­called ‘committee class’ (Wildman, 1980: 248). Whatever the composition of the committees, their role was primarily internal, to focus on ‘the reordering of military life on new principles, mediations of conflict between officers and soldiers, educational and informational activity . . . . And to prevent the ‘counter-­revolution’ (Wildman, 1980: 278). As far as the committees in the 12th Army were concerned, that meant a sweeping set of new political demands that reflected the programme of the Bolsheviks, including an ­eight-­hour day, confiscation of all imperial, church, and private land, a democratic republic, and a limit of those able to stand for election to those supporting the ‘basic socialist programme’. In some regiments the committees held total control while in others some negotiation between the committee and the senior officers still held, but by the end of March the situation seemed to have stabilized, as the press reproduced the most famous slogan of the time: ‘Soldiers to their Trenches, Workers to their Benches!’ Many of these workers seemed less infused with patriotic fervour and demanded an eight-­hour day and a pay increase instead, much to the chagrin of the popular press who tried to press the country on towards the Provisional Government’s demand for ‘full victory’, in contrast to the Petrograd Soviet who stuck to their demand for ‘no annexation or indemnities’: not peace at any cost, but the termination of Russian attacks. Towards the end of March, many representatives from Soldiers’ Committees began arriving in Petrograd for a meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, and they voiced the usual support for the continuation of the war, a democratic republic, and the ending of saluting officers, as well as pay increases etc., but many also spoke of their concerns about the laggards at home, either industrial workers on strike or garrison units taking it easy at the

Mutinies in War  117 expense of those on the front line. They concluded that the delegates needed to visit the factories for themselves to see what was happening and what could be done about the problems. On 28 March the first of the tours of Petrograd’s factories by the soldiers’ delegates occurred, and it became clear that many of the shortages at the front were not the fault of the workers but rather of a decrepit supply system, glossed over by the pro-­Duma press. As a result, the soldiers’ delegates reported back that they were satisfied with the efforts of the factory workers but concerned that the false rumours of slacking had come from the very media calling for all-­out victory in the war. The consequence was a re­affirm­ ation by the soldiers’ committees that they would only obey the demands of the Provisional Government in the future, in so far as they supported the orders of the Soviet, to whom they now vouched sole allegiance, and that allegiance supported the Soviet declaration of the ‘renunciation of conquests’. What had started out as a nationalist movement now increasingly appeared as a class movement. The political position of both sides hardened against each other, and voices in support of ‘full victory’ against the enemy became restricted to the Provisional Government and were mainly absent from the Petrograd Soviet and the soldiers’ committees, who supported the ‘no annexations and no indemnities’ plan for peace. What was also increasingly present was the degree of open fraternization across the front line as the higher committees sought to stabilize the command structure, and the lower committees became increasingly disillusioned with the new order. General Mikhail Alekseyev, commander-­in-­chief of the army under the Provisional Government, was also concerned that supplies and funds from the Western Allies would dry up if Russia did not launch an offensive against the Germans and Austrians by May to coincide with Nivelle’s offensive in the Chemin des Dames, and the enemy would take advantage of the confusion on the Russian front lines to launch their own assault (Wildman, 1987: 5–6). On 28 March, elements of the 8th Army rejected Alekseyev’s orders demanding attack and insisted that they were only going to engage in defensive duties. As Easter approached at the beginning of April, fraternization became endemic, supported by the actions of the Germans and Austrians, and front-­line troops insisted that if politicians or soldiers in Petrograd were so keen on ‘full victory’ then they could come and achieve it themselves. Pavel Milyukov, leader of the Kadet party and foreign minister in the government, sought to reassure the Allies that Russia was committed to ‘full victory’ and published a note to that effect on behalf of the entire cabinet on 18 April—which instantly provoked mass demonstrations against him and led to his resignation. It also confirmed to suspicious front-­line troops that the government intended to sacrifice them in an upcoming offensive. As a result, between the end of March and the second week of May, twenty mutinies occurred amongst front-­line troops refusing to engage in offensive operations, and instead they demanded an honourable peace. In a further manifestation of their morale problems, the numbers of desertions, as well as the arrest of unpopular officers, continued unabated, and even the low-­level committees began to lose control over their constituent members. On the front line, artillery officers that ordered assaults upon enemy lines were threatened with violence if they did not desist, and a makeshift truce prevailed, not just between the Russian troops and their German and Austrian enemies but between the Russian troops and their officers, to the extent that all thoughts of offensive operations by the Russian Army were abandoned. By the end of April, the Central Powers suggested that their troops had made contact with 70 per cent of the Russian regiments facing them. Indeed, so quiet

118  Mutiny and Leadership had the Eastern Front become that German divisions were transferred west at an increasing rate through April. The response of the soldiers’ committees was to support the authorities and demand a cessation of all fraternization, and by the middle of May this had some effect, though desertions continued unabated, exacerbated by the decision of the Provisional Government to release all those over 43 years of age from military service. Back in Petrograd, the Provisional Government proved itself incapable of maintaining control and the Soviet unwilling to take control. General Lavr Kornilov, military commander of Petrograd, ordered the Mikhailovskii Artillery to contain the protests in the streets but was humiliated by the Provisional Government countermanding his order, and he resigned in protest as the prospects of a civil war strengthened. To avoid that, on 5 May, the Soviet and Provisional Government formed a Coalition Government, but the previous hostility of the Soviet to the war was now weakened, and the Coalition called for a new revolutionary war to defeat the Germans and Austrians. But at precisely the same time the soldiers at the front decided that the movement should be the other way, and certainly not in line with the calls for a new offensive. Even the senior command recognized the impossibility of launching a new offensive, given that the new power on the front line was not even locked into the soldiers’ committees any more but rather lay with the Bolsheviks. So the generals travelled en masse to Petrograd on 5 May to confront the left wing of the Soviet and demand the abolition of Soldiers’ Rights embodied in Order No. 1 and the removal of the peace movements that were, in their opinion, responsible for the collapse of discipline of the front. In contrast, the leftists insisted that the ‘full victory’ and the pol­ icies of the generals were to blame and only the revolutionary fervour of the soldiers in support of peace, and the democratization of society, would re-­engage them and save Russia (see Figure 3.2). Alexander Kerensky, now Minister of War and leader of the moderate Socialist faction of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, managed to construct a compromise around the

Figure 3.2  Russian Mutiny 1917: Naval and army forces mutiny and drive through St Petersburg 1917 (World History Archive/Alamy)

Mutinies in War  119 notion of the new ‘citizen-­soldier’ that configured offensive action against the Germans as ‘revolutionary defensist’ activity. Furthermore, he also managed to get the Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights supported (as well as the beginning of political ‘commissars’ with the powers to oversee all activities of military command), and, to prevent mass resignations by the generals in response, he declared that officer resignations would then be treated as desertion in wartime. He added that superordinates could use armed force against insubordinate subordinates, though disciplinary powers remained with elected committees and courts. To oversee all this, and to prepare the army for a new offensive, Kerensky went on a three-­week tour of the front in which his silky rhetoric seems to have won support from the soldiers’ committees but not from the soldiers themselves. And in the face of continuing soldier cynicism and, from late April onwards, increasing Bolshevik activity following Lenin’s return to Russia from exile in the sealed train, the quest to re-­enthuse the soldiers fell short of Kerensky’s hopes as many of them succumbed to what became known as ‘Trench Bolshevism’, fed by 60,000 copies of the Bolshevik newspaper Soldatskaia Pravda (Wildman, 1987: 22–43). Lenin reoriented Bolshevik strategy in his revolutionary April Theses which denounced the coalition government and the calls to move to a parliamentary democracy, and called instead for ‘all power to the Soviets’, an immediate end to the war, and the nationalization of land. As May turned to June, the spread of Bolshevik influence over the army increased, especially on the Western Front, fed from party support in Petrograd and Minsk, but the most important fulcrum of radical change was provided by the soldiers’ revolt against the offensive, often within regiments and divisions that had little Bolshevik influence but were marked out for the imminent offensive. In the face of refusals to entrain by the 517th Batumskii and the 707th Neshavskii regiments on 17 May, General Alekseyev reported to Kerensky: The internal rot has reached its ultimate limit and has nowhere to go from here. The troops are no longer a threat to the enemy, but to their own fatherland. Admonitions and appeals no longer have an effect upon the masses. What is needed is authority, force, compulsion, the fear of punishment.  (quoted in Wildman, 1987: 74)

A week later, the 12th and 13th Siberian Rifle divisions of the 7th Army also refused to embark for the front, and when this action was imitated elsewhere the Kerensky government began to use force to generate compliance, which most of the time was successful, with little resistance, and preparations for the launch of the Kerensky Offensive at the end of June continued. But coercing overt dissent is not the same as generating support, and morale remained desperately poor. Despite this, in a classic case of Prozac Leadership (Collinson, 2012), Kerensky and General Brusilov (who had called for capital punishment to restore discipline and morale in the army) saw only positive reports from the front as each order was challenged by the committees and the soldiers in terms of its legitimacy and its congruence with the goals of the Soviet. Right across the lines there were reports of regiments and divisions simply refusing to comply with the orders of their officers, and Kerensky raced round trying to persuade the troops to do their duty and in some places succeeded. Thus, on 18 June, after a prolonged bombardment, the 7th and 11th Russian Armies swept along a 65-­kilometre front in Galicia, taking ground from both German and Austrian forces inflicting—and receiving—equally large casualties as they were pushed

120  Mutiny and Leadership back the following day close to their starting point. More importantly, the Russians had used all their most loyal troops in the initial advance, so, when they needed replacing, the more rebellious units kept as reserves often refused to go forward at all. As General Selivachev reported: All corps of the armies, after the unsuccessful battles of the 18–20 June, are in the highest degree demoralized. The consistent flouting of battle orders, unauthorized departures from positions, and refusal to replace other units on the line, have become an everyday occurrence.  (quoted in Wildman, 1987: 93)

Elsewhere disturbances were reported in eighteen divisions of the 7th and 11th armies, and nine of those had serious consequences for the continuation of the offensive. For example, the 3rd Grenadier Division refused to replace the V Siberian Corps and held a mass meeting to discuss the move, at which their own commissar was nearly lynched after suggesting that the Bolsheviks amongst them were traitors (Wildman, 1987: 94). On 18 June, the 2nd Guards Division heeded the advice of their Bolshevik comrades and refused to participate in the attack, even though units of both sides did so. Five days later the div­ision was surrounded by loyal troops and forced to surrender 400 mutineers for trial; the rest participated in an attack without artillery bombardment and were massacred, and the survivors again refused to return to their duties without the influence of the Bolsheviks who had already been removed from the division. General Kornilov’s 8th Army fared better in terms of military successes and advanced for five continuous days towards Lvov but, on realizing his advance had generated a gap between the 8th and 7th Armies, demanded reinforcements—and was sent already demoralized units of the XXXIII corps, some of whom fled the battle and persuaded Kornilov to order his own machine gunners to shoot down the retreating troops before they were all involved in a general retreat. In the 5th Army several officers were killed by their troops and several thousand ‘Bolshevik agitators’ were arrested and transferred to other reserve units, while loyal troops of the 14th Cavalry were sent back to Petrograd to deal with industrial unrest there. General Denikin had to move three divisions to the rear just to prevent open mutiny. As he reported later, he was ‘depriving myself at one stroke without a shot being fired of 30,000 troops’ (quoted in Wildman, 1987: 106). Ten divisions were involved in disputes about the legality of the offensive. Even the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death under Lt Maria Bochkareva, which was one of the few to make good progress against the German lines, was forced to withdraw after the units around her refused to advance. In response to the general collapse, Kornilov (without authority) banned all political meetings on 9 July, and military tribunals with the power to order the death penalty were reinstituted by Kerensky on July 12th for a whole array of offences, including mutiny, and sentences were to be based on a majority verdict, without appeal and executed immediately. By the end of August, about a dozen death sentences were delivered but few executions had taken place, and by and large the system of discipline continued as before, often because the numbers who had committed the most typical offence—desertion—were simply too large to process so they were usually just shipped back to the front. Kerensky and General Brusilov then decided to rid the army of Bolsheviks wherever possible, and by the beginning of August the operation appeared to have succeeded. For

Mutinies in War  121 instance in the troubled 5th Army, between 12 and 16 July 12, the 120th 121st and 135th divisions were stripped of Bolshevik agitators, including 2,000 from one regiment of the 135th Division alone. That number was winnowed down first to 785 arrested, 58 of whom were sent for trial; the residue was redistributed across other regiments. By the middle of July 12,725 soldiers and 37 officers had been arrested and sent before the ‘Extraordinary Investigative Commission’ of the 5th Army. As a result, 10,390 were reassigned to new units, 1,399 were returned to their old units and 968 (including 32 officers) were sent for trial. Half of those sent for trial were exonerated, 71 given prison sentences less than ten years, and 15 imprisoned for ten years or more (Wildman,  1987: 136). Elsewhere similar procedures occurred and in some places regiments were bombarded into submission; this was more common in the 10th Army and less common in the 2nd Army, though General Purgasov was killed by soldiers of his own unit, the 299th Dubenskii Regiment, after he tried to remove a Bolshevik officer on 20 July, and 242 soldiers and officers were subsequently arrested. In the 3rd Army under General Kvetsynskii, armed conflict was common as he attempted to root out all dissent, and at least three soldiers were executed for mutiny. The 11th Army had problems with almost all its divisions, and the agitation was often only resolved through the extensive use of committees and congresses of troops who voted on the procedures to be carried out. Where that did not work, force was employed and the regiments usually disbanded, though occasionally, as with the 6th Grenadier Regiment, it proved impossible to disband them. The 160th Division within the 8th Army proved to be one of the most recalcitrant after three of its four component regiments mu­tin­ied, and the subsequently arranged execution squad refused to open fire on those sentenced to death; the cavalry unit sent to put down the mutiny then allowed the mu­tin­eers to escape. On 1 August the 1st Guards Rifle Regiment murdered their commanding officer, Colonel Bykov and a company commander, and left the bodies to rot on a riverbank. A week later, 814 mutineers surrendered to a unit of Cossacks but the regiment successfully refused to disband. Elsewhere seventeen of the twenty-­three divisions in the 10th Army mutinied, and only the Rumanian and Caucasus fronts remained relatively free from disorder. A general retreat from the middle of July worked to temporarily defuse the dissent as the armies moved back to Russian territory again. By the middle of August, while dissent was covert, a mood of general apathy appeared to prevail right across the Russian soldiers, though some officers decided that the failure of the offensive and the subsequent retreat was not the fault of the Bolshevik agitators but rather the whole system of committees and commissars that had undermined the traditional discipline of the old army, which Kornilov (commander in chief from 20 July) seemed intent on reviving. That, of course, generated different signals to the soldiers and the officers. To the former it was a sign of a resurgent old regime, complete with a return to the pre-­revolutionary status quo. To the latter it was merely a requirement to bolster the army—and the revolution—in the face of both the external enemies Germany and Austria and the internal enemies, the Bolsheviks (Wildman, 1987: 130–47). As Kerensky proscribed Bolshevik newspapers, so the new Union of Officers, representing senior military officers, began suggesting that the whole committee and commissar system needed to go. Kerensky, still the War Minister, responded with a conference in the middle of July, at which the generals attending, led by Denikin, vigorously demanded radical changes and a return to the undivided command system of old, including the removal of Order No. 1 and the Declaration of Soldiers’ Rights that had, they argued,

122  Mutiny and Leadership bedevilled the disciplinary system and undermined morale. Ironically it was Kornilov’s written testimony that most impressed Kerensky because the general suggested a strengthening of the Commissariat system and a purging of the commanding staff; that secured Kornilov the position as new head of the army, replacing Brusilov—a scapegoat for the recent setbacks. Kerensky (about to be appointed head of the Provisional Government) believed he now had the right man for the job of reinvigorating the Russian Army: Kornilov, a charismatic disciplinarian but also, it seemed, a diplomat. While the army officers rejoiced, the army committees, especially the senior ones, sensed the beginnings of a counter-­revolution, particularly emanating from the Union of Officers. For while the Bolsheviks’ agitators had all but been rooted out, as had most of the political education, what was left was dull apathy, not a reinvigorated interest in liberal or conservative politics. But signs of a change were evident from late July. When, for ex­ample, the newspaper of the 10th Army Committee, GoXA, was banned, in addition to the Bolshevik newspapers, the Committees of the 12th, 3rd, and 8th protested to Kerensky, who eventually persuaded Kornilov to guarantee such publications and then to issue a statement on 1 August suggesting the disputes concerning the committees and commissars would shortly be resolved. Yet the conflict between and within the senior command and the representative bodies continued: General Denikin, Kornilov’s Chief of Staff, demanded the removal of a proposal for committees to be involved in planning battles, and, when he took over as commander of the Southwestern Front in early August, he banned all socialist newspapers, generating mass protests, while General Kvetsinskii was content to include his committees in all kinds of planning events. More generally, Denikin and Kornilov continued in the plan to neuter the committees completely, while the 9th and 10th Army Committees began planning to put the committees at the head of all decision-­making in the army through an All-­Army Committee working at Stavka (Central High Command) (Wildman, 1987: 148–83). While the army was mired in confusion and increasing dissent from left and right about the role of the committees and the commissariat, Petrograd experienced a significant rise in equivalent self-­organization as workers took control of their own factories under factory committees. To try and bring some control over the rapidly decentralizing impact of these various developments, the Provisional Government organized the Moscow State Conference between 12 and 15 August, including representatives of business, the senior military, the soviets, the trades unions and the political partiers (excluding the Bolsheviks who were originally invited but then not admitted). The Conference of 2,500 delegates passed resolutions for the removal of the soviets and the committees of the army and voiced support for the pursuit of total victory in the war. This was inevitably regarded as a counter-­revolutionary force by the Bolsheviks; indeed a general strike in protest against it took 400,000 workers out on strike in Moscow. This was but grist to the reactionary mill of General Kaledin, hitherto commander of the 8th Army until relieved of his post for refusing the orders of the Provisional Government. As head of the unofficial Cossack Army Government, Kaledin railed against all the democratic incursions into the army and, to applause from the political right in the conference, insisted: ‘The army must be kept outside of politics. All Soviets and committees must be abolished . . . Discipline in the army must be raised by the most resolute measures’ (quoted in Wildman, 1987: 186). As the conference finished, the Germans attacked Riga, forcing the Russian forces back in a scene that Kornilov suggested was caused by the disorganized and cowardly troops,

Mutinies in War  123 while other sources on the ground suggested both that the Russians had fought bravely and Kornilov was responsible for not providing the necessary reinforcements and for ordering elements of the Siberian Corps to withdraw, leaving the garrison trapped. Kornilov then insisted that Petrograd was threatened by a Bolshevik uprising and mo­bil­ ized a division of Cossacks (to include a squadron from the British Armoured Car Expeditionary Force [ACEF] under Lt Commander Oliver Locker-­Lampson [Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve] wearing Russian uniforms) under General Krimov ‘to protect the capital’. His enemies, now including Kerensky, suspected it was just a ruse to install a military dictatorship. On 27 August Kerensky sacked Kornilov (who believed Kerensky would support the attack) by telegram, but, with the exception of General Przhevalskii, the senior commanders all supported Kornilov and insisted he remain as commander in chief. Nevertheless when Kornilov refused all attempts at mediation, and denounced the ­provisional Government, the game was up, despite Denikin resigning in protest at Kornilov’s dismissal (and subsequently being arrested). Kerensky ordered Krimov to abandon his movement towards Petrograd on 29 August, and even if he had wished to he could not have continued, as railway workers and soldiers loyal to the government prevented the trains from moving; worse, the Cossacks themselves began to desert Krimov when the threat of a Bolshevik coup was revealed as a hoax. Ironically, given that the Kornilov threat was not that significant, the call to arms to defend the revolution against the ‘counter-­ revolutionaries’ ­effectively scuppered the resurgence of the political right just as it was regaining ground. That call to arms by the common soldiers also restored the confidence of the committees, and many demanded the death penalty for Kornilov’s treason and set about rooting out whatever officers were regarded as suspect, either arresting them or passing mass votes of no-­confidence in them. There were some murders, but these were few and far between as the soldiers usually proceeded by whatever due process was to hand. Kerensky was also mortally wounded by the Kornilov affair, as rumours of his complicity swirled around the army, and his order for the soldiers to obey all of Kornilov’s orders, until his replacement (Alekseev) took office, merely compounded the suspicions. To make matters worse, Kerensky then issued an order demanding the cessation of all political activity by the soldiers—the same soldiers that had just saved the regime from a coup—and to stop arresting officers, some of whom were the same ones that had just organized the coup. A reckoning with Kerensky and the political right was now inevitable, but, given the diversity of the military units and the instability of the context, quite what that reckoning would result in was not predetermined. What was probably inevitable was that the war would terminate before the winter arrived, with or without government approval, with or without Bolshevik support, because the soldiers’ mutinies would ef­fect­ively do what the government could not—stop the fighting (Wildman, 1987: 187–225). One clear material factor in this steady erosion of the war effort was the approach of winter and the absence of winter supplies of coats or even food, and this often generated what appeared to be counter-­productive behaviour—for instance, the refusal to build winter shelters or accumulate wood or facilitate supplies by train from the rear to the front— because if this was done then, the soldiers assumed, the war might just drag on a bit longer. As desertions increased through September and units were replaced at the front, the newcomers were regarded by their officers as untrained and totally Bolshevik in sympathy— and thus untrainable. As a report from the Rumanian Front noted, ‘Arriving replacements are not only depraved with Bolshevism, but are infected with outright hooligan instincts’

124  Mutiny and Leadership (quoted in Wildman, 1987: 233). By the end of September the hostility to the war had both spread right through the army and taken on a much more vociferous form; it had also taken on a Bolshevik hue as all the other political parties persisted with arguments about continuing the war. Mass meetings of troops, right across the various fronts, all demanded an immediate end to the war, and refusal to obey orders became commonplace though not universal. Oftentimes the dissent became contagious as regiments gave each other permission to mutiny, and word spread around the trenches. Meanwhile the members of the Provisional Government busied themselves preparing for the new elections to the Constituent Assembly (due originally in late September but actually delayed until late November) which—they presumably hoped—would manage to transcend the contra­dict­ ory tension manifestly present across the country, not least the outbreak of unrest amongst the peasantry that threatened food supplies to the cities and the army. As the news of a new Soviet Congress for 20 October arrived, it appeared to displace the importance of the Constituent Assembly elections in favour a Bolshevik-­dominated Soviet, complete with the now increasingly popular call for ‘All power to the Soviets’. Meanwhile the front-­line units were disintegrating, and even their committees were no longer able to hold dis­cip­ line together as the soldiers began to realize that only the Bolsheviks offered immediate peace and land through their (readopted) slogan: ‘All Power to the Soviets’. The road to power by the Bolsheviks was opening up. (Wildman, 1987: 226–61). The error of the political right as well as the Kadets and the non-­Bolshevik left seems to have been that they all assumed the relationship between themselves and the rest of the country was that of a synecdoche: they ‘knew’ what the peasants and workers wanted without having to ask or research them. When Kornilov’s coup clearly demonstrated that the right had got it completely wrong, it was the turn of the left. In practice it was the Bolsheviks who were the closest proxy to this, not because Lenin had embodied the genuine political desires of the masses but because the former understood what motivated the latter; it was not all power to the Bolsheviks—that would come later—but all power to the Soviets (now increasingly dominated by the Bolsheviks). Indeed, it was the grassroots organization of the Bolsheviks in both the military and the factories that persuaded Lenin to change his mind about the mobilizing power of the call for Soviet power and control over ‘the red flag’. But the whole volte-­face was a very late conversion, partly because as  late as July 1917 the Bolshevik organization in the army remain threadbare as a ­consequence of the arrests over the spring and summer, and partly because it became ­self-­evident (even to Lenin) that the ‘leadership’ lay not with the party but with the masses (Wildman, 1987: 278). The weakness of the right and of the non-­Bolshevik left can be seen in the lethargic response to the leaked news on 21 October that the Bolsheviks were intending to seize power. And with each new local election in the army the Bolsheviks increased their le­git­ im­ate representation, especially in the North and Western Fronts, and this, combined with the Bolshevik-­dominated soviets in the same regions, proved an existential challenge to the Provisional Government in October 1917. When Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power on 25/26 October (7 November in the new calendar) through the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, the military was incapable of mounting a response to challenge them because the power had seeped away into the soviets, the military committee system, and the industrial workers, whose strike action prevented any coordinated response from Kerensky or the anti-­Bolshevik military command in the first

Mutinies in War  125 few days after the coup. By the time an expeditionary force loyal to the Provisional Government had been organized under General Krasnov, an even larger rebel group from Kronsdtadt and Helsinki had mobilized and, together with the local Red Guard, the initial attack of the loyalist Cossacks at Pulkovo was beaten back and ended up with a local truce between the opposing sides and an agreement elsewhere that an ‘all-­socialist government’ was needed to ensure peace, land, and bread. Meanwhile the Bolsheviks, operating through the Soviets, managed to acquire more and more legitimate control, even though they only really dominated a few of the armies. But on 26 October the 2nd Congress of Soviets saw a majority of seats fall to the Bolsheviks and the left Socialist-­Revolutionaries and an assumption by many that once the elections to the Constituent Assembly were held the following month then power would be transferred back to it. Under Lenin’s leadership, the Congress of Soviets passed decrees on land distribution, the nationalization of all private property, the repudiation of all foreign debts, and, most importantly to the soldiers, peace. The latter is important for explaining why Kerensky failed: not because he was deeply unpopular or Lenin’s Bolshevik dictatorship was the opposite, but because only the Bolsheviks (and their allies the left Social Revolutionaries [SR]) supported what they so desperately needed: the end of the war; and only the Bolshevik-­supported institutions of governance, the Soviets and the Military Revolutionary Committees (MRCs), seemed able to provide this. Eventually the Bolsheviks grew weary of the bureaucratic wranglings with the Left SRs and the Soviets and took total control, but that was in the future (Douds, 2018). In the meantime the MRCs were then able to remove unpopular officers and elect their own replacements. Yet the Bolsheviks never dominated any army, except the 2nd, and there never was any direct and unmediated control of the military front by Lenin’s orders from the capital. One more attempt by Kerensky to regain control occurred on 28 October, as he led a detachment of Cossacks on a white horse, but it was to no avail, and by 30 October Moscow had also fallen to the Bolsheviks as Kerensky fled to France. After the first week of the coup, the Bolshevik grip on power, such that it existed, showed signs of weakening, and Lenin restored their influence on 8 November by doing what the soldiers so desperately wanted him to do: issue an order to General Dukhonin, Acting Commander in Chief, instructing him to begin peace negotiations with the enemy. Dukhonin prevaricated and insisted that the order was technically problematic and therefore could not be followed. Instead, Lenin replaced Dukhonin5 with Krylenko (a senior member of the MRC but only then an ensign in the army [the most junior officer rank]) and ordered all units to begin their own peace negotiations with the enemy facing them. This satisfied two different but related demands by the soldiers in one go: peace and decentralized control. Many units did engage the enemy in peace overtures, and a significant number of small-­scale cease fires emerged shortly thereafter across almost every Russian army front (the exception was the Russian 9th Army on the Rumanian Front). Krylenko then ordered all units to remove from office any committee members hostile to peace and himself met with the German Eastern Front Commander, General Hoffmann, on 19 November, and a general armistice came into effect on 4 December. The Constituent Assembly elections, held on 12 November, returned a majority of Socialist Revolutionary Party members, and a month later all ranks, and the practice of saluting in the army, ended. When the Assembly clashed 5  Dukhonin was murdered on 21 December by soldiers loyal to (but against the orders of) Krylenko when it became clear that Dukhonin had allowed Kornilov to escape from his custody.

126  Mutiny and Leadership with the Soviets under Lenin’s control in January 1918, the Assembly was dissolved, and by the end of the year a full-­scale civil war had erupted that lasted until 1922 in some areas, after which Bolshevik control was assured—except, ironically, in that most revolutionary of military bases: Krondstadt (Wildman, 1987: 279–405). If ever Russia was going to escape from the maelstrom unleashed by the First World War and the removal of the Czar, it was going to be by a party political leadership that understood the popularity of demands for peace, bread, and land and translated all these into a strategy for catapulting them into dominance of the soviets. This was Lenin’s genius in abandoning prior Bolshevik policies that contradicted this overriding desire, until such time as the party had won control over the soviets and was ready to begin the elimination of all other contenders for political power. The mutinies of the Russian army and navy at this time were tactical stepping stones in this revolutionary strategy, and without the disintegration of the Russian military it is unlikely that the Bolsheviks would have succeeded; the Bolshevik capture of the red flag as a symbol of almost all rebellion was a masterstroke of strategic leadership, helped on by the bumbling of opponents and the contingencies of the war which tore apart the economic, social, and political contract between the soldiers and sailors and the Russian establishment.

French Army 1917 As the Russian authorities struggled with the collapse of morale on the Eastern Front in 1917, so the French Army faced down its own mutinies in the same year, this time with a different result. But it started out in roughly the same way: at the end of 1916, and for the French army after over a million casualties of various kinds, yet another general promised a quick victory over the enemy; this time is was General Robert Nivelle. The resultant disaster nearly did provide a victory, but it was for the Germans, as the morale of the French army collapsed and mutinies spread right across the front. The French Army that emerged from the debacle of the Franco-­Prussian War of 1870–1 had struggled to shift to a professional force in response, and the political left in France was increasingly wary of its intention and effects upon French society, especially after the Boulanger Affair in 1886–7 and the Dreyfus Affair that dragged on through the 1890s, both of which put the French Army into highly disreputable positions. Just to add some balance to the tarnation equation, the left-­wing Republican government of Émile Combes, with the sympathetic support of General André, then began rooting out right-­wing and religious sympathizers from the military, leading to the fall of the government. The conscription period was then reduced from three to two years, and, following an attempt to put down industrial strikes, some regiments mutinied and desertion became widespread. Under General Joffre, the new chief of staff in 1911, the conscription term was returned to three years, the size of the army was increased, and attempts were made to catch up with German armaments. Political alliances were also strengthened with Russia and Britain (although as late as 1900–4 the French military had plans for invading Britain); the latter would provide naval superiority and also a small army to strengthen the French defences facing Belgium. The plans for war with Germany changed several times, but most were locked into an offensive mode that focused on the role of superior morale, rooted—ultimately—in the

Mutinies in War  127 bayonet charge so beloved by Du Picq, a long-­dead French military philosopher for whom casualties were but a necessary consequence of victory. Du Picq’s ideas then became encapsulated in the work of Grandmaison and Foch (though interestingly not Pétain), and they congealed into the ‘Cult of the Offensive’ that was to bedevil all sides for most of the First World War, though the lessons learned by the British Army in the Boer Wars—Fire and Manoeuvre using small-­scale units—were adopted, but only in rhetorical form. Within six weeks of the war breaking out in August 1914, a quarter of the French army of 1,500,000 had become casualties as the German advance overwhelmed the poorly armed and led French forces, and the French government, followed by 500,000 citizens, left Paris. The front began to stabilize after the Battle of the Marne in early September (in part helped by the courage of Col. Robert Nivelle’s artillery regiments), and by December 1914 it was set at roughly the position it was to remain at for the next three years, despite enormous casualties on both sides as the French and British engaged in the cult of the offensive. From February to December 1916 the Germans attempted to ‘bleed the French dry’ at Verdun, in what turned out to be the longest battle in human history, and it cost France 550,000 casualties; meanwhile the Somme offensive in the British-­French area was just as bloody and ineffective. Nivelle was, by now, a lieutenant general and had become adept at creating memorable phrases, including his Verdun phrase ‘Ils ne passeront pas!’ (They shall not pass). He was also a supporter of the notorious General Charles Mangin, who was renowned for using French colonial African and Arab troops in especially tough situ­ ations on the grounds that they were—so he argued—less sensitive to pain and more expendable (see Figure 3.3). He also held in high regard Lt Colonel D’Alançon, for whom the offensive was less of a cult and more of a religion. Nivelle, however, became a national media hero after his methodically planned and narrowly focused assaults upon German-­held forts in the winter of 1916, though his standing with his fellow officers was radically lower as they struggled to maintain morale in the face of overwhelmingly high casualties—more than a million French dead or missing (Murphy, 2015: 1–26). At the Allied conferences in the winter of 1916, it became clear that Joffre, the French commander, intended in 1917 to repeat the futile exercises of 1916, this time because the

Figure 3.3  French Mutiny 1917: French African Soldier (© Imperial War Museum)

128  Mutiny and Leadership enemy had allegedly become ‘demoralised by recent bloody defeats’ (quoted in Murphy, 2015: 28–9). To prevent Germany from gaining the initiative he suggested combined offensives across all fronts in the early spring of 1917. Apart from the rhetoric of ‘breaking morale’, mirroring that of both German and British bomber command in the Second World War, it was clear from the French postal censors at the time that the morale which was closest to collapse was actually that of French soldiers in the trenches, fed up with limited leave, most of which was wasted on the slow trains home. By Boxing Day 1916 Joffre’s political credibility had disappeared, and he was simultaneously promoted to Field Marshall and stripped of all combat responsibilities which were given to new public hero, Nivelle, despite his limited experience at very senior level. Slightly earlier in the month, Lloyd George had replaced Asquith as British prime minister, and both Nivelle and Lloyd George had Haig in their sights. Nivelle’s radical new plan—‘the formula’—as he called it, was to shift the focus of attack from a broad to a very narrow front, replicating his limited attacks upon the forts at Verdun, with creeping artillery barrages and overwhelming force at the point of contact, leading to the ‘total destruction of active enemy forces by manoeuvre and battle’ (quoted in Murphy, 2015: 36). But, for this to work, Nivelle insisted that Haig subordinate himself, and the entire British Expeditionary Force (BEF), to French command. That was never going to be politically acceptable, and ultimately a compromise was agreed to the effect that, for this particular offensive, the BEF would operate under French control until such times as Haig regarded the offensive as a threat to the integrity of the BEF. Haig railed against any implied inferior rank, and Nivelle seems to have gone out of his way to compound the difficulties of hierarchy. A further problem for the Allies was that by the middle of March 1917 the Germans had withdrawn from several exposed position to reduce their defensive lines and instituted a system of defence in depth to impede Allied attacks. One of these, the Noyon salient, was precisely where Nivelle intended to focus his attack. Despite the changes to the topography—including a scorched earth policy by the retreating Germans—Nivelle continued with his original plan and let slip the opportunity to mount an immediate attack upon the Germans as they withdrew. Worse, the Russian Czar had been deposed in the February Revolution, and it was widely assumed that the in­ev­it­ able withdrawal of Russia from the war would free up many German divisions for a renewed offensive in the west prior to the entry of the USA. The changes also allowed Haig to claim that the BEF was now exposed and that he could no longer be required to work under Nivelle’s authority, which was threatened by critics on all sides. That plan included all four French army groups, totalling a million men, plus artillery and tanks, all destined to cross an area—the Chemin des Dames—laced with rivers, canals, and natural obstacles at great speed and with maximum violence. Yet the French had little intelligence about the extent of the German defences, which comprised about six miles of lightly held but ­well-­fortified positions, before the main defensive lines were located and, as such, the first defences delayed attacks long enough for the Germans to evaluate the real point of danger along an extended front line and send in the reserves. Moreover, since French security was so poor, the Germans knew when and where the assault was to be focused, but, even when this became apparent, Nivelle still continued with his original plan, as the Germans con­ tinued to strengthen their forces in the area confirmed to be the decisive point. Nivelle’s plan would see half a million troops in the main assault on the Chemin des Dames, supported by over 5,000 artillery pieces—one for every twenty metres of land in

Mutinies in War  129 the assault—and the intention was to provide a creeping barrage just in front of the troops but, since the speed of the barrage bore little relationship to the actual speed of troops covering broken ground under fire, the barrage was never going to be successful. Worse, the Germans had learned from Verdun that rolling barrages could not roll indefinitely because it was impossible to keep moving the artillery; thus all that was required was to keep their reserve troops out of the distance of the terminal point of the rolling barrage, ready for counter-­attack. Despite this, the optimism of the commander, supplemented by over 500 aircraft and a strong assumption amongst the troops that victory was at hand, allowed Nivelle to calm all the fears of his political and military colleagues by insisting that, if the plan failed, it would be stopped within forty-­eight hours at the most. Nivelle expected French casualties to be no more than 10,000. Confidence was high on the French side—indeed there had been little evidence of popu­lar discontent in the army or at home even a few months earlier—and to that extent the mutinies came as a radical and unexpected shock to the establishment (Becker, 1985: 195–248). Likewise, morale was high amongst the British, who, with their Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian allies, were due to start their offensive and draw German reserves away from the Chemin des Dames with a series of mines detonated in tunnels under German lines. A five-­day preliminary bombardment that turned into a creeping barrage on the first day of the Battle of Arras, 9 April 1917, led to some initial British and Canadian successes, though Australian losses two days later were the worst so far, and by the end the battle it had cost 150,000 British casualties. A two-­week artillery bombardment by the French presaged the first assaults on 16 April, just as poor weather interdicted French supply lines and delayed the attack for twenty-­four hours. At 06.00, thirty-­seven French infantry divisions, including many colonial troops, left the safety of their trenches and headed out into the deeply cratered area in front of them that inevitably slowed their advance and put it out of synchronization with the creeping barrage. Over 100 French Schneider tanks fared no better than the infantry, and by the end of the first day, despite the capture of some 13,000 German soldiers, only a few kilometres progress had been made, and at enormous cost to the French troops. Despite Nivelle’s promise to call off a failed offensive within twenty-­four to forty-­eight hours, he did nothing of the sort and instead reinforced the assaults the following morning in a classic illustration of the problem of sunk cost (Staw and Blumer, 1976), when the losses are so high it makes it harder, not easier, to change direction. By 20 April the French government became concerned about the state of the offensive and French morale, but the lack of clarity about French casualties at this point enabled Nivelle to suggest a series of more limited attacks would continue, much to the consternation of his own officers. Faced with an indecisive government fearful of dismissing Nivelle, the latter dismissed Mangin, scapegoating one of his own generals for his own failures. Ten days later, on 30 April, Nivelle himself was replaced by Pétain who initially tried to have himself appointed as Minister of War, as well as military commander of the French forces. Despite this hu­mili­ ation, Nivelle refused to accept personal responsibility for the failure and refused to leave office until given a subordinate command on 17 May; he was eventually appointed ­commander of French forces in North Africa in December 1917. On 25 June the offensive formally ceased, but by this time French morale had been badly affected, both by the over-­optimism in the first instance and by the continuing assaults that secured so little

130  Mutiny and Leadership territory (much of it retaken by the traditional German tactic of immediate counter-­attack) for so many more French casualties (somewhere between 118,000 and 180,000). At this point the BEF, under Haig, was to take over the main offensive operations, while the French army licked its wounds and regathered for the next offensive. However, the common French soldier, the poilu (‘the hairy one’—a reflection of the bearded nature of French soldiery after weeks in the trenches) had other plans: morale had been poor before the Nivelle offensive, then it rose with the optimism prevalent of the pre-­offensive period, only to collapse afterwards. This is reflected in the desertion rate that had been 470 per month in 1916 rising almost four-­fold to 1,619 by June 1917 (Murphy, 2015: 122). There had been various forms of discontent in the previous year: in May and June 1916, during the Verdun debacle, several small groups had mutinied and were court-­martialled, with two officers being shot. By December 1916 French troops were no longer singing ‘La Marseillaise’, The French national anthem, on the way to the front but rather bleating like sheep on the way to the slaughterhouse and singing the ‘Internationale’. Before the Nivelle offensive the French army had already lost over a million men, and the survivors castigated their commanders, politicians, rear echelon troops (embusqués), journalists, and just about anyone who was not actually fighting in the trenches. The mutinies, which were called ‘collective disobedience’ by the French authorities and generally hidden from public view, actually began on the first day of the Nivelle offensive, when twenty-­six cases of indiscipline (refusal to obey orders and general protests) were recorded. A typical event occurred on 16 April, when five soldiers and an NCO from the 151st Infantry Regiment refused to leave the trenches and join the assault. The following day, seventeen soldiers of the 108th Regiment did the same, and four days later the 1st Colonial Division did the same on their way back from the front line. On 29 April, the 2nd Battalion of the 18th Infantry Regiment, which had lost all but 200 soldiers on the first day of the offensive and had been taken out of the line to rest at Soissons, a large-­scale rest camp, was refilled with new officers, NCOs, and troops and ordered back to the front line. They refused and rioted, but by the following morning they were back in line, courtesy of the local gendarmerie, minus five ringleaders that were sentenced to death for mutiny. A week later, soldiers from the 2nd Colonial Division embarked on a similar mutiny, also at Soissons, and were again persuaded to return to the front. On 15 May the resistance became more serious when soldiers of the XXI corps mutinied and began shooting at officers who attempted to restore order. The mutineers then tried to board trains to Paris. On 26 May four battalions of the 158th Division mutinied and elected their own deputies and units from the 370th Infantry Regiment, again all at Soissons. They also seized a train and, singing revolutionary songs and waving red flags, headed for Paris. The train was intercepted near Villiers-­Cotterêts where the traditionally loyal cavalry persuaded most to return to Soissons, while an unknown number of resisters were shot without trial (Murphy, 2015: 125–6). In the first week of June, fifty-­four divisions were affected by various levels of mutiny involving four of the five French armies that had been involved in the offensive. The troops of the 310th Infantry Regiment, at Coeuvres, refused to return to the front and set up their own camp also near Villiers-­Cotterêts where, once again, a unit of cavalry troopers persuaded them back to camp, and the same happened to the 298th Infantry Regiment. By the end of June it is estimated that 40,000 French soldiers had mu­tin­ied from sixty-­eight different divisions. As one postal censor reported, having intercepted the soldiers’ letters home:

Mutinies in War  131 The soldiers are thinking like employees. They concern themselves with laws governing recruitment, pay command structure, the guarantees afforded to them by the state. Moreover the soldiers are convinced that by acting collectively they can determine their own fate, if need be by imposing their will at the front as do workers in the rear by striking. (quoted by Murphy, 2015: 129)

As ever, the mutinies need to be situated against the context of the time, and in this case two events exacerbated the discontent on the front line: first, the rise of industrial unrest on the French home front (Becker, 1985); and second, the example of the first Russian Revolution that had occurred in February, though news only reached the front in April. The latter emboldened the two Russian battalions that fought alongside the French as part of the ‘troops for weapons’ agreement. The Russians began organizing their own Soldiers’ Councils and even participated in decision-­making with their appointed French officers as to the merits of the upcoming offensive. In fact, they agreed to engage the Germans on the first day of the assault, lost 6,000 troops and half their French officers, and refused to fight further. They were moved to La Courtine where the divisions of the Russian political left were reproduced in microcosm, and the camp ended up being attacked by French soldiers in September 1917, when they collectively mutinied. Following this 81 ringleaders were handed over to the Russian authorities, 549 were imprisoned in France of North Africa and, following further unrest, the remaining 7,000 mutineers were either imprisoned in North Africa or used as prison labour in French munitions factories (Murphy, 2015: 135). Against this revolutionary background and the increasingly militant action of French industrial workers (strikes had increased from 98 in 1916 to 689 in 1917), the French authorities feared that a revolution was very likely, hence the decision to switch offensive responsibility to the BEF and to switch French strategy from offensive à outrance (offensive at all costs) to défense en profoundeur (defence in depth): if all-­out offensive merely increased the attrition rate on the attacking side and served no strategic or even tactical purpose, then why not switch to defence in depth where most troops were kept out of harm’s way except in response to an attack? This way the tacit agreement between the French generals and their troops—that the latter would not be wasted on some vainglorious quixotic desire by the former—would be maintained to avoid both further mutinies and an equally fearful scenario: the Germans taking advantage of the collapse of French morale and launch their own offensive. Thus the January 1918 military regulations noted that ‘The commander who knows his job will ask only useful efforts from his troops’, whereas the 1916 regulations suggested that ‘The rank and file are a reflection of their leader  .  .  .  They demand only to admire him and follow him blindly’ (quoted in Smith, 1994: 218). In fact, the Germans seemed generally unaware of the morale problem (which con­ tinued in some units as late as 30 August 1917 (Smith, 1994: 221), but Pétain was not and immediately ordered a halt to all extended offensive operations and a different strategic philosophy, captured in his phrase ‘the artillery kills and the infantry holds’. Pétain was also concerned with the existing system of military law that had replaced the original cours martials (with its associated use of immediate execution) with the new (1914) ­system of conseils de guerre that incorporated elements of the civilian law, including the right of appeal and the demand that all warrants for execution be signed by the president of the republic. By 9 June Pétain had persuaded the government to alter the law in cases of

132  Mutiny and Leadership collective disobedience, to remove the president’s right to offer a pardon and not to ­publish the new changes. As such, the executions began in early June, and of the 3,427 soldiers convicted of mutiny, 554 were sentenced to death with 52 (or possibly 62) men executed (the rest had their sentences commuted to hard labour, mainly in North Africa). Many more were probably shot out of hand, but obviously the records of these do not exist, and the precise nature of those chosen for trial was markedly different in different units. For example, General Taufflieb, commander of the XXXVII Corps, had twenty men picked at random by gendarmes from his mutinous troops, but most seemed to have chosen the alleged ringleaders. Thirty French officers were sent for trial under the new conseils de guerre (including three generals and eleven lieutenant colonels), usually for failing to put down the mutinies rather than engaging in mutiny themselves. But Pétain also set about addressing the complaints of the poilu, especially the leave system, which was increased and made more ­efficient and transparent and associated with improved rest zones when the troops were out of the line. He also visited ninety divisions in person and distributed more medals for ­valour—and not just to officers—than had hitherto been the tradition. In addition, he ensured that information about the mutinies was suppressed, even to the extent of telling Haig that only two French divisions were involved, rather than the sixty-­eight that were. Given that Haig feared the French army would collapse at this point, perhaps it did not matter what Pétain told him. And given the likely withdrawal of the Russian army and the virtual collapse of the Italian army, the early summer of 1917 was a very dangerous time for the Allies. Yet, for all Pétain’s dissembling, by mid-­July the once-­shattered French army was ready for further offensive operations, albeit not on the scale envisaged by Nivelle. When Pétain published his own account of the mutinies in 1926, he blamed the flood of pacifist propaganda that had swamped the trenches in the winter of 1916/17, poor conditions at the front and in the French army generally, and Nivelle’s fantastical overconfidence. Furthermore, Pétain insisted that, while there were some politically motivated mutineers, most involved were merely misled, and this proved a common thread amongst French authors. But their British counterparts were much more willing to impute the collapse of morale to what Watt (1963) called a ‘convulsion of exhausted troops’ (quoted in Smith, 1994: 177), a line that Pedroncini (1967) would have supported in his claim that the mutinies were a response to three years of increasingly pointless and increasing costly military failure, hence the geographical link between mutinies and active combat zones. In other words, the mutinies were rooted in breaking the social contract but were not manifestations of political radicalism. This, as suggested earlier, implies a clear delineation between industrial militancy and political radicalism that often fails to understand the fluid nature of the boundary and the extent to and speed at which the boundary can shift in one direction or the other. And, as Smith (1994: 178) suggests, this cannot explain why the mutinies persisted beyond the Chemin des Dames offensive and after the point at which Pétain took control. Smith’s (1994: 175–214) own focus of attention—the French 5th Infantry Division—had not been in combat for three months when it engaged in the mutinous activity that included refusing to go back into the trenches. This may have been exacerbated by the fact that the division had been expecting to engage in mobile warfare following on the assumed success of the Nivelle offensive. That refusal was compounded by the attempts to persuade other units to do the same and a demand that the war be stopped, if necessary through revolution, and that ‘foreign troops’ (Algerian and Moroccans usually) stop being used to break up industrial disputes in Paris.

Mutinies in War  133 Yet violence in the mutinies was extremely limited, and the immediate trigger was often mundane. For example, on 28 May 1917, the 1st Battalion of the 129th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Division engaged in an unarmed protest after they were moved by truck to Soissons from Nogent l’Artaud, even as their families were arriving to spend the holiday with them. When they arrived at Soissons they were then told that their train would be delayed for three days. A series of meetings, protest marches, and ‘strikes’ then ensued, and the army responded by moving different regiments to different locations, without force, but the discontent continued. On 6 June the division refused to enter the trenches and some soldiers armed themselves, demanding to see their political representatives in Paris, which, of course, implies a politicization of the dispute and a radicalization of their complaints—but also an implicit recognition that the Third Republic remained legitimate. In the end, enough officers interceded, followed the official policy of restraint, and persuaded their men—usually without coercion—that duty required them to comply with orders, and eventually the mutiny evaporated, though not without the traditional search for scapegoats and ‘outsiders’. Even as early as 8 June Pétain admitted he was searching for ‘leaders’ of the mutinies, though there was little evidence that the mutinies had been led by individuals, let alone political radicals, and much more evidence that large bodies of soldiers were involved right from the beginning. Most of those arrested were either privates or corporals and few were charged with the most serious offence: ‘revolt bearing arms’. Where large numbers had been involved in some form of mutiny, for example, in the 5th Infantry Division, the actual proportion arrested varied from 4 per cent to 24 per cent, but it was never more than a quarter of those known to have engaged in mutiny. Oftentimes they were chosen not randomly but because they had previously poor dis­cip­lin­ary records and were therefore assumed to be amongst the most guilty. And that assumption usually held. For instance, only two of 100 soldiers arrested from the 74th and 274th Infantry regiments were found not guilty, and the defences of most were extra­or­din­ar­ily common: they admitted participating, they denied leading, they denied understanding the intent of the mutineers, and they suggested they were merely following their comrades in solidarity but not in mutiny. Those that were found guilty of political ac­tiv­ities were often either shot or given long prison sentences. Roughly 16 per cent of those found guilty were sentenced to death, but between 3 and 8 per cent were actually executed (Smith, 1994: 212–14). The French Republic survived the scare of 1917 that had swept the Russian Czar and Provisional Government out of the way; the German military thought they had also weathered their own 1917 storm—but they did not expect the 1918 maelstrom.

The German Mutinies 1917–18 If the Potemkin represented a festering receptacle of privilege and poverty, conservative obsequiousness and radical dissent, for most of the first two decades of the twentieth ­century, in Russia, it was not unique. In 1917 the German Navy suffered its own bout of protest against conditions and discipline, and in November 1918 the ‘red sailors’ became involved in one of the period’s most important mutinies that had extraordinary unforeseen circumstances for Germany and for the world. Historically Germany, and before that Prussia, had relied upon its formidable army to maintain defence and engage in offensive action outside national boundaries, but it had

134  Mutiny and Leadership little colonial interest or ambition. In that sense, it was the opposite of Britain, whose establishment had long feared a standing army and whose overseas commercial interests had always privileged naval over army interests. However, and despite the fact that it failed, the 1848 revolution in Germany had helped to found the navy through popular subscription, and the sailors, the Blauen Jungen (Blue Jackets), remained admired from then on, especially in contrast to the class-­ridden Junker aristocracy that led the army (Horn,  1969: 3). Indeed, the German navy in the nineteenth century was noted for its broad social background and much more benign disciplinary system than the one that prevailed in the army. The accession of Wilhelm II to the German throne in 1888, compounded by the arrival of Admiral von Tirpitz as Secretary of the Navy in 1898, ended that restricted naval interest and helped put Germany on a collision course with its neighbours. Kaiser Wilhelm was vigorously supported by the German ‘Navy League’ of ‘Fleet Association’, formed in 1898 by Tirpitz to persuade the German Parliament, the Reichstag, to fund a rapid and large scale expansion of the Imperial German Navy, the Kaiserliche Marine. From then onwards, the German Navy was dominated by battleships in the North Sea, facing off against the British, not cruisers peacefully visiting the world. That also meant that captains would no longer have the opportunity of having independent commands abroad but would, from this point, only be compliant servants of central command. The authoritarian culture that then prevailed, which had started in the Prussian army, generated a Kadavergehorsam (blind, deathlike obedience) which also grated against the highly skilled technicians on board ship that comprised over half the crew by the time of the First World War. This also reflected a deeper cultural divide in Germany between the increasingly educated and skilled working class that was prevented from obtaining their desired political representation by the same aristocratic forces that had always dominated Prussian and then German politics and had a very different agenda (Horn, 1969: 11–12). In pursuit of this agenda, both Kaiser Wilhelm and Admiral Tirpitz were supporters of Alfred Mahan’s popular book The Influence of Sea Power on History, which suggested that sea power was the key to the acquisition and retention of world power status—and an empire—something many members of the German establishment were keen to acquire. After all, how could you call yourself a German Emperor without a German Empire? And to acquire and retain an empire you needed a fleet strong enough to defeat, or at least deter, the greatest naval force of the day, the British fleet. To achieve this, Tirpitz argued that parity was not necessary and that indeed such a threat would provoke the British before the German Navy was ready. But, even in the face of greater resources available to the British, their considerable colonial requirements spread the Royal Navy so thinly around the world that a German battlefleet that was smaller but better trained and equipped would be more than a match for the British. Thus the ‘risk theory’ that Tirpitz promulgated required no major fleet engagement—that the initially inferior German fleet would lose—but a series of smaller engagements within the confines of the North Sea to allow the Germans to hit and run and eventually wear the British fleet down to parity. That all assumed the British would comply with Tirpitz’s plan, but Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty and thus the political head of the Royal Navy, was adamant that no such risk would be taken and was determined that Admiral Jellicoe, Commander of the British Grand Fleet (and ‘the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon’), was never going to be authorized to engage the Germans in a large-­scale battle unless absolutely necessary.

Mutinies in War  135 In the end, as the German critic of Tirpitz, Admiral Heeringen, stated, the German fleet was ‘too large to die with honour but still too small in order to triumph over the British under all circumstances’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 14–15). Nevertheless, the German Navy opted for impressive battleships when the real threat to the Royal Navy (as it was in the Second World War) was submarines that were not even built in significant numbers until 1912, even though German submarine technology led the world at this time. Given that each battleship took twenty times more resources to build than a submarine, it should have been obvious that the focus on battleships was counter-­productive, but this always going to be a cultural and not a logical debate. Moreover, while the German battleships spent most the war bottled up in the Baltic by the blockade of the Royal Navy, their few submarines nearly brought Britain to its knees. But a year after Jutland, and after Tirpitz had been ‘dismissed’ (he was forced to resign by Bethmann-­Hollweg, the German chancellor, who feared Tirpitz’s sudden support for unrestricted submarine warfare would drag the Americans into the war), the German naval shipyards were still building eight more battleships and only forty-­seven sub­mar­ines.6 This was even more surprising, given that Germany had reintroduced unrestricted submarine warfare in January 1917 and promised to bring Britain to its knees within six months.7 The tardiness of the naval support for submarine building might be explained by the cultural hostility of the senior command, after all, as Admiral Capelle suggested to the Reichstag, ‘what would happen to the organization and promotion [ladder] of the navy, if U-­boats were to supplant battleships?’ (quoted in Horn,  1969: 19). Horn’s (1969: 19) response to this question is telling: ‘The German navy had long ago created a system whose purpose it was to protect and advance the status of its officer corps.’ Furthermore, the German Navy now began to attract more and more officers with middle- and upper-­class backgrounds, and their strongly conservative political views began to corrode the hitherto more liberal views of the nineteenth-­century naval officer class in what Horn (1969: 6) called ‘the feudalization of the bourgeoisie’. Equally important, by 1911 the German Navy, at the request of their Inspector of Education (Vice-­Admiral von Cörper), specifically began to recruit their engineering officers from lower-­middle-­class families so that they—engineering officers—would not pollute their brethren in the ‘proper’ officer corps. As for the deck officers, the equivalent of Non-­Commissioned or Warrant Officers in the army (that is sailors with ten to twenty years of experience with significant technical skill and experience), not one was promoted into the ‘proper’ officer ranks during the First World War. This was in sharp contrast to the practice in the German army. As Vice-­Admiral von Trotha noted at the time, to admit such ‘comic figures’ into the mess would, once the war was over, bring about ‘highly undesirable . . . revolutionary change in the composition of the officers’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 9). Ironically, then, the German Navy, which had for so long before the First World War avoided the Prussian system of coercive discipline and social snobbery, actually took over the mantle and exaggerated its characteristics in the new Kastengeist (Caste spirit). That might explain why the 6  The U-­boats commissioned in the First World War never totalled more than 375, and two-­thirds of these were usually being replenished or refitted at any one time. 7  Unrestricted submarine warfare had been introduced first in early 1915, and that had resulted in the sinking of the Lusitania, a passenger ship with 1,962 people on board, of whom 1,201 died, including 128 Americans. The threat from President Woodrow Wilson had been sufficient to get the restrictions to military vessels reinserted in September 1915.

136  Mutiny and Leadership Captain of the König Wilhelm, a training ship, was apoplectic when told he would no longer be able to inflict even ten lashes upon 15-­year-­old cabin boys. Tirpitz’s plan prevailed in the early part of the twentieth century at the expense of the army budget, but as Social Democratic representation in the Reichstag increased and ­hostility to Tirpitz increased, the budget moved back towards preference for the army by 1911/12. Indeed, such was the concern amongst the establishment that the rise of working-­class representation would threaten their entire existence that there were calls to launch a war to unite the country against the enemy outside, rather than inside (Epkenhans, 2003: 89). Worse, and unexpectedly, the British responded by putting even more effort into building up the Royal Navy to the point where the Kaiserliche Marine found it impossible to catch up. To the astonishment of many European Social Democrats, and contrary to many ­pre-­war announcements, when war was declared in 1914 most working-­class political bodies responded enthusiastically. Nowhere was this more so than the previously anti-­war German Social Democrats, who readily acquiesced to the Kaiser’s claim that a ‘fortress truce’ (Burgfrieden) should prevail for the duration of hostilities, arguing (wrongly) that the war was only for defensive purposes and not about the acquisition of an empire, and that the gross political and economic inequalities would be addressed. The Battle of Jutland (31 May to 1 June 1916), which ended with more losses for the British High Seas Fleet than their German opponents, was ultimately inconclusive and not the striking blow that either side wished for. Moreover, while the German fleet may have won the tactical battle, it lost the strategic war because it remained confined to German waters for the rest of the war. Perhaps more importantly, Jutland marked the end of the dominance of the large battleship and, despite Tirpitz’s disinterest, the beginning of the age of the submarine as the greater danger to enemy ships. Tirpitz saw a different danger to the German Fleet—that it would be relegated to a second-­class status as a consequence of its failure. Indeed, he had written to his wife at the beginning of the war that he feared ‘the navy will be lost, in my eyes, if it cannot prove some success at least’ (quoted in Epkenhans, 2003: 94). Thus the German fleet found itself restricted either to the Baltic or to port, where the tensions between the officers and ­sailors, and within the officer class between executive and ‘other’ officers, became more dangerous with each day of passing. Neither engineering officers nor deck officers were allowed to enter the executive officers’ mess, and their response, especially the younger officers, was often to disengage from their duties and volunteer for duty aboard the expanding submarine service. When the war began to turn against Germany in the summer of 1918, many of those younger officers, who had originally acted as a buffer between the executive officers and ordinary sailors, had already left (Epkenhaus, 2003: 80–89). In fact, between August and October 1918, 49 per cent of the captains and 45 per cent of the first officers of the ships that were destined to participate in the suicide mission in October 1918 had changed (Horn, 1969: 215). As morale declined after Jutland, and the months of waiting returned, what one or­din­ ary seaman’s diary (Seaman Stumpf—initially a Catholic and strong supporter of the monarchy but later a reluctant social democrat) noted as a ‘prison psychosis’ returned to haunt the ships, as the disciplinary requirements set by the officers hardened just as the likelihood of further action receded. The morale of the crews was worsened by the absence of the kind of sporting and recreational centres that the British armed forces usually

Mutinies in War  137 provided to keep their soldiers and sailors engaged. Thus, for example, even where a ­theatre was provided, as at Flensburg, all the seating was reserved from various levels of the officer class. And while even married ordinary sailors were forbidden to live ashore, to ensure security, every single officer could live wherever they liked. Nor was there much inter­action between officers and crew, except through official duties, and this generated a vacuum in what came to be called Inner Führung (internal leadership), that would, ­elsewhere, bond the two groups together. This, combined with the officers’ Kastengeist (caste spirit) and their own adoption of the Kadavergohorsam (blind obedience) effectively and iron­ic­al­ly blinded them when faced with any form of dissent—which they immediately took to be politically inspired treason, especially after the Russian Revolution in February/March 1917. As Ordinary Seaman Stumpf wrote from his bunk on the battleship Helgoland, ‘Since we have such limited contact with the actual war, we wage a sort of internal war among ourselves on the ship’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 33). The German Navy was not alone; the navy of its ally, the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, was similarly engulfed by mutinous discontent at exactly the same time and for very similar reasons: poor food, poor conditions, unnecessary labour, harshly coercive dis­cip­line, and a division between the ratings and officers that made a mockery of the alleged unity of the empire (Sondhaus,  2001). In Germany that political discontent had been brewing since the spring of 1917, when the British naval blockade, combined with a poor harvest the previous summer which had blighted the potato crop, began to bite into German food supplies, leading to the ‘turnip winter’ that affected everyone in the navy, with the notable exception of the officers. Even before this, the costs of food allocations exemplified the problem: the cost of ordinary sailor’s food was capped at 1.32 marks per day; officers at 3.65 marks per day. But the problem was not just the inequality but the widespread rumours that the officers stole some of the men’s food in addition to their own. Worse, rumours spread that officers on the light cruiser Stettin were alleged to have thrown sandwiches at each other, while the crew survived on little more than turnips. Elsewhere it was common for the officers to eat three times a day while the men only ate one meal of Drahtverhau, the ‘barbed-­wire’ soup made from dehydrated vegetables. As ever, the problems were not restricted to the navy, and strikes amongst dockyard workers at the Kiel naval base, in protest against the lowering of flour rations, began to spread throughout the naval yards. That coincided with news emanating from Russia that the Czar had fallen in a revolutionary uprising. The Imperial Naval Office responded on 20 June by ordering the appointment of Menagekommission (Food Supervisory [Complaint] Committees), but the order was ignored by naval high command. Captain Brüninghaus even suggested such committees resembled the sailors’ councils that had appeared in ­revolutionary Russia—and there is only one account of an officer taking his responsibility seriously by reprimanding those responsible for poor food (Kapitän Langemark on the Thüringen), recognizing the connection between poor food and low morale (Horn, 1969: 49). The immediate response elsewhere was a refusal by sailors on the Helgoland to eat their rations, prompting the captain to reduce their soap ration, but when the second stokers watch on board the Friedrich der Grosse copied their colleagues, their officers forced them to stand naked for forty-­five minutes while they were checked for cleanliness. In June 1917 the Friedrich der Grosse was placed under the command of Admiral Bachmann and sailed from Wilhelmshaven to Kiel, under orders not to discuss politics and with a refusal to

138  Mutiny and Leadership organize a Menagekommission. Max Reichpietsch, a long-­serving sailor with a poor ­dis­cip­lin­ary record but with the support of his colleagues, decided to take leave and go to the Reichstag in Berlin to meet with both left-­wing political parties (the Independent Social Democratic Party, or USPD, and the Social Democratic Party, or SPD) to see whether Admiral Capelle’s order for a Menagekommission was legal and whether Admiral Bachmann’s prohibition of left-­wing political discussion was illegal. Reichpietsch met several politicians from the USPD who cautioned him against being too overt with his pol­it­ ical activity, given the politics of the navy. In the event, Reichpietsch did not meet with the SPD and did not raise the two issues he had been sent to discuss—the legality of the two orders—but he had raised the possibility of sailors joining the USPD and reading their literature, both of which were legal activities at the time (neither the USPD nor the SPD openly recruited members of the armed forces). What he had also not done was secure support for an imminent mutiny in the fleet because none was planned; however, Reichpietsch did appear to believe that he had a mission to spread the work of the USPD within the navy. On the evening of 4 July 4 the crew of the Friedrich der Grosse engaged in artillery practice and were so hungry that they consumed the bread allocated for the following day. When that day came—and no bread was available—half the crew (about 500 sailors and stokers) refused to work and eventually succeeded in persuading the captain to provide an extra meal and equally important, to establish a Menagekommission to consider not just food complaints but all complaints. The crew promptly elected Reichpietsch, Weber, and Sachse to represent them. Aboard the Prinzregent Luitpold, anchored at Wilhelmshaven, the crew were asked to subscribe to a new war loan and they collectively refused, while their spokesperson, Seaman First Class Preuschkat, was degraded a rank and transferred. This ship, regarded by the navy as a ‘convict ship’ because of its unruly crew, regularly had around 5 per cent of the crew on some disciplinary punishment. On 6 June the crew refused to eat the prepared food unless it was also eaten by the officers, and eventually 1st Officer Herzbruch capitulated and provided them with bread and bacon, but, since the food did not improve after this, the crew decided to set up a Soldatenbund (soldiers’ council) to organize future protests. Delegates were elected from each watch and division, and the organization was to be led by two stokers, both of whom had anarchist sympathies but neither of whom assumed the soldiers’ council was concerned with anything other than domestic problems on naval ships: Albin Köbis, who would handle the internal issues; and Johann Beckers, who would have responsibility for communicating with other crews on different ships. Beckers then made contact with Max Reichpietsch and Willi Sachse on the Friedrich der Grosse. The crew of the Prinzregent Luitpold then went on a go-­slow and demanded the establishment of their own Menagekommission, which was eventually conceded by Captain Hornhardt. Nevertheless, on 19 July the crew were provided with a meal ‘that was swarming with worms’ and, after they refused to eat both it and the first replacement meal, a second replacement with bread and sausage arrived and was accepted (Horn, 1969: 109). The next day, the crew of the Pillau left the ship without permission in protest at the cancellation of all their leave, and they spent the afternoon in the local bars before returning to work; they were given three hours of exercise in punishment, but no one was arrested for mutiny. Reflecting the growing war-­weariness in the country and the rise of industrial ­discontent, with Chancellor Bethmann-­Hollweg’s support the Kaiser’s Easter message in

Mutinies in War  139 1917 promised limited liberalization of the country, but even that was too much for Ludendorff and Hindenburg, who demanded the Chancellor’s resignation, which the Kaiser accepted the same month. This, in turn, spurred the left-­wing political parties to pass a Peace Resolution on 19 July 1917, echoing the Russian revolutionaries’ claim for immediate peace without annexation or indemnities. As the intrigue at the top of the political hierarchy played out, a small meeting at the bottom was to have dire consequences for some of the mutineers. On 20 July Alfred Herre, a one-­time editor of a USPD paper and now a sailor, spoke to a small group of sailors in Wilhelmshaven, and while explaining that they could not join the USPD and should not use violence nor comply with orders requiring them to fire on protesters, told them they could collect signatures in support of the forthcoming Peace Conference. Nothing that Herre said seemed to have been illegal and he was not charged until a year later, but the effects of the speech seemed to have been dramatic, as 400 sailors and stokers signed up as members of the USPD and rumours circulated that a demonstration against the war was planned. Shortly after this, Reichpietsch gave a speech to a group of about forty sailors in which he insisted that the war must be stopped and that, if necessary, force should be used against their officers to stop it, if the peace conference came to nothing. At a subsequent meeting on 30 July, Beckers, from the Prinzregent Luitpold, successfully argued that the political issue was not part of their remit and that they should all stick to the concerns of the Menagekommission. At this time Horn (1969: 123, 131) suggests that no more than 10 per cent of the German Navy was ever really committed to political action (led by Reichpietsch), whatever the supporters (from the extreme left) and opponents of political revolution (from the extreme right) might pretend, and the rest were merely concerned with securing improved food and conditions. In short, the sailors’ movement was being politicized, but it was not at this point a political group, let alone a revolutionary movement. Even Lenin assumed the opposite, however, and in his article ‘The Crisis Is upon Us’ he suggested that the German mutiny was revolutionary in nature and heralded the beginning of a world revolution. It wasn’t, and it didn’t, and the USPD was not a revolutionary party in the sense that the Bolsheviks were, though its left wing was to split away and become one in late 1918. However, three things turned a string of successful mutinies in July into a series of catastrophes in August. First was the presence of the pacifist literature, combined with a list of signatures organized by Reichpietsch in favour of the International Socialist Peace Conference to take place in September 1917 in Stockholm. Second, naval intelligence reported that over 5,000 naval crew had applied to join the USPD. In fact, the USPD seemed rather disinterested in their newfound naval friends and did not sanction strikes or mutinies within the armed forces, though Reichpietsch believed it would if the Stockholm conference failed to secure peace. Third, the centre and left political parties in Germany agreed to press the government to negotiate peace and establish a parliamentary democracy with an extended franchise. The transition—from actions regarded by the authorities as quasi-­legitimate protests in July to rabid political insurrection in August—is best represented by what happened to the stokers on the Prinzregent Luitpold. They were involved on 31 July 1917 in yet another protest about the turnips they had been fed, and Hoffman, a senior engineering officer, responded by cancelling the cinema and recreational privileges of the stokers and re­placing

140  Mutiny and Leadership them with drill. The next day, under the direction of Beckers, the stokers refused to report for the infantry drill or to start work until 11.00, and then forty-­seven of them left the ship. When they did return they were lined up on deck, and eleven were selected as the ringleaders for punishment: all were degraded in rank and given between fourteen and twenty-­one days’ detention (suspended until the space for them became available on board and in the town prison). The stokers involved then objected to what they saw as scapegoating and demanded of Captain Hornhardt that either all of them be punished or  every other stoker. Hornhardt refused, and a meeting was then held that evening (1 August) on the dock side, with delegates from the Prinzregent Luitpold, the Friedrich der Grosse, the Kaiser, the Kaiserine, and the Pillau. They decided that the entire crew of the Prinzregent Luitpold would walk off the ship the following day in protest, but there were no calls for political action, nor was the war—or peace—discussed. Indeed, Köbis, noting the three-­hour state-­of-­readiness requirement in case of enemy action, suggested they kept the protest to three hours in length so that—as had happened on board the Pillau on 20 July—they would receive, at worst, extra drill because they could not be accused of treason or putting the ship at risk. Since no other crew that had been involved in similar action had been unduly punished, and they were confident of ­support from other crews, on 2 August 600 other sailors duly walked off the battleship. After listening to Stoker Köbis address them on the dock, demanding the release of their comrades, they marched off to a local tavern for the morning, leaving just 100 sailors on board. At about 10.00 that morning they were persuaded back to the ship by local police, where they were met by an officer who ordered them to return; they refused until he had left, and then they returned at speed to the ship. At this point leaflets were found on board published by the USPD calling for an end to the war ‘without annexations or indemnities’. The following day eighteen of the crew involved in the walkout on 2 August were singled out from the parade and, at gunpoint, herded onto a small boat and taken ashore. Despite the protests of the crew, and their leaders, Köbis and Beckers, that the complaints were nothing to do with politics and all to do ‘local disaffection’ and dis­crim­in­ ation, this was enough for the commander of the High Seas Fleet, Admiral Scheer, and Admiral von Capelle, Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, to assume a politically inspired mutiny on the Prinzregent Luitpold, and seventy-­five sailors were arrested. In fact, Admiral Scheer’s initial response was relatively benign, and he ordered all commanders to ensure that the Menagekommission did not interfere with standard work practices, but others were less tolerant. In his report to the admiralty, Captain Hornhardt noted that, ‘the events of August 1 and 2, and the discovery of documents, point to widespread agitation and recruitment by the USPD which has undermined the patriotic spirit and military bearing of the crew’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 136). Moreover, the commander of the Baltic Fleet suggested that the movement ‘emanated from an anarchistic central headquarters on shore’, despite the irony that anarchists wouldn’t have had a central anything, let alone a headquarters issuing directives. Much more important in the apparent change of mind on the part of Scheer was probably the testimony derived from the interrogations of the accused undertaken by Doctor Dobring, legal counsel of the 4th Squadron. He told Beckers, for example, that he was ‘one of the death candidates’ and said to him that he must ‘tell the truth [or] I shall at once demand execution by firing squad’ (quoted in

Mutinies in War  141 Horn,  1969: 140). When Sachse8 was interviewed he was asked to choose between a revolver and a noose, and his response was to implicate his colleagues in all kinds of pol­it­ ical conspiracies involving the USPD, including a fabricated story about blowing up the Friedrich der Grosse and the use of force to end the war. Reichpietsch was a more recalcitrant prisoner until faced with Sachse’s ‘confession’, at which point Reichpietsch admitted meeting with USPD politicians but not the grand conspiracy that Sachse alleged had the fleet in its grip. Beckers and Köbis similarly admitted to knowing of the links to the USPD, but they denied any political conspiracy and insisted that food and conditions were the cause of the mutinies, not politics, and, ironically, the withholding of food, poor conditions, and threats of execution were a common practice during the interrogations of the mutineers. No attempts were made at the two-­day court martial to raise the role of poor conditions or food or leadership—as might be expected given that the German Navy was more concerned with protecting the officer corps than developing an efficient and ef­fect­ ive naval service—so the entire focus of the prosecution seems to have been (since the records vanished) on the political corruption of the mutineers by the USPD. Interestingly, no leaders of the USPD were called to give evidence, and the only real evidence against the accused was the confession of Sachse; even the Admiralty’s legal team advised that the case against the mutineers was palpably weak. Despite this, on 26 August, five mutineers were sentenced to death for violating paragraphs 89 and 90, Article 6 of the Code of Military Justice. Paragraph 89 concerned giving aid to a foreign power—which clearly they had not—and paragraph 90 concerned ‘incitement to rebellion’ or ‘completion of treasonable incitement to rebellion’. Even the navy’s own head of legal affairs, Dr Felisch, suggested that both of these actually required proof of rebellion—of which there was none—though, in his opinion the men were guilty of ‘attempting to mutiny’, for which the death penalty was forbidden. Admiral Scheer, head of the High Seas Fleet and the man who could have intervened against the death penalties, refused to do so (he had already suggested before the court martial that ‘a few death sentences’ would help discipline) and arbitrarily signed two of the five warrants on 3 September, ordering their executions on 5 September, thereby preventing the Kaiser from having the time to commute these two sentences, as was his right. It was, as Horn (1969: 165) concludes, ‘a judicial murder’. Köbis and Reichpietsch were shot at the Fahn firing range near Cologne on 5 September 1917 by a 25-­man firing squad. Beckers, Sachse, and Weber had their sentences commuted to imprisonment. Willy Weber responded later: ‘Nobody wanted a revolution, we just wanted to be treated more like human beings.’ Many who acted to secure the latter but who had not been imprisoned were transferred to shore batteries in Kiel or Wilhelmshaven or the Naval Infantry Brigade in Flanders (Horn, 1969: 189). Weber was partially wrong: the navy wanted a revolutionary political party that they could blame for the mutinies—and to save themselves from any taint of responsibility— and the USPD was the chosen scapegoat. That, of course, also meant that changes within the navy to address the concerns of the mutineers were never forthcoming, and the problems were sidestepped rather than faced head-­on. Admiral Scheer first voiced this strategy 8  After his death sentence was commuted to fifteen years’ imprisonment for his part in the mutiny, Sachse joined the Communist Party and was involved in the Revolutionary Workers and Soldiers, a group that organized resistance to the Nazi Party. He was executed on 21 August 1944.

142  Mutiny and Leadership in the middle of August but was disappointed by Admiral von Capelle’s response that, since USPD Deputies enjoyed parliamentary immunity, they could not be prosecuted for treason (nor was there any evidence for this anyway). Undeterred, Scheer persuaded the new chancellor, Michaelis (who had replaced Bethmann-­Hollweg), to authorize a search of the offices of the USPD and, despite any evidence to the contrary, demanded that action be taken to proscribe them. The uproar against this action by the left and centrist parties then turned into an attack upon the armed forces, especially when it became clear that two mutineers had been executed for their political beliefs in what many believed was a fraudu­lent trial. Fortunately for the navy, at this juncture (9 October) a ‘confession’ from Paul Calmus, a mutineer on the Rheinland, reported not just that revolutionary politicians (and particularly the USPD Deputy, Dittman) were involved but that the ‘conspiracy’ also included military officers and foreign agents from Russia, Britain, France, and Italy and would have led to the assassination of the Kaiser. That the fantasy concocted by Calmus could not have been true, because Dittman was at the Peace Conference in Stockholm at the time he was alleged to have met Calmus, seems not to have bothered the navy one iota. But it bothered the Reichstag, who threw out the claims and also threw out Michaelis, to be replaced as chancellor by von Hertling. Far from turning Köbis and Reichpietsch into convenient scapegoats, the actions of the navy had turned them into radical heroes, but it also in­aug­ ur­ated the fatal narrative about the German forces being ‘stabbed in the back’ by left-­wing and Jewish politicians and revolutionaries. In fact, the German army ordered a ‘Jewish Census’ in October 1916 to ‘prove’ that Jews were under-­ represented in front-­ line troops and over-­ represented amongst support troops. In the event the results suggested that Jews were over-­represented in both areas— and the results were duly suppressed (Evans, 2003). But perhaps the most prescient manifestation of this wilful blindness was the comment by the captain of the Prinzregent Luitpold, von Hornhardt, on 26 September: ‘The morale of the crew had been completely restored by the punishment and lectures by officers’ (quoted in Horn,  1969: 185). Two days later, Captain Lefert on the Friedrich der Grosse made a similarly misguided comment that captures what Collinson (2012) called ‘Prozac Leadership’. As Lefert suggested: ‘Lectures have brought things to such a point that the majority of men will no longer allow themselves to be deceived or misled’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 186). Seaman Stumpf thought the punishment had done something quite different from the effusion of loyalty evinced in the officers’ minds: ‘Half of the men are apathetic, a quarter of them regard this as an outrage and feel sorry for the poor devils, while fewer than another quarter are ready to act and seek revenge’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 188). The officers, now in conspiracy mode, dis­cip­lined all naval personnel who had red threads in their uniform and banned all news­ papers from the political left (but not the political right). As the winter of 1917/18 advanced, the food situation in Germany drastically worsened (the average calorie intake was halved to 1,400 calories per day, from the pre-­war 3,000) and protest marches erupted across the country, led by women and industrial working men. But while the revolutionary upheavals in Russia prompted some radicalization amongst German workers, the eventual peace treaty with Russia provided Germany with much-­needed military resources to transfer to the Western Front. It also encouraged the German army leaders, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, to press for an immediate all-­out effort to head off the rising internal discontent—‘the democratic flood’, as it was

Mutinies in War  143 called—and win the war before the Americans landed in the next few months. That, plus the rise of military support for right-­wing political parties in the pan-­German programme for imperialist expansion (which later emerged as the Fatherland Party), effectively ­shattered the Burgfrieden—the political truce—and undermined the military’s claim that soldiers and sailors, of all ranks, should be apolitical. Indeed, just before the Fatherland Party was launched, Admiral Capelle, the Secretary of the Navy, had ordered all naval commanders to prevent the distribution of political material, ‘regardless of [political] direction’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 62–3). That was roundly rejected by many senior commanders, including Prince Henry, brother of the Kaiser, who insisted on his right to allow ‘good political literature’. Admiral Scheer and Admiral Bachmann also said they would continue to allow ‘good political writing of a generally nationalistic nature’ and promptly prohibited his own sailors from attending socialist lectures. In reality, most of the senior commanders were appalled by Capelle’s threat to inform the Reichstag of their refusal of what they deemed to be matters of a ‘purely military nature’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 64). However, the failure of the German army’s Spring Offensive in 1918 led directly to the slow retreat by the German army until that turned into the first major setback on 8 August, when the Allies broke the German line at Amiens and began the ‘100 days Offensive’ that generated an unravelling of the entire Western Front. On 11 August Scheer replaced Holtzendorff as Chief of the Admiralty Staff, and, with Trotha in charge of the High Seas Fleet, the German navy was now led by the two most reactionary leaders, just at the time that the government was heading in the opposite political direction. In addition, the navy had reports that sailors in Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, and Friedrichsort would walk off their ships in protest if the war were not over by the middle of October. With Scheer’s new chief of staff, Captain Levetzow (who would go on to be the Nazi chief of police in Berlin), a plan to save the navy from humiliation, through a suicidal attack upon the Royal Navy, was hatched. However, within a week, Ludendorff admitted that the war was effectively lost, and by 29 September the Imperial High Command advised the government to seek an armistice to protect the German military—and to accept a democratization of Germany to protect the establishment. The following day, Admiral Scheer, wary of Ludendorff ’s warning that the German Navy would probably have to be ceded to the British to pay for the defeat and persuaded by similar-­minded officials, ordered the High Seas Fleet to assemble at the bay on Schillig Roads, off Wilhelmshaven, to engage in a final mission to ‘save the honour’ of the German navy, even though it was obvious the war was lost as the German army descended into chaos in October. The naval plan—Operations Plan No. 19—was agreed orally between Admiral Scheer and Admiral von Hipper, so as to prevent either the Emperor or the Chancellor knowing of the plan (von Hertling resigned on 30 September and the liberal Prince von Baden took office on 3 October), and it would have led to a full-­scale battle between the British and the German navies—had the British decided to take the bait. But since peace was at hand, and there was no incentive to engage in such a battle, it is highly unlikely that the Royal Navy would have responded to the threat. On 14 October President Wilson insisted that German submarine attacks upon ­passenger vessels would have to cease if Germany wanted an armistice—and still Scheer resisted, demanding that his plan to build even more submarines be executed, and this was only abandoned when von Baden threatened to resign on 20 October. Scheer’s

144  Mutiny and Leadership response was foreboding: ‘In the event that we are forced to give up submarine warfare without in return obtaining a ceasefire, the fleet shall again become available for other tasks’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 207). The German naval planners continued with various versions of their fantasy with total disregard for von Baden’s plea to avoid ‘any incident that might disrupt the peace negotiations’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 207). Indeed, after the war the navy insisted that von Baden should have interpreted Scheer’s obscure statement as clear evidence of an impending attack, and as such the failure to stop it was political not naval. Whatever the linguistic distortions and doubletalk that were to come later, on 22 October Levetzow arrived at Wilhelmshaven with the secret (oral) order for Admiral Hipper: ‘High Seas Fleet shall attack and engage in battle the English Fleet’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 208). Four days later Ludendorff was dismissed from the army, and all military authority was formally subordinated to the new civilian government; though Scheer insisted that this injunction did not include the navy since operational decisions remained with him and had already been authorized by the Kaiser, which was completely untrue. Thus, in an act of consummate rebellion against the legitimate government, on 29 October the naval high command met on Hipper’s flagship the Baden, in preparation to sail the following morning. As Trotha insisted about the final battle (Flottenvorstoss), ‘From an honourable battle of our fleet, even if it should prove to be a battle that will bring about its death, . . . a new future German fleet will arise; a fleet that is shackled by a humiliating peace, shall have no future (quoted in Horn, 1969: 205). But, even as they met, mutinies had been, and were still, breaking out across the whole fleet, as the sailors realized what their officers were conspiring to do: rebel against the legitimate government. Even before the fleet had assembled, resistance mounted: on 27 October the crews of the Strassburg, Moltke, Derfflinger, Von der Tann, and Seydlitz refused to either board or make ready to sail to the Schillig Roads. On 28 October the crews of the Regensburg, König, and KronPrinz Wilhelm followed suit (see Figure 3.4) and the next day the Markgraf and the Bayern were similarly immobilized against the impending suicide mission. Hipper was forced to postpone the sailing when Admiral Kraft, commanding officer of the Third Squadron, admitted he had lost control over his entire squadron. By 30 October only the submarines and the torpedo boats had not joined the mutiny, but Hipper insisted that the plan should be executed and told the mutineers that the operation was not a suicide mission but a defensive operation that had been scuppered by cowards and traitors. Nevertheless, he ordered the fleet to disperse, with the Fourth Squadron remaining put, the Third to go to Kiel, and the First to go to the Elbe and cover the (still) impending submarine attack. The inevitable result was a wave of ‘mutinies’ by sailors and stokers of the First Squadron against the rebellion by their officers. On board the Thüringen and the Helgoland the crews refused to sail and instead cut their anchors, doused the furnaces, and broke out small arms, but they were overpowered by their of­fi­ cers, supported by marines. Next day the rebellious sailors on the Thüringen again refused to prepare to sail, and when they were threatened by the approach of two ‘loyal’ torpedo boats and a submarine, rebellious sailors of the Helgoland manoeuvred it to threaten the torpedo boats and submarine. The stand-­off was broken when the Helgoland ‘mutineers’ backed down, leaving over 200 of their comrades on the Thüringen to be arrested. However, when the stokers of the Ostfriesland were ordered to join the Thüringen as replacements for the arrested stokers, they refused. That night the ships of the Fourth

Mutinies in War  145

Figure 3.4  German Navy Mutiny 1918: Kiel Harbour, 28 October (Chronicle/Alamy)

Squadron were similarly becalmed amongst waves of protests, and Hipper responded by proclaiming that a Bolshevik conspiracy had ‘already spread very far’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 227). Although revolutions had indeed broken out in Vienna and Budapest on 31 October, and the naval command assumed the German mutineers were driven by the same radical politics, there is scant evidence that—at this point—the mutineers were engaged in radical politics and much more that they were simply not going to risk their lives in a futile effort to save the honour of their incompetent leaders. Nor were they going to allow what they called ‘the Admirals’ Rebellion’ (Horn, 1969: 198–233) to undermine the peace-­feelers put out by the legitimate government. Even that was in chaos, and the Kaiser had left Berlin and seemed on the verge of abdicating (he did so on 9 November). The naval command responded, as might be expected, not by admitting culpability but by insisting that their plan was only one intended to keep the crews busy, sever lines of communication between elements of the British fleet, and prevent naval support for a British army attack in Belgium. Thus, the naval establishment’s version of events was that the mutinies had been politically motivated and were nothing to do with resisting their ill-­founded suicide mission. On 1 November the Third Battle Squadron arrived at Kiel where their commanding officer, Admiral Kraft, had promised an amnesty for all those involved in the ‘mutinies’, but as soon as they had entered Kiel harbour he had forty-­seven men imprisoned on land and a further 200 posted to a penal battalion. In response, 250 sailors and stokers simply abandoned ship and met with local trade unionists and social democratic party activists in a naval yard. There—and in a classic example of how quickly demands can escalate and radicalize—they insisted not just on the release of sailors imprisoned in Kiel but also the end of the war, the abdication of the Kaiser, freedom of the press, a democratic republic,

146  Mutiny and Leadership and a further meeting the following day. Admiral von Souchon, the governor of Kiel, responded by prohibiting all demonstrations and increasing the number of armed patrols, but 600 naval crew then held an impromptu meeting in the open air, and two companies of the Sea Battalion (marines) refused to fire upon the meeting at the orders of their of­fi­ cers. Gradually crews from all over Kiel abandoned their ships and joined the protesters on land until 3,000 men had assembled for a meeting on 3 November. After the meeting they marched on the local naval jail to free the prisoners but were faced by an armed patrol of forty-­eight officer cadets and mates who fired over the heads of the crowd, and then into it, killing eight and wounding thirty-­nine protesters. In response, the crowd pelted the patrol with stones, injuring their commander, Lt Steinhäuser. Admiral Souchon seemed to have assumed the dispersal of the crowd implied victory over them, and he erroneously cancelled a request for external support. Starting with an overt rebellion by the hitherto loyal torpedo and submarine sections, the crews of the various ships in Kiel then demanded the formation of sailors’ and workers’ councils, and at 13.45 the town commandant told Souchon, ‘The mutiny among the troops continues to spread. Our means for the military suppression of the military are exhausted; we no longer possess any reliable troops’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 243). Souchon responded by opening negotiations with the rebels, much to the chagrin of the political right and the rest of the naval hierarchy, but the former would have their revenge later and the latter simply had no way of restoring order once the deceit of self-­enthrallment had been refuted. Within twenty-­four hours, red flags flew from every ship in the 3rd Squadron, but few officers were attacked because very few resisted, and the three that did—Captain Weniger, the commander of the König, and two junior officers—were shot dead trying to prevent his crew from hoisting the red flag by threatening them with pistols. Kiel’s town commandant was also killed while trying to evade an armed patrol of mutineers. The demands of the mutineers included a court martial of those involved in the shootings of 3 November, the end of the Hohenzollern dynasty, the freeing of all naval and political prisoners, a universal franchise, peace without annexations or indemnities, and a recognition of the sailors’ councils as legitimate representatives of the crew. Finally, they demanded a withdrawal of all army troops from Kiel; otherwise, they would bombard the railway station and the officers’ section of the barracks. As Souchon prevaricated about the deal, much of which was totally outside his control, the crews took over the entire town, and the officers assumed that Souchon had formally surrendered and gave up trying to resist the mutinies. The situation was further prevented from descending into anarchic chaos by the arrival of Gustav Noske, a leading SDP politician. Despite this, the Imperial Navy Office responded by ordering the arrest of all mutineers and the isolation of Kiel by loyal soldiers. However, the mutineers responded by sending ships to the other ports, and by 4 November Cuxhaven declared for the mutineers, followed by Wilhemshaven, Lübeck, and Hamburg. On 4 November, Ritter von Mann, the new Secretary of the Navy, continued to beg the army for support in putting down the mutinies. In support of this, and in an extra­or­din­ar­ ily bare-­faced lie, Hipper even proclaimed: ‘The Fleet receives its orders from the government and carries them out’ (quoted in Horn, 1969: 229). But when the army refused to attack the mutineers, the naval commanders were finished. By 5 November Noske grew increasingly worried that the jubilation of the victorious mutineers would degenerate into political chaos as the government of von Baden blockaded Kiel and threatened to make

Mutinies in War  147 examples of the ringleaders; worse, that evening, officers shot eight sailors dead and wounded twelve as they listened to Noske address them. In the absence of any clear local leadership, and without the political conspirators that the officers claimed were running the mutiny, Noske was then elected chair of the sailors’ council and the new Governor of Kiel. Noske then persuaded Souchon to order the officers to stop firing upon their crews, to share rations with their crews, and to surrender their weapons so that order could be restored. Even as this was happening, Admiral Levetzow, still smarting from the failure of his plan for a final suicide mission, persuaded the Kaiser to authorize an assault upon Kiel by Admiral Schroeder in a special train full of shock troops to put down the rebellion. Fortunately von Baden got wind of the plan and persuaded the Kaiser to rescind his authorization before it had been executed. On 6 November a general amnesty was issued by von Baden for all involved in the mutinies, provided they all handed their weapons in. In the event, by 7 November, Kiel had returned to some form of normality as banks and shops reopened and armed patrols kept order. Beyond Kiel all the major military and civilian ports had turned themselves into red ports within a few days: Lübeck and Cuxhaven on 5 November, Hamburg and Bremen on the 6th. That night a train full of naval prisoners arrived at Hanover from the Kiel mutiny, and they were just in time to celebrate the fall of the German Tenth Army to army mu­tin­ eers. At Wilhelmshaven, the largest German Naval base, the commander, Admiral von Krosigk, prepared to resist the approaching storm with 200 reliable troops and fifteen machine guns, but as 6,000 of his sailors protested outside his office on 7 November he acceded to all the demands of their representatives (a sailors’ council, removal of all troops, the freeing of all prisoners, no saluting when off duty, equal rations for all, and— perhaps not surprisingly given the limited demands of the mutineers—the banning of all alcohol and the return of order). These red-­flagged mutinies, then, did not represent the victory of a proto-­communist revolution but rather the sailors’ and soldiers’ flag of defiance, that they had seen off a reactionary and illegal attempt to waste their lives for the sake of a medieval notion of honour on the part of an elitist and decadent social group. In Berlin, on 6 November, General von Linsingen placed machine-­gun positions to cover the main railway and roads into the city and prevent the arrival of 300 sailors, but it was too little and too late. Within the day, twenty-­three minor princes had abdicated, as did the Kaiser the following day, 9 November, as Berlin finally fell to the insurgent but peaceful sailors and soldiers. On that day Friedrich Ebert, leader of the SDP, took power as the new chancellor—much to the relief of Baden—and within two hours Germany was declared a republic. That effectively meant it was Ebert, the Social Democrats, and the mutineers that had allegedly ‘stabbed Germany in the back’ and that the cessation of hostilities on 11 November was the responsibility of the political left, not those who had actually caused it, the political right. That avoidance of responsibility was to haunt Germany for much longer than the mutiny had lasted (Epkenhaus, 2003: 90–103).

ANZAC 1916 and Étaples 1917 If it was the German sailors that most concerned the German military high command, the British equivalent were more worried about their Australian troops than their own sailors. Troops of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) posed an intriguing

148  Mutiny and Leadership dilemma for the Western authorities. They were held in high esteem for their military prowess and fearless fighting capabilities, but the Australians in particular were feared for their poor disciplinary record. Given that about 20 per cent of Australian troops were British-­born, that fear is ironic (Robson, 1982). So, although the Australians were notorious for their refusal to take German prisoners at Polygon Wood near Ypres, for example, and were disproportionately involved in the raiding parties of 1918 (Jordan, 2017), they were also disproportionally involved in acts of indiscipline. Even amongst all the Dominion troops, the Australians were far more likely to be behind bars (9 prisoners per 1000 troops) than the Canadians, New Zealanders, or South Africans (1.6 prisoners per 1,000 troops). And they were also more likely to free other prisoners, irrespective of country, than any other country’s troops (Corns and Hughes-­Wilson, 2002: 390). Haig was convinced that the very high rates of insubordination and desertion from Australian troops was directly related to the refusal of their government—in contrast to every other—to permit executions (Gill and Dallas, 1975: 100, note 47). Hence, although 129 Australians were sentenced to death (mainly for desertion), none were executed. Section 98 of the (Australian) Commonwealth Defence Act 1903 stated that the death sentence was restricted to four martial offences—mutiny, desertion to the enemy, and two forms of treason—but all death sentences had to be signed off by the Australian Governor General and none were carried out. Partly this was because it was thought improper to execute soldiers who had volunteered for a war that had little to do with them, but it was also the case that the then Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, was trying to push a referendum on conscription through parliament and he was concerned that an execution would undermine the vote. On 7 June 1917, the Australian Solicitor-­General wrote to the Australian Secretary of Defence in response to a demand from Haig that he be allowed to impose the death penalty on Australian soldiers, suggesting: ‘I am of the opinion that, in view of the amendment of section 55 of the Defence Act, the Australian Imperial Force is subject to the [British] Army Act save so far as it is inconsistent with the Australian Defence Act’ (quoted in De Bellis,  2014: 86). In effect, Haig’s wishes were denied, which is perhaps not that ­surprising given that he went on to suggest that ‘wherever Anzac troops gathered in a gang out of line there was usually crime, disorder and trouble’ (quoted in Corns and Hughes-­Wilson, 2002: 391). As Gammage (1974, cited in De Bellis, 2014: 87) concludes, ‘while statistically it remains possible that the AIF contained an abnormally high proportion of shirkers, far more probable its indiscipline reflected a forceful Australian assertion of civilian prerogatives’. Australians were involved in a mutiny in 1916 at No. 1 Military Prison at Blargies about thirty-­one miles south-­west of Amiens. The prison, designed to hold around 300 prisoners in tented accommodation, was notoriously tough, and the prisoners worked as labourers for the Royal Engineers in the local area. On 12 August a new group of Australian prisoners arrived and refused to obey orders, demanding—and securing—improvements in their conditions. Two days later British prisoners did the same thing and refused to work, attacking a guard in the process. The following day, they repeated their refusal and supported their apparent informal leader, Gunner Lewis, in his refusal to be handcuffed and marched away. Seven were charged with mutiny, and on 19 October six were sentenced to death. Those sentences were then forwarded to Haig, the Commander-­in-­Chief, with a recommendation for commuting all the sentences to ten years’ penal servitude. Haig

Mutinies in War  149 accepted five but confirmed the sentence for Lewis, who was shot in Rouen Prison on 29 October 1916. Lewis had in fact already been court-­martialled twice before, once in June 1915 when he was sentenced to six months’ prison for absence and once in early 1916 to a year’s sentence for theft. On the same day, Pte John Braithwaite of the New Zealand Division (and the only one of thirty-­four Kiwis found guilty of mutiny to be shot) was also executed at Rouen. Braithwaite, a 35-­year-­old ex-­journalist from Dunedin, had been court-­martialled four times before his final trial for absence, lying, forging a leave pass, and, whilst waiting to be deported back to New Zealand, desertion. On recapture he was sent to Blargies Prison and was involved in a fracas between an Australian prisoner, Pte Little, and a British guard, Staff Sgt Shearing. Braithwaite and four other Australian prisoners were then charged with mutiny and all sentenced to death, but, since the Australians had outlawed the death penalty, only Braithwaite was shot. The Inspector General of Communication forwarded the sentence to Haig with a recommendation for mercy on the grounds that Braithwaite’s version of events was probably true, but Haig ignored the recommendation; the Australians’ sentences were reduced to two years’ hard labour in what Corns and Hughes-­Wilson (2002: 389) suggest was a ‘deliberate policy of pardoning all except one’. Braithwaite was by no means the last Kiwi to involved in trouble with the military police, but this time it was to spark the most significant British mutiny since the Christmas Mutinies in 1914, and it occurred at Étaples, a fishing port on the Canche River, fifteen miles south of Boulogne and fifty-­eight miles west of Arras. Étaples became one of several British Army Infantry Base Depots (IBDs) on the coast of France, where troops were billeted while either recovering from wounds or being trained prior to moving up to the front. Between June 1915 and September 1917 over a million troops passed through Étaples (Gill and Dallas, 1975: 89). Across the river from Étaples and over the bridge linking the two towns (and out of bounds to the regular troops) was Le Touquet-­Paris-­Plage, an altogether more upmarket town and the resting spot for British Army officers. Étaples had acquired a reputation—whether true or not—of being run by martinets who had not served on the front, and it was well known that recuperating soldiers often presented themselves as well and fit for return to duty, rather than stay any longer there. The regular training courses (mainly gas-­related) lasted two weeks, usually in the Bull Ring training ground, and troops were billeted in tents and provided with one main meal a day. The meagre rations, poor conditions, brutal training, and limited recreational opportunities (except Sunday afternoon) left the camp as a place to be avoided. Troops were forbidden to cross the bridge to get to Touquet-­Paris-­Plage, but it was common practice to wait until the tide had receded and cross the mud flats further inland. Wilfred Owen had been there and, writing on New Year’s Eve 1916, captured the in­fam­ous ‘two thousand yard stare’ that afflicts soldiers who have long given up on the  prospect of survival but without succumbing to any apparent fearful state (Grint, 2008: 315). I thought of the very strange look on all the faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England, though wars should be in England; nor can it be seen in any battle. But only in Étaples. It was not despair or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s. (Owen, 1967: 521)

150  Mutiny and Leadership On Sunday 9 September, Gunner Healey from the New Zealand Expeditionary Force (NZEF) was arrested for overstaying his local leave, allegedly assaulted, and then released without charge. However, rumours of his detention led to an altercation on the bridge with Australian troops, and in the ensuing melee Private Reeve, a British Army red cap (army police) with a reputation for bullying, drew his pistol and accidentally shot Corporal William Wood (4th Battalion, Gordon Highlanders)—who had not been involved in the scuffle with Australian troops—in the head. Wood died the same day. The result was a mass of about 4,000 troops who began demonstrating and throwing stones at the besieged red caps. By 19.30 the numbers had dwindled to 1,000, but they rampaged through the camp, released military prisoners from the prison, and dragged the camp commandant, Brigadier-­General A. Graham Thomson, out of his office; according to some reports, he was unceremoniously thrown into the river before the soldiers returned to barracks. The following day, 10 September 1917, at around 16.00, and despite reinforcements and the presence of many officers, a group of soldiers brushed aside pickets on the bridge and held a meeting at which a committee of six soldiers was elected under the leadership of Corporal Jesse Short from the Northumberland Fusiliers. Various protests with different numbers of soldiers continued until 21.00. Following another attack upon the official bridge picquet, this time led by Capt. Wilkinson of the West Yorkshire Regiment, on Tuesday 11 September, Brigadier-­General Thomson had had enough and requested external troops through the Chief Provost Marshal of the Armies and—more immediately—a demand for help from two cavalry squadrons of the 15th Hussars stationed close by. The latter request was refused by GHQ after the cavalry Corps HQ had sort their permission, but instead 800 men from the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) were ordered from Montreuil—about 150 miles south of Étaples. The following day, before the HAC had arrived that evening, a further protesting group marched across the bridge and on to Paris Plage, but the thousand troops involved dispersed of their own accord as night fell. By then, the 15th Hussars had been (re)ordered to Étaples, and they arrived along with four machine gun sections. At morning parade on Thursday the 13th all ammunition was removed from the soldiers, and two further infantry battalions from the 7th Division arrived, while a brigade of cavalry were put on standby before being dismissed that evening as surplus to requirements. By Friday the 14th the infantry battalions sent to bolster the authorities (1st battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers and 22nd battalion, Manchester Regiment—both regarded as ‘loyal’ regiments that would, if necessary, shoot their compatriots when ordered to do so) were deployed in and around the camp, and trouble was expected to fade away in the face of this increasingly robust stance. The arrest of fifty to sixty soldiers in Étaples that afternoon was assumed to be the end of the resistance. Four of these were charged with mutiny, including Cpl Jesse Short. His charge sheet read thus: Endeavouring to persuade persons in His Majesty’s Forces to join in a mutiny, in that he at Étaples on 11 September 1917, endeavoured to persuade a picquet not to listen to their officers but to lay down their arms and go with him . . . . Referring to the officer in charge of the picquet, [he] said to the picquet, ‘You ought to get a rope, tie it round his neck with a stone and throw him into the river’, or words to that effect. (quoted in Corns and Hughes-­Wilson, 2002: 392)

Mutinies in War  151 Wilkinson’s evidence was supported by other members of the picquet, and on 30 September Haig, apparently persuaded by the appearance of red flags, confirmed the death sentence handed down to Short. He was executed on 4 October 1917. Major Guinness, the camp adjutant at the time, wrote later that the discontent was generated by experienced troops having to undergo the same training as the raw recruits from England, plus that the usual links between officers and soldiers were severed through their separate camps, with responsibility for authority lying with the training camp officers, especially the Provost Marshal of the military police. The MPs had, it appears, not served at the front and instead been drafted in from Aldershot. Gill and Dallas (1975: 99) also suggest that the presence of ANZAC troops contributed to the discontent because they were more contemptuous of authority generally and had none of the embedded class institutions (military servants for officers and separate dining facilities) that the British officers depended upon. They also suggest that the admixture of Scottish and Australian troops— who had historically provided popular companions—facilitated the discontent, while the ethnic tensions between the 51st Highland (Scottish Protestant) troops and 16th (Irish Catholic) Division troops ensured the latter refused to become involved in the dis­turb­ ances at Étaples. As we shall see later, the Irish contingents in the British Army did not remain unaffected by the Nationalist temper in Ireland, one reason why the British Government never imposed conscription in Ireland. Despite Haig publicly denying that ‘any discontent exists in our ranks’ a few weeks after the mutiny at Étaples, the senior military leadership at the camp was replaced, the training element of the camp was transferred back up the line to the front, and a more integrated approach to further disturbances was organized. The British Army needed it, for there were further strikes at the tank base in Le Havre in December 1918 where men of the Royal Artillery burnt down several depots (Gill and Dallas, 1975: 110) and at the Calais Base and across the water in England in January 1919, as the British Army descended into chaos.

Salerno 1943 As we shall see in the next chapter, the British Army fell apart in 1919 after the First World War, but it fell apart for different reasons at Dunkirk in 1940, then set about reorganizing itself into a generally effective unit. This was most notably the case with the Desert Rats, Montgomery’s Eighth Army in Africa, which first withstood and then defeated Rommel’s Afrika Korps at El Alamein in October/November, 1942. It is ironic, then, that the largest single British mutiny in the Second World War, in terms of people charged with mutiny, occurred when 192 soldiers from the 50th (Northumbrian) and 51st (Highland) Divisions refused to join their newly allocated units at Salerno, Italy, in 1943. Both divisions had formed part of the Desert Rats and had established a strong reputation against the German Afrika Korps and subsequently in the invasion of Sicily (July 1943). Most of the units were to have been withdrawn from Sicily back to the UK to prepare for D-­Day in 1944, but 1,500 of them had been sent to Tripoli to recover from wounds and illnesses suffered in the Sicilian campaign. The origins of the mutiny lay in two cultural norms: loyalty to the regiment; and a social contract between the leaders and the led. The general framework of loyalty in the British

152  Mutiny and Leadership Army—which was and still is to the particular regiment9 and not the army in general— produced a bond of fidelity bordering on that common amongst families or gangs, which sustained morale in times of need and was rooted in the authority of the pater familias— the head of the family, the commanding officer. But it also engendered an amateur parochialism, common to the public schools from which most officers prior to the World Wars were derived, that undermined cross-­regimental or cross-­divisional cooperation and ­supported a social and technological conservatism that saw senior promotions based on regiment rather than talent. Furthermore, it generated a hostility to innovation that sometimes bordered on purposeful delusion (see Grint, 2008). The mutiny also related to the breaking of the social contract which insisted that truth was the basis of consent, not lies. In effect, if the troops were told something, however egregious, they would accept it—if it was indeed the truth. The regimental loyalty, which normally operated as a positive inducement to compliance, was further compounded in this case when Major-­General Wimberley, commander of the 51st Division, had previously told his troops that ‘if wounded etc., and separated from your own units, do not allow yourselves to get drafted to other battalions, but see that you come back to us’ (quoted in James, 1987: 171). It was this aspect of the social contract that the mutineers believed had placed them in an invidious position; indeed, most of them did not consider themselves mutineers at all and continued to maintain military discipline. On 15 September those who had recovered sufficiently from their wounds embarked on three ships at Tripoli, believing they were heading back to rejoin their prior units in Sicily, as was the norm. But in reality they were put ashore at Salerno on 16th September, where the American Fifth Army under General Clark had landed a week before as part of the invasion of mainland Italy. Clark’s army comprised the US VI Corps and the 82nd  Airborne Division, plus the British X Corps. The original deployment at Reggio, south of Salerno, had been unopposed; however, the allied advance had become bogged down as German resistance increased, and General Alexander had requested reinforcements from Philippeville in Algeria. Alexander had shown great tactical skill in ­extraditing the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940 and evading the encircling Japanese Army in Burma in 1942, but even he recognized that the German counter-­attacks at Salerno were likely to drive the allies back into the sea unless he could find reinforcements from outside theatre. On 14 September two battalions from the American 82nd Airborne Division reinforced the line, but the situation was still deteriorating as German reinforcements arrived to bolster their counter-­attack. By this time, X Corps had suffered 1,300 casualties, and although 2,000 reinforcements were due on the 15th, the shortage of infantry amongst them determined that some short-­term emergency transfer was necessary. That could have come from the American 3rd Division waiting in Sicily for shipping to Salerno, or they could have used the troops from the understrength, but still viable, British 4th Division at Bougie, Algeria. Instead it was decided to take 1,000 soldiers from each of 9  The origins of the British Army’s regimental system lie in the personal bodyguards of the then monarch, Charles II in 1662, and not any standing army—which the British establishment have feared since its only brief experiment with republicanism in Cromwell’s Commonwealth of 1649–60. French (2005: 334) ascribes the success the regimental system to its ability to pass the six tests set by Haviland (1996) for the survival of any culture. They must be able to: (1) reproduce themselves; (2) socialize newcomers; (3) maintain order; (4) motivate the members; (5) produce and distribute the necessary goods and services; (6) adapt to change. The ­Cardwell-­Childers reforms of the 1870s and 1880s abolished the purchase of commissions, established short-­term careers, and localized the regiments to encourage loyalty.

Mutinies in War  153 the 46th and 56th Divisions and transport them by cruisers for the fourteen-­hour crossing from the Advanced Reinforcements Section in Philippeville, Algeria, to Salerno in Italy. As the confirmatory signal was being sent to Clark’s HQ in Salerno from Bizerte (Alexander’s 15th Army Group HQ), a second signal arrived in Tripoli from Eisenhower’s staff at Allied Forces Head Quarters (AFHQ) in Algiers requesting 1,500 troops for immediate embarkation to Salerno. In theory AFHQ was subordinate to the 15th Army Group HQ, and, while the former demanded the reinforcements, it was up to the latter to source them, though it was not uncommon for both groups to send similar orders and confuse themselves and everyone else. This may have been an administrative mistake that no one ever admitted, or it may have been a legitimate order, given the serious nature of the situ­ ation at Salerno and the battle-­hardened nature of the Desert Rats versus the untested soldiers from 4th Division. Even after the event it was not clear who had ordered these particular reinforcements: General Alexander was one of the main suspects but so too was General Miller, the senior administrative officer in the 15th Army Group’s HQ. Whoever actually did send the troops, and whether they were the right troops, was then irrelevant because the order arrived at 155 Reinforcement and Transit Camp in Tripoli on 14 September and the staff set about responding to it immediately. Camp 155 housed about 12,000 troops in tents, controlled by twenty officers and 200 soldiers on the permanent staff. The camp contained both fresh recruits and wounded veterans and discipline was limited, as was the entertainment. Initially, Company Sergeant Major (CSM) Green, in charge of all the infantry within the camp, was ordered by his commanding officer, Lt Col. Richards, to select 1,500 soldiers for transporting, but since the known naval transport was limited to 750, in the first sweep only 750 were selected at 17.30 (the 51st Highlanders were excluded) and told to report on the parade ground with all their kit by 18.00. At this point a second message promised that three cruisers would arrive, thus the extra 750 could now be recruited, and this time the Highlanders were included. At the time it was common practice to return troops to their own divisions, and in the case of the Sicilian campaigns an order had been issued by General HQ Middle East (Cairo) to the effect that ‘men from Sicily who were ex-­hospital would return to their own units’ (quoted in David, 1995: 19). Indeed the Highland Division had itself requested that its men were returned to unit, in Sicily, but this decision was taken on the same day that their troops embarked for Salerno. When CSM Green was subsequently asked about the destination of these soldiers he replied that, as far as he knew, they were all being RTUd (Returned to Unit), as indeed was noted on the roll call of individuals by Corporal Floodgate at Camp 155. This is not what the officers involved were told. Captain Lee of the 1st Battalion the York and Lancaster Regiment, for example, was told by the Camp Commandant, Lt Col. Richards, that the destination was Salerno, not Sicily, but that no mention was to be made of the destination for security reasons. In Richards’s own words, ‘It was not until I got to Salerno that I heard that the men had been told that they were going back to their own units’ (quoted in David, 1995: 20). Whether the destination was Sicily or Salerno or somewhere else was less relevant than that they were returning to their own units, though some of the troops believed they were actually returning with their original units back to the UK, and this may have encouraged some of the walking wounded to volunteer for the journey. Although the authorities always insisted that only fit soldiers were sent to Salerno, it is clear from David’s (1995: 25–8) account that several had malaria and that many were still

154  Mutiny and Leadership recovering from their battle wounds. As Michael Winter, a sailor aboard HMS Euryalus, recalled, ‘As they came on board they looked pale and sick, they didn’t look like fit fighting troops. I think there were even some with bandages on their wounds’ (quoted in David,  1995: 28). On HMS Scylla, another of the transporting cruisers, Marine Rayner was ‘completely amazed at the state of these troops and to a man we knew they would never be any good as a fighting force’ (quoted in David,  1995: 29). It may be, as David surmises, that some of the sick were the consequence of the speedy recruitment from the camp when many of those sent were actually absent on the evening of the parade. Indeed, so desperate was the demand for troops that some were even sent without rifle or ammunition, water bottle or helmet. On 15 September the three cruisers, HMS Euryalus, Scylla, and Charybdis (part of V Force protecting the landing at Salerno), left Tripoli, with the soldiers certain they were heading to Sicily and the ships’ crews certain they were not. Halfway across the Mediterranean the tannoy on HMS Euryalus (containing many of the troops from the 50th and 51st Divisions) announced: ‘Attention! Attention! You are not going back to your own units. You are to be landed as reinforcements at Salerno.’ Private Archie Newmarch captured the general response of those on board: ‘The army just didn’t do things like that. If Green had not said it in the first place, “You’re going back to your units,” then the whole situation would never have arisen. But it was that which caused it.’ Corporal Hugh Fraser was similarly dumbfounded but also determined not to comply: ‘There was fury but it was a contained fury. There was no uproar, just an angry buzz . . . I probably said to some of the other Camerons: “I’m not going.” But there was no coercion, no conspiracy. Everyone was capable of making up their own minds. It was a matter of conscience, purely and simply’ (quoted in David, 1995: 35). According to the official report of army psychiatrist Lt Col. Thomas Main, who interviewed many of the mutineers after the event, by the time they had arrived at Salerno there was already widespread cynicism about military authority outside the bounds of their own divisions. The soldiers were desperate for both news and direction, and many had begun to discuss how they could rejoin their original units, with or without the ­as­sist­ance of the army. In fact, by the time they all reached the beachhead at Salerno on 16 September, the crisis of German encroachment into the beachhead had passed and the Germans began to retreat towards Naples, so the reinforcements went into the reserve area, not the front line. Thus no one seemed to know what to do with the new troops, and they milled around in a tented field not far from the coast. On the following morning (17 September) most of them were moved north to a larger holding area, and rumours spread that they were to join the 46th and 56th Divisions and that the troops who should be fulfilling this role, from X Corps, were still in Tripoli. The discontent and general malaise seemed to have percolated through to the authorities who then became reluctant to order the troops to join their newly designated units. In the end some of the camp o ­ fficers ‘asked’ the troops whether they would be willing to move to the 46th and 56th Divisions, and while the rookie troops did so, along with about 100 members of the Black Watch who were persuaded to join the 46th Division by Lt Coulter, the remaining veterans of the 50th and 51st were much more reluctant. As one transit camp officer recalled: By now we were aware that the men were claiming they had been misled at Tripoli, that they had been told they were being sent back to their own units. Under the circumstances

Mutinies in War  155 we decided that instead of confronting the men it would be better to let them know that we sympathised with them, which we did. We felt exactly as they did; we didn’t want to be posted to unfamiliar units, but as officers we could not enjoy the luxury of saying ‘I’m not going’ . . . At first we went to speak to the 15 or so York and Lancaster boys on the draft. [Captain] Williams knew a sergeant among them, and he must have had some influence because they all agreed to go. Then we went to speak to blokes we didn’t know, but most were adamant that they would not join any units other than their own. At no time did we actually order anyone to go.  (quoted in David, 1995: 44–5)

Note here that the actions of the officers effectively gave permission for the troops to resist (and several soldiers mentioned the ‘sympathy’ for their plight on the part of the officers) and that those that were persuaded were secured through personal relationships, not through naked authority. In the end about 1,200 complied and moved out, but 350 refused to move and they were then put under guard by military police officers. At this point Lt General McCreery, commanding officer of X Corps, arrived by jeep and spoke to the dissenters from the top of the jeep’s bonnet, saying, ‘I’m shocked to find you men here. I had expected all of you to be with your new divisions by now. They had been having a hard time, which is why it was necessary to ask for urgent reinforcements.’ In response someone in the crowd shouted: ‘We were told we were going back to our units!’ and McCreery responded, ‘Obviously there’s been a cock-­up. As soon as the military situation allows I promise you I will do everything in my power to return you to your units.’10 He was met with boos and shouts that they had already been promised that, and it was to no avail. McCreery continued, ‘If you go now, we’ll forget this whole little incident. If you don’t, the consequences could be very serious indeed. You know the penalty for mass disobedience’ (quoted in David, 1995: 46–7). When that threat was also met with boos, McCreery gave them one more chance and then drove away, telling his staff officer to allow the men the rest of the day to decide; fifty accepted their fate and marched away, leaving a hard core of 300. Thomas Main’s subsequent report suggested that although some of these 300 were just trying to avoid combat at any costs, the real leadership came from those with the highest combat spirit who were simply trying to retain their divisional, regimental, or battalion esprit de corps. Within Montgomery’s 8th Army, information had traditionally been full and frank, in contrast to the deceit that many of the 300 believed had been present since Tripoli. On 20 September, a further attempt was made to get the 300 to acquiesce by various officers, some with prior knowledge of, or allegiance to, the various units involved. When that failed, the troops were ordered to parade and, after a roll call, divided into two groups. Those in the Durham Light Infantry (DLI) were addressed by Captain Lee who read out section 7 of the Army Act from the Manual of Military Law: Every person subject to military law who commits any of the following offences; that is to say causes or conspires with any other persons to cause any mutiny or sedition in any of His Majesty’s military, naval or air forces; or endeavours to seduce any person in any such 10  On 1 October, after taking Naples, General McCreery (with Alexander’s and Montgomery’s support) fulfilled his promise to those from the 50th and the 51st Divisions that had joined their new units and offered to get them repatriated back to their original units (David, 1995: 73–5).

156  Mutiny and Leadership force as aforesaid from allegiance to His Majesty . . . [or] does not without delay inform his commanding officer of the same, shall, on conviction by court martial, be liable to suffer death . . . The term ‘mutiny’ implies collective insubordination or a combination of two or more persons to resist or to induce others to resist lawful military authority. (quoted in David, 1995: 53)

Captain Lee then ordered the DLI to ‘Pick up your kits, fall in on the road and march off to the 46th Division area!’ Twenty DLIs complied, leaving 120 now in official mutiny. Lance Corporal Aveyard was still in denial: ‘I wasn’t worried at this point because I didn’t think that what we had done was mutiny. We didn’t take up arms, or anything like that. All we did was stand still. I was convinced that if it came to a trial, we would be let off ’ (quoted in David, 1995: 54). Major Ellison then repeated Captain’s Lee threat and, after Captain Lee had repeated his order to fall in, a further forty-­five men did so, leaving seventy-­five recalcitrants including three sergeants (Innes, Pettit, and Middleton). The three sergeants were then promised a promotion to sergeant-­major if they persuaded the seventy-­two others to fall in. They all refused, and Innes then addressed the other seventy-­four, suggesting that he wasn’t going to trade a promotion for compliance but that each man had to make his own mind up. Captain Lee then repeated his order for the third and final time, and, when no one moved, Major Ellison ordered the commanding officer of the guard, Captain Dallenger, to disarm and arrest all seventy-­five soldiers. The same procedure was then deployed with the second group and about twenty complied, while 140 soldiers refused to fall in, many from the Cameron Highlanders. Again Major Ellison took the NCOs aside and asked them to persuade the rest to fall in, but again they all refused, and, while the repeated ordered left only 117 on parade, none of them acceded to the third iteration of the order. As Private Thompson of the 5th Seaforths recalled, it wasn’t the fear of dying that stopped them complying: We all realised that we would be killed if we joined units at Salerno. But then we had all been in action before and had faced those dangers. I stayed put on a matter of principle; the fear of dying came second. After all, I had fought right the way across the desert. If Salerno had been a quiet battlefield . . . I think I would still have refused to join the 46th Division. We had never been treated in this way before and we weren’t going to put up with it.  (quoted in David, 1995: 58)

Both groups of mutineers were then marched into a POW cage in the beach and bizarrely, after a shell landed at the entrance, an extra soldier (Sapper DeLong) accidentally joined the mutineers, even though he had not been part of either group. The combined group was then subject to jeering from a group of German POWs held in the next cage who called them cowards, only adding to their humiliation (James, 1987: 172). The next morning, one of the mutineers, Private Smith, tried to change his mind and join the new unit, but his request was refused by Captain Dallenger, and a roll call revealed that 193 were now under arrest. On 22 September they were transferred by landing craft for the 48-­hour journey to Bizerte in Tunisia. They were kept on deck in the full sun, despite there being bunks available below deck, and fed on hard tack and biscuits, as if they had already been found guilty. Despite this, most of the men seemed to believe they would be found not guilty and returned to their proper units as soon as the ‘mistake’ was

Mutinies in War  157 recognized. That was never going to happen. Major General Miller, who had originally sent the troops to Salerno and assumed the mutiny had been caused by their attempt to rejoin their units to get back to the UK, was adamant that any troops found guilty and sentenced would serve out their sentences in North Africa and not back in the UK.11 By the time the mutineers had landed in Bizerte one of them had suffered from a malarial relapse and was taken off the boat to hospital, while the remaining 192 were sent by slow train (average speed 7 mph)—on a 400-­mile journey in cattle trucks to Ouled Rahmoun, in Algeria, the site of POW camp 209. They arrived on 27 September almost without three mutineers who had missed the train at a local stop when they had gone to buy fruit from a local vendor. However, when they discovered they had—literally—missed the train, they persuaded a local lorry owner to drive them to catch up. Once in the camp, and with the agreement of Lt Everett from the 30th Beds & Herts who was the camp commandant, the mutineers maintained a self-­disciplined hierarchy, led by the three sergeants (Innes, Pettit, and Middleton) who organized sporting activities (including a game between the Mutineers XI and the Guards XI). Even Captain Daiches, working for the prosecution, was impressed when he visited the camp for two days before the court martial to take evidence, commenting on their good discipline: ‘Given that these were men who were due to be court martialled for mutiny . . . I was not only surprised, I was impressed’ (quoted in David, 1995: 71). Also surprising was that Daiches informed them that they would be charged with ‘disobeying the lawful command of a superior officer’ rather than ‘mutiny’ because, even though the two offences appear identical, the maximum penalty for the former was penal servitude while the latter was death. He went on to suggest that ‘other charges might follow’. The decision to try the mutineers en masse was taken by Lt Col. (Lord) Russell (2nd  Baron Russell of Liverpool) because there appeared to be no ringleaders, and the three sergeants appeared to have made no attempt to persuade the other ranks to join them. And, as David (1995: 75) concludes, if there was no conspiracy and the ‘mutineers’ were being charged as individuals (albeit collectively), then the charge could not be mutiny, since that implies a conspiracy, but merely disobeying a lawful command. The court martial was held in Constantine, Algeria, and by the time of the trial several prisoners were ill, leaving 186 to face the charges.12 Fourteen officers were appointed to defend them but given only six days to prepare their defences. Responsibility for a group of prisoners was then allocated to each defence officer, but it was clear, even with such little time, that the four main aspects of the defence were unknown to them: (1) that conditions in Salerno were not as critical as implied by the authorities; (2) that those who obeyed orders were almost all rookies; (3) that many of the accused were either ill, wounded or not provided with adequate weapons and uniform to fight properly; and (4) that the unblemished military career of the defendants should stand in mitigation of the ‘mutiny’. That word was important now because the charge had changed from ‘disobeying a lawful command’ to having ‘joined a mutiny by combining among themselves to resist lawful authority and disobey the said order’ (quoted in David,  1995: 78). In fact, the defence did not call on General McCreery, nor any senior officer from the 8th Army, to 11  In fact the 50th and 51st Divisions were not sent home until 18 September, after the reinforcements were on the beach at Salerno. 12  Six prisoners had become ill and one had died from cerebral malaria (David, 1995: 76).

158  Mutiny and Leadership confirm the mutineers’ claim as to the normal pattern of posting, or the admission of a cock-­up, but at least Russell ordered Daiches to assist the defence in whatever way he could. Captain Evers, one of the fourteen defence officers, was then sent to the original 155 Transit Camp to secure witness statements for the defence, but these depended upon others admitting they had made mistakes or misled the soldiers and they were not forthcoming. The defence was left to hope the prosecution could not prove the defendants were guilty of mutiny, or that each individual acted on their own, and thus there was no conspiracy to mutiny, just a refusal to obey the orders of a superior officer. Fortunately, Sergeant Major Green had been called but then not used by the prosecution, and so he was already in Constantine and was willing to corroborate a lot of the defence’s case: that soldiers were normally repatriated to their own units; that he had assumed they were all going to Sicily, not Salerno; and that there were no kit or medical inspections before they left. But, since grievances, however legitimate, were no defence against a charge of mutiny, the defence group of fourteen either argued (as did the lawyers in the group) that the best defence was to demand a cast-­iron prosecution—hoping it would fail—or hope (as did the regimental officers in the group) to rely on the past record of the troops and pray the judges would have empathy for the accused. It was unlikely that the defendants would get any empathy from the prosecution, who both deleted the date of the alleged mutiny from the final charge sheet, to ensure that the conspiracy charges could be applied prior to the date, and deleted the specific order which they were charged with disobeying, allowing the prosecution to claim a general disobedience (James, 1987: 172–3). The trial began on Friday 29 October, and every defendant was required to wear a numbered tag on a string around their neck so that the five judges, led by Major General Galloway, could identify them. Captain Evers, for the defence, could not be there because his flight back had been delayed. The first defence case was that the charge was not specific enough—no particular date and no particular order—but this was overruled by the court. Next, each individual was charged with the same offence, and each defendant proclaimed themselves not guilty. The defence then sought an adjournment because Captain Evers, and whatever documents he carried, had been delayed, but again the court overruled this, allowing only an adjournment until the following morning. By then a few more defendants had been taken ill, leaving the number now in court at 183. Captain Evers returned that evening but, with an unreliable witness and just one document of limited value, so the defence decided to offer only a general character witness for the defendants and then demand that the prosecution prove their guilt. The first element was denied by the court, but when Captain Lee admitted that the men had all acted individually it looked like the charge of mutiny would fail. When Captain Williams for the prosecution then admitted that some of the DLI had decided to comply with Lee’s order after being spoken to by the three sergeants, it seemed that the conspiracy case has also weakened. Much of the time was spent arguing over the actual number that should have been put on trial, since one (Sapper DeLong) was clearly in the wrong place and two others (Mulligan and Rae) disputed their identification on an earlier roll call, but the court again rejected the case of the defence (David, 1995: 93–109). When the defence took over, they argued that there was no case to answer to for any of the defendants and, furthermore, that a case of mutiny required clear evidence of the ‘orders, disobedience and agreement or combination’ (quoted in David, 1995: 113). In fact, went the defence, since the soldiers had been warned that they were ‘individually’

Mutinies in War  159 responsible and liable to court martial if they refused the order, there could be no ­conspiracy to mutiny. Thus in the same way that a crowd acting together at a sports match did so on the basis of individual not collective decisions, so too was the refusal to obey orders individually and not collectively decided. The prosecution suggested that the absence of evidence for a conspiracy did not mean there had been no conspiracy—and since there had been a mutiny, they could infer that a secret conspiracy had existed. Indeed, quoting from the 1929 case of Rex v. Meyrick and Ribuffi, the prosecution argued, ‘Proof of the existence of a conspiracy is generally a matter of inference deduced from certain criminal acts of the parties accused, done in the pursuance of an apparent criminal purpose in common between them’ (quoted in David,  1995: 119). Those criminal acts included, amongst ­others, the need for the officers to address the crowd; the necessity for the parade; and the reading of section 7 from the Army Act to the parade. As far as the prosecution was concerned, these, and the fact that the men acted in consort with each other, ‘proved’ the conspiracy to resist lawful authority existed. The defence argued that, since this was, at best, an inference, it was up to the court to decide whether the prosecution had actually proved the conspiracy existed. Under advice from the defence officers, the defendants chose not to offer any further evidence. Instead the lead officer for the defence, Captain Quennell, reiterated that all the accused were ‘first class fighting men’, that the prosecution had not proved beyond all reasonable doubt that the men were guilty of the charges, and that, at worst, they were guilty of individually resisting lawful awful and therefore not guilty of mutiny. Captain Murgatroyd, another defence officer, then suggested—in a bizarre attempt to construct ethnic purity—that the men could not be guilty of mutiny because there was ‘no real definition of mutiny in English case law, for the very good reason that Englishmen are not made that way’ (quoted David, 1995: 126). Finally, Captain Mitchell reminded the court that, since the prosecution had decided to bring a charge under section 7 not section 9 (conspiracy to mutiny rather than disobedience of a lawful command) they required a much higher level of proof given the severity of the punishment if found guilty. The five members of the court took an hour to come to their decisions: Sapper DeLong was found not guilty and released, and the other 181 had AFB122s (Field Conduct Sheets listing prior histories of the accused) to their name. Although it was not clear to the defendants at the time, this was bad news. Only ‘not guilty’ verdicts were announced at courts martial, all guilty verdicts and their accompanying sentences required confirmation by senior officers and therefore could not be announced. Since thirty-­six of the Field Conduct Sheets were missing, the court gave the defence until the following morning to make their mitigating appeals, but at this point it became apparent that they had all been found guilty of mutiny. The next morning, 2 November 1943, after a five-­day trial, the court martial decided that all thirty-­six missing records would be taken as ‘exemplary’ for the purpose of sentencing. The defence then called Sergeant Green to confirm that, in his opinion, the defendants all assumed they were being returned to their own units but that he had heard a rumour that the real destination was Salerno. Picking up on this ‘deliberate lie’, the defence then secured several officers of the prisoners to argue on their behalf that their actions, prior to Salerno, had been impeccable and that they would all be proud to serve with them in the future. Captain Quennell then summarized by reminding the court that there had been no crisis at the point the accused had refused the order, that the order was not to fight but to join a different unit to the one that had been preparing to rejoin and

160  Mutiny and Leadership resume combat, and that the actions were comparable to ‘going on strike’, not mutiny, so any sentences should be tempered by these points. Captain Kailofer, for the defence, then listed all the battles his clients had fought in and reminded the court that the behaviour of the prisoners since arrest had been exemplary and not one had attempted to escape. Lt Gardiner went one better and listed the battles one of his 19-­year-­old clients had fought in: El Alamein, Marsa Brega, El Agheila, Wadi Zem Zem, Mareth, Wadi Akarit, and Sicily. And, as Captain Wheatley noted, not one soldier had refused to fight. Captain Taylor argued that since the British Army was not prone to mutiny there was no need to impose harsh sentences to deter others because there would be none, and Captain Magnay completed his mitigation speech by noting there had been none of the behaviours associated with mutiny—lawlessness, disorder, dishonesty—so it could not have been a mutiny. Given that loyalty to the division had been drummed into them, it was hardly unexpected that they would resent having that loyalty challenged. Captain Evers even quoted from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: ‘The quality of mercy . . . is twice blessed; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes’ (quoted in David, 1995: 147). Lt Howat, in the penultimate defence submission, noted that the esprit de corps in the Highland Division (HD) was almost a religion . . . To these men General Wimberley is their military god and the song ‘HD’ is the altar at which they worship. So much so that to ask a soldier of the Highland Division to fight with another division is, in my mind, akin to asking a Hindu to worship Mohammed. Such a thing is unthinkable. Remove the Highland men from their Highland Division and you have torn them from their military altar and cast them into utter darkness.  (quoted in David, 1995: 148)

Finally, Captain Mitchell argued that, without exception, the men had been ‘actuated by a misguided loyalty to a right ideal’ (quoted in David, 1995: 150). Four hours later, all that effort on the part of the defence proved pointless: the three sergeants were sentenced to death, without recommendation for mercy; sixteen corporals were given ten years’ penal servitude; and, with the exception of Private Kemp, who had changed his mind and tried to follow orders and so was given five years’ penal servitude, the remaining lance corporals and privates were given seven years’ penal servitude. If the sentences were designed to deter others they could not have worked because the whole event was kept secret. All the sentences—which could hardly have been harsher if the accused had engaged in a military uprising or refused to fight under any circumstances— were then submitted to Lt General Gale, the senior British officer at Allied HQ in Algiers, for confirmation. In the meantime, the defence officers asked Captain Daiches (the pros­ ecut­ing officer who had reneged on his promise to give the defence enough time to prepare their arguments) to join them for a drink in the middle of Constantine, where he was abducted and turned loose, minus his trousers. As Daiches recalled later: After the trial there were some very unpleasant scenes between me and some of the defending officers. Samwell and Quennell asked me to join them for a drink in the of­fi­ cers’ club. There, Samwell in particular became extremely offensive. He called me a ‘chairborne’ officer who was only there to put the law into motion without having regard to the realities of war. In general I got the impression that the Eighth Army defending officers felt the whole case had been engineered by lily-­livered, white-­kneed staff officers of the

Mutinies in War  161 JAG [Judge Advocate General] branch who were living on the fat of the land while all the Eighth Army boys were doing the fighting. My view, of course, was that thus was a load of rubbish.  (quoted in David, 1995: 155)

On the morning of 3 November the three sergeants found guilty were taken to a hut and told they were to be shot, and then they were driven 100 miles to #1 Military Prison near the Algerian port of Bône, where they were kept in solitary confinement. They were visited by Quennell, who drew up a petition for their death sentences to be commuted on nine separate grounds, including that, rather than conspire to generate a mutiny, they had actually persuaded several soldiers to comply with orders. The petition went on to appeal against all the sentences on the grounds that the deputy judge advocate had misdirected the court and the evidence did not prove the men guilty. The other petition related to the other sentences against Mulligan and Rae, who should never have been on trial in the first place had it not been for an administrative mix-­up. Meanwhile Lt Col. Lord Russell wrote secretly to Lt General Gale explaining that, since the trial had been a Field General Court Martial, not a General Court Martial, different rules applied and that they had (rightly in his opinion) inferred the presence of a mutiny from the events, not from any other independent evidence. He went on to quote from page 61 of the Manual of Military Law, stating, ‘An NCO should, as a rule, be more severely punished than a private soldier concerned with him in the commission of the same offence’ (quoted in David, 1995: 163), though why the lance-­corporals had been treated the same as the privates was not considered. Russell went on to ask for confirmation of all the sentences, including death for the sergeants. On the morning of 16 November the most senior sergeant, Wally Innes (DLI), was taken to Major Winter’s hut (the prison commandant), but it was the Deputy Assistant Adjutant General (DAAG), Major Flowers, who made him sit while he read out the paper in front of him detailing the charges and the events. Twenty minutes later he read out the final paragraph: ‘You have been found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to death. General Gale has confirmed your conviction, but has seen fit to commute your death sentence to twelve years penal servitude and reduce you to the ranks’ (quoted in David, 1995: 164). General Alexander had insisted that the first two of the twelve years were to be served in North Africa. Mulligan and Rae’s convictions were not confirmed by Gale and both were freed. However, as Flowers was about to announce Gale’s intentions with regard to the lance-­corporals and privates, General Adam,13 the army’s Adjutant General and thus second in command to General Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, arrived by chance as part of a prearranged tour of inspection. When Adam was made aware of the inmates of the prison he was visiting in Bône—and the mutiny—he asked for all the papers and, having assessed them, suggested to Montgomery later that it was ‘the worst thing we have ever done’ (Kennedy, 1995: xi). It then took the authorities twenty-­five days to inform the prisoners that Adam had suspended all the sentences. Even then, Major Flowers insisted on following protocol: all the 168 remaining soldiers (excluding those too ill to attend) were called to parade and informed that they had been found guilty of mutiny and 13  Adam left the army in 1946, after a distinguished career in both wars, and went on to become the principal of the Working Men’s College, as well as chair of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). He was also a member of the National Association of Adult Education.

162  Mutiny and Leadership sentenced to seven or five years’ penal servitude depending on their rank. He then went on, ‘Except in the case of Private X, who has already served a period of penal servitude, all sentences have been suspended on condition that you agree to join units of the Eighth Army fighting in Italy.’ Records show a second (unnamed) officer then said: ‘By refusing to join units at Salerno and joining in a mutiny, you have disgraced yourselves. Fighting in Italy will give you a chance to retrieve your lost honour, but you should realise that any misdemeanours committed between now and the end of your time in the army will lead to the immediate re-­imposition of your sentences’ (quoted in David, 1995: 167). The response of the soldiers seemed to be universally outraged that their act of defiance, which had been in honour of their regiments and divisions, had now been turned into ‘dishonourable conduct’. Many assumed that the sentences had merely been postponed until they were caught out for some subsequent minor infraction, while others—again wrongly—believed they were heading back to their original units. Twenty-­four hours later, all, except the sergeants, were on a train, under armed guard, heading for the Algerian port of Philippeville and then on to Taranto in Italy. Once there, they were moved up to the front line and treated with contempt by many soldiers on the way. Rumours were rife that they were to be kept on the front line until ‘the problem of the mutineers’ had been removed by combat fatalities and injuries. Some of the mutineers went absent without leave (AWOL), assuming they were now just cannon-­fodder, while the rest were given full equipment—but no ammunition—and generally shunned by the other soldiers in the line. The sergeants and corporals were not informed of the suspended sentences until a week before Christmas. Wally Innes was posted to the 6th York and Lancasters, and Fraser went to the 1st York and Lancasters. On 28 February 1944, the 6th York and Lancasters were pulled out of the front line for a period of rest and recuperation, except the mutineers who were told to stay put until a replacement regiment arrived; in other words, the mutineers were there for the duration of the war, or until they were killed or injured. Innes then deserted, as did many others, but most remained in situ. Some who went AWOL were either recaptured or turned themselves in, and they were generally returned to North Africa to serve out their prison sentences. Innes was recaptured and, after a few months in prison, was lucky enough to be returned to the DLI, where he served out the rest of the war with distinction. Some survived for months on the run: Ray Whitaker, originally with the Argylls, was returned to a different battalion (8th) but the same regiment; he concluded that his RSM was out to get him returned to prison and decided to go AWOL after four months’ service. He lived in the Foggia area of Italy for months, selling black market cigarettes and then olive oil, before trying to shoot his way out of a trap set by the American Army’s Special Investigation Branch. He was sentenced to six years for desertion, robbery, and attempted murder—a year less than his original sentence for refusing an order! Of the 185 soldiers convicted for mutiny, seventy-­five had deserted—an astonishing 40 per cent. Worse, the army then demanded the return of the army pay books for the wives (and sometimes the mothers) of all those soldiers. Thirteen of those who did not desert were killed in action (David, 1995: 180–5; 191–2). The attempts to clear their names failed. General Maitland Wilson, who had replaced Eisenhower as Supreme Commander in the Mediterranean Theatre, turned down a petition in February 1944 on the advice of Russell, who considered that individuals might seek a change in status if their subsequent conduct deserved it but there should be no collective change. In the summer of 1944, Major General Wimberley, commander of the

Mutinies in War  163 51st Division, who held himself partially responsible for the original denouement, tried to reconstruct the events in order to make a collective plea on behalf of the mutineers and to trace their movements. For Wimberley, there probably were a few ‘bad hat’ ringleaders but the rest just suffered from a misguided sense of loyalty and should not have been punished so ruthlessly. To that effect, Wimberley asked General Adam whether the sentences of all those who had done their duty since the mutiny should be annulled. Unfortunately by this time a significant minority had gone AWOL and, on recapture, had their original sentences reimposed, with the first two years in North African jails. However, Adam ordered that each recalcitrant should be interviewed by Lt Col. Main, a psychiatrist in Royal Army Medical Corps back in the UK. Main’s report, General Matters in the Salerno Mutiny, was finished in January 1945 and ended: ‘The plans for rehabilitation of the men after the first sentence was suspended were not wholly successful; the opportunity to restore and stimulate morale was not taken, and this led to a rapid failure of discipline’ (quoted in David,  1995: 195). Perhaps the most concise account of the whole affair was given by another British Army psychiatrist, Robert Ahrenfeldt: In fact, it may be said the whole of this pitiful incident was a tragedy of errors. In the first place, the men were misled from the very beginning; secondly, there was a complete absence of clear direction, precise information or firm leadership throughout; thirdly, there was a total disregard (whether avoidable or not) of well-­established group loyalties in experienced fighting men of previously high morale, and finally, when the trouble was well underway, the men were further demoralised – it would seem almost beyond repair – by the humiliation and degradation they suffered; it should not be forgotten that these experienced British soldiers, who together had been through previous battles and ­campaigns, were subject to ridicule by German Prisoners of War, and to the contempt of their comrades in arms, Incidentally, in this instance, as on other occasions, the absence may be noted of any effective procedure to enable men to express collective grievances. The effect of these serious errors in man-­management and leadership was a gradual disintegration, first of group morale, and then of individual morale. The consequences of ignoring certain basic principles essential to morale proved disastrous.  (quoted in David, 1995: 195–6)

General Adam suggested that those who had served in the field should have their ­suspended sentences removed, while those in jail should have their sentences cut short, but the response of Sir James Grigg, Secretary of State for War, in the House of Commons on 17 April 1945 to a question about the now public mutiny gave little hope of this. Three weeks later, on 7 May 1945, with the end of the war in Europe, the War Office began making arrangements for the release of all the mutineers still held in prison, on condition they served out the rest of their original time in the army. Some refused: Ray Whitaker, by now in prison in Durham, refused to be released and serve his time out in the Pioneer Corps building roads abroad, so he stayed put and was finally released in October 1947, after serving half his six-­year sentence. He subsequently ended up serving thirty years in prison for all kinds of offences (David, 1995: 204). The cases were reviewed again in 1947 and confirmed as legitimate, and in 1982 a further review, carried out by Lord Trenchard and John Nott, then the Secretary of State for Defence, confirmed the trial and sentences as legitimate, since all the soldiers involved were fit for active service (James, 1987: 172–3). David (1995) suggests that this was never

164  Mutiny and Leadership the case and that the consequences on the mental and physical health of many of the mu­tin­eers was tragic, not least because their campaign and gallantry medals were taken away from them. Others survived and prospered: Corporal Hugh Fraser spent twenty-­nine years in the Aberdeen police and, when he admitted at the time of his first interview that he had been convicted of mutiny and served time in prison, the response of the Chief Constable was ‘Don’t do it again!’ (David, 1995: 204). Sergeant Innes was demobilized in March 1946 and appeared on the BBC documentary Mutiny broadcast in 1982. There, the presenter Peter Snow asked (Major) William Harris, QC, at the time the only member of the court martial with a legal background, whether he still thought the convictions were justified. His response, in front of Wally Innes, underlines the main issue: ‘We must maintain absolute discipline in an army, and once any soldiers, officers or men, feel they can get away with it, the rot sets in’ (quoted in David, 1995: 206). David added an open letter to the Secretary of State for Defence for a pardon but to no avail. On 22 March, 2000, the MP for Aberdeen South, Anne Begg, raised the issue of pardons once again, and it was again rejected. On 17 August 2006, Begg made a further plea in Parliament for pardons of the 191 soldiers convicted over the Salerno Mutiny, and again it was rejected.

Conclusion Mutinies in war generate the most dangerous to mutineers and those they mutiny against. To the establishment, a wartime mutiny threatens the cohesion regarded as necessary to maintain morale against the enemy, so any mutiny is treated as the ultimate betrayal, requiring the harshest penalty, if only to persuade others not to copy the mutiny. As the first refrain of mutiny suggests, the issue is not what the mutineers thought they were doing but what those with the stronger position think the dissent meant. For the Salerno mutineers it was about loyalty to the primary unit, but to British Army it was a refusal to fight in the face of the enemy. This, as the Salerno mutiny demonstrated, is problematic because in order to use the harsh punishment inflicted on mutineers as an example to keep others in line, information about the mutiny itself had to be published, and this might have compounded the problem rather than ameliorating it. On the other hand, if no admission of a mutiny was made then there could be no exemplary effect. As ever, the scapegoating of a few, and the misunderstanding about the default nature of authorities to crush dissent, led to just some being sacrificed, but Salerno also exposed the second refrain of mutiny: know your enemy. The mutineers remained confused about who they were loyal to and fighting against, and the second refrain sunk them. They were also victims of the eighth refrain: had the circumstances been slightly different, had they had a little more luck with the initial communications, and had not the unnamed officer shamed them as they were being released, the subsequent desertions might never have happened. In the Russian army mutinies of 1917 and the German navy mutinies of 1918, the ­long-­term result was the collapse of the state, though whether that would have happened in time without the mutinies is unclear. However, there is little doubt that both mutinies contributed to the overall crisis in both countries and served as a warning to other monarchs and governments: mutiny in war is like a bacillus, and if it is not eradicated immediately, and at source, then it will infect everything around it. And sometimes in war it is the establishment that gets the first refrain wrong and their leadership fails, either because the

Mutinies in War  165 purpose is blatantly wrong and the relational leadership totally inadequate (the ninth refrain), as in the German Navy in 1918, or because their strategy is flawed, as in Russia in 1917. On other occasions it is the mutineers who fail, either because the purpose and strategy is flawed, as with the Salerno mutineers, or because—as here it is clear—there is very little formal leadership on the part of the mutineers, which weakens their case because there is no mechanism for adjusting the tactics or even reconsidering the strategy when the mutiny falters. Of course, mutiny is not a bacillus and, as the examples of Christmas 1914, and at Salerno and Étaples suggest, some mutinies are about specific breaks in the social contract or particular events that get out of hand, rather than symptoms of a wider malaise, such as in the Russian and German naval mutinies. Ironically, while the 1917 German naval mutiny is a symptom of a wider malaise that only became transformed into a danger to the state in the 1918 German naval mutiny, the latter was really a fracture of the political contract, rather than the social contract, because while the former concerned the poor conditions and stifling of political debate, the latter was generated by the last death spasm of a military elite, intent on an illegal and utterly pointless exercise in a warped chivalrous code. This is what made the mutiny dangerous for the establishment, because the deceit of enthrallment was shattered by the simple refusal of the sailors to die for a long-­dead elite code of honour. This captures the eighth refrain well because, had the senior leadership of the German chosen not to launch a suicidal and vainglorious mission, there might not have been a naval mutiny and the German establishment may have survived the defeat relatively intact. In short, it could have been otherwise. In the case of the French mutinies of 1917, we see not only the influence of the Russian mutinies and revolution that spur their French counterparts to action, or rather inaction, but also the speed and extent to which a mutiny can spread right across an army, essentially denuding the state of any defence in just a few days. And these French mutinies refract the problem and complexity of morale: had the Nivelle Offensive not promised so much, so quickly, and the French Army just maintained its defensive line for another year, there may well not have been any mutinies. But the raising and dashing of morale, in an exercise of self-­evident futility, was more than the average poilu was prepared to accept. The danger here of Prozac Leadership, in which the leadership of the military and the political establishment persuade themselves that optimism and positivity is all that is required for success, is clearly exposed—albeit a warning that remains obscured even in contemporary conflicts in Afghanistan. The painful truth, not the glossy lie, is what is required in such situations, and, for the French mutineers, the real question is embodied in the second refrain: know your enemy. Finally, we should note how often mutineers regard their actions not as illegitimate assaults upon respected institutions but merely the righting of wrongs committed by those very institutions—a clear illustration of the first refrain, that what we are looking at is socially constructed. For many, their actions were not mutinous, as had clearly been those of the Russian soldiers in 1917, but for the establishment the inability to differentiate between legitimate complaints and attempts to overthrow the state meant that many scenes of agonism were transformed into acts of antagonism. As such, quotidian dissent is framed as a revolution in order to dispense summary and condign punishment out of all proportion to the real threat.

4

Mutinies after War The British Forces 1918–19 After January 1915, and with the exception of Étaples in 1917, overt mutinies between 1915 and 1918 may have been few and far between in the British Forces, but unrest and mutinous dissent were not, especially in the Royal Navy and the Royal Marines. Since 1905, the magazine The Fleet had been published by Lionel Yexley (real name James Wood) to expose injustices in the Royal Navy, and he had some success in persuading the ratings that dissent could be legitimate and was better organized through collective representation than through the more traditional individual petition. By the outbreak of the First World War, other magazines took up the fight, such as the Naval Warrant Officers Journal. In 1917 the discontent surfaced as two petty officers were court-­martialled for ‘circulating letters’ on HMS Resolution, but they were treated leniently (James, 1987: 155–7). The reverberations from the Russian Revolution in November 1917 reached deep into the Western Allies’ camp that had formed a thirteen-­country alliance in a (failed) attempt to defeat the Bolsheviks—and to prevent the spread of the ‘revolutionary virus’ to the rest of Europe and North America. A meeting of the Allied Supreme War Council in London, in December 1917, had committed the west to support Russians intent on continuing the war against Germany, at the same time as the Bolsheviks began talks with Germany to pull  out of the war. These peace talks (eventually completed on 3 March 1918 in the ­Brest-­Litovsk Treaty) were represented as proof that the Bolsheviks were in league with the Germans, releasing thousands of troops to reinforce the Western line, as well as ­conducting despicable crimes of their own—including, allegedly ‘the nationalization of women’ and the forcing of all girls over 12 to become mothers. It was also clear to the West, including the Canadian government for whom Russian was the seventh-­largest market for exports, that economic gains could be won from a White Russian government that would disappear under the Bolsheviks—including the war loans worth 13 billion ­roubles that the Bolsheviks had simply abandoned (Isitt, 2006: 229). Even before the Brest-­Litovsk Treaty was signed there was trouble: on 26 February 1918 a battalion of the Yorkshire Regiment refused to turn out to march on Seletskoe in support of the White Russians against the Bolsheviks. Two of the sergeants were singled out, arrested, found guilty of mutiny, and sentenced to be shot, but by the time they received their sentences the war was over and their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment under the general amnesty following the armistice on 11 November 1918 (Lett, 2016: 49). Three days after the signing of the treaty, on 6 March 1918, the British Royal Marines Light Infantry (RMLI) landed at Murmansk, ostensibly to remove the British munitions there that had previously been destined for the Russian Government. There were also 648,000 tons of Allied munitions in Vladivostok harbour, and initially it was considered likely that the Germans would requisition them. Two Royal Navy ships were in Murmansk in the spring of 1918 (HMS Glory and HMS Cochrane), and by June 1918 troops from Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0005

Mutinies after War  167 Japan, the UK, and Czechoslovakia, all part of the North Russian Expeditionary Force, had seized the port. In fact, by then the danger from a German assault had retreated (the fear had been that the Germans, who had entered Finland in early 1918, would capture the port and use it as a submarine base for attacking Allied shipping in the Atlantic), but the Western troops removed the locally elected Soviet, against some armed resistance and with some casualties. The Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, but the war itself did not formally stop until the Treaty of Versailles was signed, and that wasn’t until 28 June 1919. The USA did not sign the peace treaty until August 1919, and the formal termination of conflict (with Germany) occurred on 10 January 1920. But, within days of the armistice being signed, trouble erupted amongst British soldiers who thought they had done their duty and that it was now time to go home. On 13 November 1918, an officer pushed an enlisted man into the mud in Shoreham camp and promptly had him arrested, and that ignited a firestorm: others refused to obey orders and demanded instant demobilization, and 7,000 men marched to Brighton town hall demanding the soldier’s release. The Chief Constable (Sir William Gentle) and the Mayor (Herbert Carden) spoke to them and agreed to get a general from London to listen to their grievances, but the general just demanded the men return to barracks and they refused. Faced with defeat, the establishment caved in, and 1,000 men were demobilized that day, with more the following days. It was not just the end of the war that started the firestorm. On 14 November 1918 it was announced that there would be a British General Election a month later (it had been postponed from 1914), and Lloyd George’s Coalition Government (of Conservatives and the Liberals that supported Lloyd George) promised early demobilization for all conscripted men and a ‘land fit for heroes’ as well as ‘habitations for heroes’. General Sir Henry Wilson (Chief of the Imperial General Staff, or CIGS) was appalled at the prospect of early demobilization and convinced that the political rhetoric was to blame for the ensuing discontent: ‘The whole trouble is due to Lloyd George and his cursed campaign for vote catching’ (quoted in Webb, 2016: 31). The election returned the Coalition Government, split the Liberals, now led by Asquith, and left the Labour Party as the main opposition. It also left the British Army in a parlous state of morale. There had been very little overt opposition to the war in Britain, except from the Workers’ Socialist Federation led by Sylvia Pankhurst, who had been appalled at the way her mother Emeline and sister Christabel became vociferous proponents of the war and handed out white poppies to those men they deemed too cowardly to volunteer for the forces. The other opposition came from Conscientious Objectors. Conscription was introduced in March 1916, but only 16,500 men registered as Conscientious Objectors with religious or moral objections—0.3 per cent of the total relevant population (Webb, 2016: 6). However, the ‘social contract’ that most soldiers seem to have accepted was based on defending the country from enemy attack and defeating the enemy; it did not seem to have included attacking erstwhile allies (Russia), nor putting down revolts by rebels elsewhere (Ireland), nor occupying Germany, nor (re)establishing the British Empire in places under threat (India), nor maintaining garrisons in the Middle East or Gibraltar or Malta or anywhere else. All of these might be jobs the professional British soldier was prepared to countenance, but not so those called up to do their patriotic duty and just defeat the enemy. Indeed, the government had made it clear that only volunteers would be posted to Russia (Webb, 2016: 26).

168  Mutiny and Leadership It should also be noted that there was not much public hostility towards the British generals—over a million people lined the street to watch Haig’s funeral cortege in 1928. But the new Prime Minister, Lloyd George, had promised demobilization, now the war was over and the job done, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen were going to hold him to his promise and get back home as soon as possible. In the face of growing political unrest across Europe this was a significant problem for the British authorities. With Russia already in the throes of post-­revolutionary civil war, the Irish question had not gone away, and, in the face of revolutionary upheavals in Riga, Bavaria, Munich, Bremen, Berlin, Strasbourg, Alsace, Hungary, Slovakia, and even Basel, the time for demobilizing British troops, as far as the military establishment was concerned, was not now. Churchill was certain that the Bolshevik state should be ‘strangled at birth’ to prevent later catastrophe, though Lloyd George—rather more perceptively—suggested that ‘to send our soldiers to shoot down Bolsheviks would be to create Bolsheviks here’ (quoted in Webb, 2016: 17). Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, decided that Lloyd George was wrong and set about planning a large-­scale intervention while the Prime Minister was negotiating the peace in Europe. Before the First World War, the British Army was composed exclusively of volunteers and rose from about 400,000 to almost three-­quarters of a million as war broke out. By the end of the war, the army had increased to about 4 million (about two-­thirds of a million were dead or missing by then, with a further 1.6 million wounded). Churchill wanted a standing army of 1.1 million to maintain the empire, releasing the other 2.9 million, based on demobilizing criteria such as early volunteers, older soldiers (37 and above), those with three or more wound stripes, or those with important (‘pivotal’) jobs at home. The latter was a particularly acute issue because such men had not been called up until the very last minute, in the early part of 1918, when the German Spring Offensive threatened to overrun the Allied positions. That also meant such men had only been enlisted for a minimum period when the armistice was called, and pressure began to build to demobilize the army, but the result was a last-­in-­first-­out system, not a first-­in-­first-­out system, as had been promised. And all of this ran contrary to the political promises that had got Lloyd George re-­elected, and it fed the fears of the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign run by people like Harry Pollitt, later to be General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The kind of incident that the ‘Hands Off Russia’ campaign was aimed at was represented by the events that started on 29 May 1918, when a British Royal Marine Field Force, comprised of 300 men complete with field artillery, arrived in Murmansk, having been trained by Sir Ernest Shackleton in arctic survival skills. In February 1919, the ‘Marine Mobile Column’, as it became known, was led by Captain Lane who informed his superior, Lt Col. Lawrence of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary, that he (Lane) had received a letter of complaint from his men. In fact, the letter had originally been presented to Lt Carvell, who insisted that complaints could only be made by individuals not by groups and then tore up the ­letter—which reappeared the next day addressed to the General Officer Commanding. Dated 9 February 1919, the letter noted: We the Royal Marines, do respectfully request to see the O/C on Monday 10th in a ‘General Parade’ before daily routine commences to ask why the request that was put in to go through to General Maynard on Thursday last had not gone through . . . . If, after tomorrow’s parade we have no satisfaction as regards going home, we will down ‘tools’ for

Mutinies after War  169 48 hours. If nothing happens we will commandeer the first train travelling in the direction of Murmansk . . . . We think we have been here long enough and what is more we have been messed about like a flock of ‘sheep’ without a Shepard [sic] ‘Everyone is fed up’, with everything in general and our one aim is England and we will have that or t­rouble . . . . Another point is, men of the Army are getting leave and in big batches, not six at a time. They have not been out here above three months . . . ‘Sir’ this is only a few of our complaints but we were expecting to have a reply to our note to the General so that we could state our grievances in a proper manner. If that note has not gone, we shall find ways and means of seeing him ourselves and explain things to him. Signed, The body of the Royal Marines We are not in a state of Mutiny. Far from it, we are simply asking for our rights. 55 signatures  (reproduced in Bentinck, 1999: 56–7)

When Maynard investigated the problem, he suggested to a subsequent enquiry that the Marines had suffered no hardship compared to other non-­Marines (and non-­dissenting troops), and that this would not have happened ‘had the officers taken proper interest in the welfare of their men . . . The opinion I formed at the time was that neither Captain Lane nor 2nd Lieut. Carvell had a grip over their men and that they paid little attention to the welfare of their detachment’ (quoted in Bentinck, 1999: 15). Indeed, Col. Lawrence’s own inspection not only supported Maynard’s conclusion but noted that another RM platoon, under Lieut. Stevens, had not been involved in the original letter, exhibited good morale, and the difference between the two platoons ‘reflects great credit on Lieut. Stevens, who is a good skier, a keen sportsman, and an excellent officer looking after his men well’ (quoted in Bentinck, 1999: 16). The incident then seems to have been closed, but three months later, on the night of 18/19 May 1919, the Marines were ordered to work with a unit of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC) and undertake a reconnaissance against a Bolshevik force at Madvejya Gora. The Marine officer (Major Willes) refused, arguing that his men were too exhausted, though they appear to have undertaken no more than the men of the KRRC previously. Willes then tried to resign, but his application was refused. In the event, the KRRC went out alone, was ambushed, and beat a hasty retreat after a large proportion of them fled the scene. There followed a month of confusion and rumour as various individuals and groups protested about either the (in)action of the Marines or the betrayal of alleged promises to send home the Marines, who had, apparently, been on active duty for fourteen months, longer than any other unit. However, the Commander-­in-­Chief of Allied Forces in Murmansk, Major General Maynard, was not impressed and telegraphed the War Office in London informing them that he was sending them home because of the ‘exceedingly bad spirit . . . I am very disappointed in behaviour of both officers and men’ (quoted in Bentinck, 1999: 13). The subsequent enquiry acknowledged that the Marines should have been withdrawn after four months, not fourteen as the Admiralty had intended. The Army General Officer Commanding on the ground, however, had overridden this promise. Despite the findings of the inquiry, the War Office, while acknowledging fault on all sides, rejected their complaint about General Maynard, but matters were considered closed, primarily because a different detachment of Marines—the 6th Battalion—was in even greater trouble.

170  Mutiny and Leadership The British 6th Royal Marines Light Infantry Battalion, led by Lt Col. Kitkat, was not from a regular, let alone a battle-­hardened, group. Most were either under 19 years old (and would not normally have been deployed for combat), and the rest were old soldiers and some ex-­prisoners of war who had yet to return back to Britain. It had originally been designated in July 1919 as a unit to facilitate the plebiscite in Schleswig-­Holstein to determine whether that region would remain in Germany or be returned to Denmark, but with the Russian campaign underway the unit was sent to Murmansk, landing on 8 August 1919, to facilitate the withdrawal of allied forces. Kitkat, however, was not expecting any kind of combat, which was just as well because Major Barnby, in charge of B Company, had spent his entire career either at sea or in the air; Capt. Watts (second in command of B Company) was the only officer in that company who had spent any time in land combat, and that amounted to a mere thirty-­six hours in Churchill’s previous escapade, Gallipoli, before he was wounded and evacuated with a permanently disabled arm. Indeed, only 15 per cent of that company had any land fighting experience. On 29 August 1919, the Marines of C Company, led by Kitkat, were ordered to assault the Bolshevik village of Koikori but suffered three dead and eighteen wounded before withdrawing. A second assault was also repulsed, and Kitkat was wounded in the foot and was replaced by Major Ridings. On 30 August C Company was ordered to attack for a third time, but the Marines refused, many complaining that they were still under 19 and therefore exempt from fighting, and others suggesting that they had not volunteered for Russia, though Churchill had promised only to send volunteers, and C Company had done all the fighting so far and it was the turn of another company. Three under-­19-­year-­olds were then sent back from the front line but the dissent continued, this time from B Company with ‘anxiety that the officers should not try to win any medals . . . . And their men become unnecessary casualties’ (quoted in Bentinck, 1999: 32). On 7 September B Company, under Major Barnby, attacked Koikori while D Company attacked Ussuna, both suffering casualties in the densely forested land, with some concern that the Russian guides were actually Bolshevik spies. When Barnby was wounded, his place was taken by Capt. Watts, who immediately ordered B Company to retire through C Company and then seems to have suffered a mental breakdown. As the Company Sergeant Major Finch stated, On the morning of 8th September 1919 I saw Capt. Watts in the forest. He seemed perfectly normal and was going forward at the time. About 14.30 hours I saw him on a stretcher. He appeared to be crying and the men told me he had lost his reason. (Quoted in Bentinck, 1999: 34)

That evening, fifteen men were ordered to go forward but they refused and disappeared. The following day, fifty-­six men from B Company left the front line altogether, and on 24 September the battalion was pulled out of the line, with a Court of Enquiry held over the following three days to ascertain the cause of the collapse in morale. Some giving evidence on the part of the army suggested that the problem was rooted in the poor quality of the Marines’ NCO leadership; others from the Marines suggested that the battalion had not been adequately trained for infantry work. Ninety-­four men and two officers were tried on 3 and 7 October 1919. Major Laing was found guilty of ‘conduct to the prejudice of good order’ and received a severe reprimand; Capt. Watts was found not guilty of cowardice but

Mutinies after War  171 guilty of using ‘words calculated to create alarm and despondency’ and dismissed from the service. Watts eventually ended up in the Black and Tans as a member of a murder squad.1 One NCO and twelve other ranks were found guilty of ‘Disobeying so as to show wilful defiance’ and sentenced to death, but all sentences were commuted by the Commander-­in-­Chief; fifty-­two other ranks were found guilty of ‘deserting H.M. Service and sentenced to two years imprisonment with Hard Labour. Of the final twenty-­one other ranks arrested, twenty were found ‘guilty of disobeying a lawful command’ and given five years’ prison.2 No one was found guilty of mutiny—which would have been harder to commute. Indeed, Thompson’s history of the Royal Marines (2000: 215) concurs with Lt Smith-­Hill (Commander of B Company) that there was ‘no mutiny and no cowardice’, and Thompson supports this by suggesting ‘Many Royal marine units before and since have been thrown into far tougher fights at shorter notice, and under more adverse conditions than the 6th Battalion, and come through with flying colours’, but this confuses a particular incident with a universal assumption and obscures the point that, however embarrassing, a mutiny did occur. Indeed, on 8 October, the battalion sailed back to Glasgow. Ironically the receiving party was unaware of the events in Russia and had prepared a Divisional band to march them through the streets of Glasgow, but, while the band was preparing themselves, the battalion was marched in silence to their barracks from where the prisoners were despatched to Edinburgh and Bodmin jails. After a debate in Parliament, the prison sentences were reduced for most of the prisoners: ‘Their Lordships direct that, in consequence of Lt Col. Kitcat’s responsibility for the failure of the 6th Bn on active service in North Russia, he be placed on half pay’ (note on personal record of Lt Col. Kitcat, quoted in Bentinck, 1999: 5). In all, when the last British troops left Murmansk on 12 October 1919, forty-­one officers and 286 other ranks had been killed, and sixty-­five officers and 591 other ranks wounded, in Churchill’s failed attempt to eradicate Bolshevism. Lloyd George’s fear about stimulating rebellion at home through such intervention in Russia appeared to bear fruit as early as November 1918, when the Royal Navy experienced a mutiny aboard a light cruiser anchored in Libau, Latvia, after its crew refused to sail against the Bolsheviks. Royal Navy crews at Archangel, Murmansk, Invergordon, Portsmouth, Rosyth, Devonport, and Fort Edgar followed suit. Ironically, when the crew of HMS Delhi noted that, although they were now ‘at war’ in Russian waters, the Royal Navy had told the crews that war pensions would not be paid to those killed in action because they were only payable when the country was ‘at war’. The crew of HMS Cicala, an Insect-­class gunboat designed for use in shallow waters, refused to sail up the Dvina river against the Bolsheviks, and Admiral Cowan asked London for clarity of the political pos­ition, because if Britain was ‘at war’ with the Bolsheviks then the crew could be ­executed for mutiny. When he received a positive response, Cowan had the five ringleaders court-­martialled and sentenced to death—subsequently commuted to five years’ imprisonment (Webb, 2016: 15).

1  The Black and Tans, so named because of their mixed uniforms, was a Special Reserve of the Royal Irish Constabulary, composed of temporary constables and recruited during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21). They had been recruited at Churchill’s insistence from British soldiers, returning from the war, and became in­fam­ous for their assaults on civilians. 2  The decisions are listed in Bentinck, 1999: annex G.

172  Mutiny and Leadership In fact, the Royal Navy had been storing up all kinds of problems for some time: between 1852 and 1917 there had been just one pay increase (a penny a day extra in 1912), and discontent was widespread enough for the Admiralty to discuss the problem and send Rear Admiral Sir Thomas Jerram on a tour of British ports to establish the extent of the problem (Lamb, 2017). On 7 January 1919, the Royal Navy tried to head off any criticism by establishing a Committee of Enquiry, subsequently known as the Jerram Committee, but it was already too late. On 13 January, the crew of HMS Kilbride, a patrol vessel stationed at Milford Haven, mutinied after their demand for extra pay was dismissed by their commander. The crew responded by replacing the White Ensign with the red flag and refusing to go to sea. As a result, eight of the thirty-­nine crew were court-­martialled for mutiny and given prison sentences of between two months and two years. On 27 January, the naval commander at Rosyth Naval Base was forced to discharge over 100 ratings from HMS Cyclops in response to their demand for demobilization. The government’s initial response was to offer an interim one shilling and six pence a day pay rise, and this eventually became the basis for the four shillings a day basic rate for ratings. That their discontent had been rewarded was anathema to some officers, as one wrote: ‘The men of the lower deck were given opportunity of airing their views without fear of incurring displeasure or more serious charges of insubordination, disaffection, mutiny or the preferment of friv­ olous requests’ (quoted in James, 1987: 158). For many ratings ordered to sail across the Baltic, the ending of the war and the delights of a traditional sto over en route in Copenhagen proved too much to bother about continuing on to Russia to start another war against former allies. The crew of HMS Caledon persuaded Rear-­Admiral Sir Walter Cowan, commander-­in-­chief of the fleet of six light cruisers and ten destroyers in the Baltic, that they needed more time ashore—which he reluctantly accepted. When the crew of the aircraft carrier HMS Vindictive hoped for the same leniency they were shocked to find all leave had been cancelled, and they responded with a protest, shouting ‘No leave, no work!’ A scuffle followed, and two stokers were sentenced to five months’ imprisonment (James, 1987: 158–9). About forty sailors from HMS Velox, Venerable, and Wryneck also deserted their ships as they were due to sail to Russia (Bentinck, 1999: 46). Equally serious for the British establishment was the contemporaneous discontent amongst British soldiers. In December 1918, many soldiers were given leave for Christmas and the New Year at home from France, and after Lloyd George’s demobilization speech and election victory many assumed they would not be returning to the front. On 2 January 1919, soldiers were ordered to Folkestone to return to France; just to compound the morale problem this generated, rumours circulated suggesting that Russia was the real destination after Churchill’s speech at the Mansion House where he talked of ending the ‘foul baboonery’ of Bolshevism (quoted in Webb, 2016: 32). The following day (3 January) 2,000 soldiers took over Folkestone port and refused to allow any ships to leave or trains to arrive. By 4 January, the mutinous troops had increased to 10,000, and they elected their own representatives, and when a squad of fusiliers were ordered to fix bayonets and enforce discipline, they too refused. General Sir William Robertson, CiC Home Forces, then drove to Folkestone and assured the mutineers that no reprisals would be taken and their leave would be temporarily extended, but then they would have to go to France as ordered. The response was that soldiers due to embark for France from Dover took the same mutinous action until the same promises were made. But the mutinous action was

Mutinies after War  173 now becoming widespread, and on 6 January soldiers from the Army Service Corps ­stationed at Isleworth, on hearing they were going to be the last to be demobilized, drove to the Prime Minister’s residence in Downing St, London, and blocked the roads with ­lorries; they were demobilized within four days. Worse was to come. In mid-­January 1919, 5,000 troops mutinied in Southampton Docks and refused to embark for France. General Sir William Robertson (who had negotiated the settlement to the Dover and Folkestone mutinies) had seen enough and sent General Hugh Trenchard to Southampton, not to negotiate but to restore order. Trenchard had led the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and was later to become Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and he had held both army and air force commands. Trenchard went to the docks as an army general with aide-­de-­camp, Maurice Baring, and Bates, his former clerk and driver. Trenchard blamed Lloyd George for the mutiny—his ‘key men first’ promise for demobilization effectively undermined those with a claim for having been the longest serving, and this was exacerbated by administrative errors that had led the soldiers to believe they would be demobilized from Southampton, not sent back to France. When he approached the mutineers he was jeered and ejected physically from the docks by the mutineers: ‘It was the only time in my life that I had been really hustled. They did not want to listen to me. They told me to get out and stay out. They wanted either the Prime Minister or the Commander-­in-­Chief. They would listen to no one else’ (quoted in Boyle, 1962: 320). Trenchard demanded 250 armed men, plus a detachment of military police (the mu­tin­ eers were unarmed) from the garrison commander in Portsmouth, to be sent by the first train the following morning. The GOC Southern Command was then informed of Trenchard’s decision, but he insisted Trenchard must not order the troops to open fire. Trenchard outranked him and said on the phone that he was ‘not seeking your support. I’m informing you of my intentions, so there’s nothing more to be said’ (quoted in Boyle, 1962: 321). The following morning, under Trenchard’s order, the electrical power to the dockyard was cut off, leaving the mutineers in the main building in the dark. As the train was delayed, Trenchard sat in his ‘office’ at the docks and was interrupted by a lance-­corporal who had come to surrender himself and inform Trenchard that most of the mu­tin­eers felt themselves to be the victims of War Office incompetence, but they were not revolutionaries. Around 12.00 the train from Portsmouth arrived, and the troops were marched to the docks and paraded in front of the main customs shed, the mutineers still in darkness. At that moment the power was restored and the floodlights shone on the spectacle as Trenchard ordered the 250 Portsmouth troops to load their weapons ‘as noisily as possible’ (quoted in Boyle, 1962: 322). As Trenchard stepped forward to demand the mutineers’ immediate surrender, a sergeant amongst the mutineers told him to ‘drop dead’—at which point the military police were ordered to arrest the sergeant, which they did, unmolested by the rest of the mutineers. Trenchard then repeated his demand and most of the mutineers capitulated—but were only released to the waiting arms of the MPs once they had individually told him of their complaints. One hundred and seven were arrested for instigating mutiny amongst 5,000, and fifty-­three were subsequently confined on board the troop ship back to France. That left a further 100 mutineers who refused to surrender, and they retreated to their billets and barricaded themselves in. Trenchard ordered the windows of the buildings smashed, and fire hoses were turned on through the windows. The mutiny then disintegrated, but it is not clear what happened to these final few. Churchill (then Secretary of State for War and Secretary of State for Air) praised

174  Mutiny and Leadership Trenchard’s ‘masterly handling’ of the ‘Southampton riots’ (quoted in Webb, 2016: 39) and then offered him a job as the inaugural Chief of the Air Staff. By the end of January 1919, the War Office was so concerned about the state of morale of the British forces that all commanding officers were ordered to provide weekly reports of the morale of their troops and asked whether they could be relied upon in a crisis—particularly regarding public disorder, strikes, or Russia (Webb, 2016: 39–40). That was not scare-­mongering from the War Office; things were about to get seriously dangerous. As Basil Thomson, Director of Intelligence in 1919, wrote: In the months following the Armistice, some of the societies of ex-­servicemen began to give anxiety. The most dangerous at the moment seemed to be the Sailors’, Soldiers’ and Airmens’ Union, which has whole heartedly accepted the Soviet idea and was in touch with the police strikers who had been dismissed, with the more revolutionary members of the Trades Councils, and with the Herald League.  (quoted in Webb, 2016: 44)

On Monday 27 January 1919, men from the Army Ordnance and Mechanical Transport sections at the Val de Lièvre camp in France mutinied and demanded improved conditions and demobilization. This was a base adjacent to the Calais docks that had previously been a timber yard owned by the Valdelièvre family, and it had become a large RAOC (Royal Army Ordnance Corps) supply base. The mutiny also coincided with the arrest of Private John Pantling of the RAOC for delivering a ‘seditious speech’, which had called on the authorities to release five young soldiers (aged 17 to 19) who had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for minor acts of indiscipline at the Étaples training base in September 1917. The mutineers marched to the Les Attaques prison and released Pantling by force. Then the sergeant responsible for the jail was arrested for failing to prevent Pantling’s escape until the mutineers, in turn, demanded both the release of the sergeant and that the authorities cease hunting Pantling. However, on the first Sunday after the jail break, Pantling was rearrested, and by Monday both the soldiers at the Val de Lièvre camp and those at the nearby camp at Vandreux refused orders. Later that Monday, some 4,000 mutineers marched to Calais, behind brass bands, and demanded the release of Pantling again. This time it was Brigadier Rawlinson who acquiesced to the demand, and Pantling was freed within twenty-­four hours. There were now some 20,000 troops from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and Royal Army Service Corps in the mutiny, aided by striking French railway workers, and women serving in Queen Mary’s Army Auxiliary Corps who also refused to work in their jobs as cooks, waitresses, and nurses. They all refused to obey orders in Calais and formed the ‘Calais Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Association’ to run the port of Calais through a number of smaller committees, each of whom elected a delegate to attend the Camp Committee, until their demands for better rations and speedy de­mo­bil­ iza­tion were agreed. In effect, a soldiers’ and sailors' soviet now ran Calais. Haig, Commander in Chief of British Forces in France and still concerned that the war might restart, sent General Sir Julian Byng, C.O. of the 3rd Army, along with two divisions (complete with machine guns), to ‘quell the riots’ that Haig thought were caused by those ‘who come from a class which like to air real or fancied grievances’ and were akin to the trade unionists that he so disliked (quoted in Gill and Dallas, 1975: 108). Gill and Dallas suggest it was Brigadier-­General J.B. Wroughton, rather than Byng, but, whoever it was, their arrival was delayed by French railway strikes and by the refusal of 5,000 British

Mutinies after War  175 troops to return to their units. By 28 January the camp was surrounded by troops with machine guns, and the mutineers were told to surrender immediately. They did, but only after insisting that the authorities put Pantling on court martial and find him not guilty, because that meant he could not be rearrested later. Pantling was duly found not guilty. A conference of the committees was then organized on 30 January, and it agreed to end the mutiny in return for improved conditions, new huts, and no weekend work. Four ‘ringleaders of the Calais Soviet’ (whom Haig wanted shot but was overruled by Churchill) were sentenced to imprisonment for their part in the mutiny; Pantling subsequently died in hospital from infection. With the War Office request for weekly morale reports starting to come in, and facing serious civil unrest in Glasgow and Belfast, the British government decided to secure the services of those that could be relied upon, primarily the guards’ regiments: Grenadier, Coldstream, Scots, Welsh, and Irish. All were despatched back to the UK from France. In Glasgow, although the TUC had negotiated a national cut from fifty-­four to forty-­seven working hours per week, many workers sought a much more radical cut and had little faith in the official trades’ union movement. A General Strike was called in Glasgow for 27  January 1919, in support of a forty-­hour week, not to increase the hours available for overtime but to reduce the high level of unemployment. But we should be wary of assuming this was the spark of a universal socialist call to arms; just four days earlier, on 23 January, Emmanuel Shinwell, leader of the Glasgow Branch of the Seafarers Union and Chair of the Glasgow Trades and Labour Council, had told the 600 merchant sailors at the meeting that it was cheap Chinese labour that was preventing British sailors from getting jobs. Later that same day a fracas had broken out between white and black sailors in Glasgow, which had resulted in the latter group being pursued by a large mob of the former. When the house in which the black sailors were besieged came under physical attack, in the so-­called Harbour Riot, several sailors from both groups were injured. Sometime later that day, Shinwell stated the riot was the direct responsibility of the black sailors alone (Webb, 2016: 53–4). When a General Strike occurred on 27 January 1919 in Glasgow, most of the city was affected in some way as over 40,000 workers downed tools (as well as soldiers still in uniform). Moreover, as had happened in Belfast at the same time, the strikers began to cut off the electricity supply to the rest of the city, demanding the city provost authorize the reduction in standard working hours to a maximum of forty. On Friday 31 January, there was a mass meeting in Glasgow’s George Square, it was addressed by Gallacher and Shinwell, but Lloyd George refused to negotiate with the unofficial movement and insisted that only the official trades unions and the TUC would be represented at any future talks. At this point, while the city provost was engaged in discussion with representatives of the strike committee, the police decided to clear a path for the trams, now engulfed by the strikers in the square, and a riot then broke out as the police attacked the strikers with truncheons and the strikers responded with bottles. Sheriff McKenzie then tried to read the Riot Act that would have effectively given the police carte blanche to clear the square by any means, before he was hit by a bottle and the riot paper snatched from his hand. The ensuing riot—subsequently known as the Battle of George Square—led Robert Munro, Secretary of State for Scotland, to claim it was ‘a misnomer to call the situation in Glasgow a strike – this is a Bolshevist uprising’ (Quoted in Webb, 2016: 59). Indeed, several of the strike leaders were arrested for incitement to riot (including Shinwell), and thirty-­four

176  Mutiny and Leadership strikers and nineteen police officers were injured. The government response was two-­fold: first to confine the local Glaswegian troops to barracks for fear of them siding with the strikers; and second to send 10,000 troops from elsewhere to the city to guard the main public buildings and utilities and to deploy machine guns, artillery pieces, and even tanks into the streets. A week later, the official trade union movement accepted the 47-­hour week proposal on offer and the troops were withdrawn. But the situation in London and Belfast did not ease, and threats to cut off the electricity supply prompted the government to add Regulation 43C to the Defence of the Realm Act (DORA) which specifically outlawed depriving a community of power. This was then used in Belfast to undermine the strike, but not until troops were deployed on the streets. Not all the troops were so reliable: on 7 February 1919 a large body of troops, mainly from the north of England, were told to report to Victoria Station London to board trains to Dover for embarkation to France. No trains arrived and the men were told to report the following day, but no accommodation or food was provided. The following day there were still no trains, and fights broke out. A company of Scots Guards, sent from Buckingham Palace under fixed bayonets, cleared the station, and they placed the soldiers under arrest in Wellington Barracks. Meanwhile, another 1,000 soldiers (this time with rifles) assembled outside Victoria Station and marched on the Houses of Parliament—to Churchill’s consternation who was working in the House and could see the troops assembling outside. Churchill phoned Major-­General Sir Geoffrey Fielding, General Officer Commanding London, and asked two questions: who could be sent to disperse the crowd; and, equally enlightening, could they be relied upon to obey orders? Since no one appeared to be in the House, the troops moved on to Horse Guards Parade, much to Churchill’s relief, and he remained away from his window, ‘a prey to anxiety’. The mutineers were then addressed by a civil servant as a troop of the Household Cavalry rode at them from one direction and a troop of Grenadier Guards approached from the opposite direction. As Fielding suggested, the Guards and Cavalry would do their duty. The mutinous soldiers surrendered, were marched to Wellington Barracks, and then were shipped straight off to France (Webb, 2016: 42–3). But beyond the military ambitions held by the British state that might have required a large number of conscripts to remain in uniform for the foreseeable future, there was also a fear that dumping large numbers of soldiers onto an already weak labour market would provoke further unrest, especially given the political discontent around Europe at the time. Moreover, the government was well aware what might happen because a hundred years previously—at the close of the Napoleonic Wars—almost a third of a million vagrants had roamed the countryside as a similar number of soldiers and sailors (or ‘Masterless men’ as they were called) were unceremoniously discharged. The result then was both ­general unrest, the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, and the Cato Street Conspirators that planned to assassinate the Prime Minister and his cabinet, and all this fed into a web of fear on the part of the establishment (Webb, 2016: 10–13). Now, in 1919 things did not look that different according to the Manchester Guardian, reflecting on a riot in Wolverhampton in 1919 following the arrest of a demobilized soldier: One can hardly imagine trouble on such a scale arising out of an ordinary arrest before the war. Certainly there would not have been such organized defiance of the police. In earlier centuries people shook their heads over the ‘masterlessmen’ that the end of a war

Mutinies after War  177 released on a country. Something of that rare spirit of masterlessness has come in the wake of this war—a readiness to fly to violence and defy authority. Some may put it down to a reaction against discipline and the natural ebullience of men at a loose end after years of restraint. But after three or four years spent in the scientific practice of violence a man does not throw aside the methods he has been so painfully taught by merely changing his clothes.  (quoted in Webb, 2016: 12)

It was also the case that industrial unrest in the UK in 1919 reached unprecedented levels. This was exacerbated by the fact that many industries such as the railways, the mines, and docks had been nationalized for the duration of the war and remained nationalized even after the war ended. Since all three were necessary for the transport of troops to the con­ tin­ent and across the country, any threat of industrial action by the trade unionists of the Triple Alliance (formed in 1914 by the Miners Federation of Great Britain, the National Union of Railwaymen, and the National Transport Workers’ Federation) generated high levels of anxiety amongst the establishment. Lloyd George responded by establishing the Industrial Unrest Committee under Sir Eric Geddes, who in turn developed a plan rooted in the history of colonial control: the country was divided into sixteen areas to be run by a District Commissioner with the help of a Citizen Guard, formed from 70,000 volunteers recruited to halt the spread of Bolshevism. The latter appeared in the guise of a National Strike that seemed the inevitable consequence of simultaneous unrest on the London Underground which threatened to bring the national transport system to a halt, and an unrelated demand by the miners for a reduction in the working day, an increase in wages, and the nationalization of the mines. Under this threat, Lloyd George called the leaders of the Triple Alliance to Downing Street in February 1919, and admitted that he, and the country, were at their mercy because the army could not be relied upon, and, while great sacrifices had been made by the people, the country could not afford to reward them appropriately. But, if they chose to engage in a General Strike, then the state would collapse and the trade unions would have to run the country (Webb,  2016: 73–4). At this, apparently, Robert Smillie of the miners, James Thomas of the railway workers, and Robert Williams of the transport workers called off the action and effectively stopped the militant trade union movement turning into a radical political movement. A subsequent Royal Commission, chaired by Mr Justice Sankey, recommended a 20 per cent pay increase and a reduction in hours for miners (which was implemented) and the nationalization of the mines (which was not). In effect, neither the mood of the strikers nor the mutinous soldiers was, at this point, revolutionary—unlike the situation in Russia in 1917 or Germany in 1918, and, unlike both those countries, the fledgling revolutionary political parties had neither the capacity nor the leadership capable of turning militant discontent into political radicalism. After all, the Russian mutineers in 1917 supported the Bolsheviks not because they wanted a Bolshevik political system but because the Bolsheviks promised what they wanted: bread, land, and peace. The following month, on 9 March 1919, the American military were involved in a disturbance in London. A group of American soldiers and sailors were told to desist from gambling on the pavement of the Strand in London—an illegal activity. When the police officer was rebuked, he called reinforcements and three US service personnel were arrested and taken to Bow St police station, which was then surrounded by over 300 members of the American, Australian, Canadian, and British armed services, all demanding their

178  Mutiny and Leadership release. Just as the crowd was persuaded to disperse, two more American military personnel, this time off-­duty military police officers suspected of instigating the disorder, were arrested and taken to the same police station. The subsequent attack on the police station was broken up, and one soldier (a Scot) was arrested (Webb, 2016: 84). On 26 May 1919, a rally was held in Hyde Park London of over 10,000 members of the Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Soldiers and Sailors, disgruntled by the absence of jobs. That led to a riot and a charge by mounted police, but the Federation was only just getting warmed up. The following month, the war was formally ended on 28 June, and the British government decided to mark the event with a Peace Day on 19 July 1919 across the whole country. In Luton, a town roughly thirty miles north of London, Mayor Henry Impey organized a parade and a Mayoral banquet but failed to invite a single ex-­serviceman or serving soldier, whilst not a single member of the invited council had actually served during the war because they all had ‘reserved occupations’ and were not conscripted, nor had any volunteered. In response, the local Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Soldiers and Sailors petitioned the council for permission to hold an alternative religious event on the same day but at Wardown Park. This was rejected by the Tolls and Municipal Buildings Committee, and in response the Federation decided to organize a rival march—including maimed ex-­servicemen—that would arrive at the town hall at exactly the same time as the official parade. In the event, the protesters and police clashed, and during the resulting riot the town hall was burnt down. The Canadians had still to make their mark. On 17 June 1919, Canadian troops from Woodcote Park, a convalescent home in Epsom, were ejected from a local pub, the aptly named ‘Rifleman’ on Epsom High Street, and two of them were arrested prior to being released into the arms of the local military police the following morning, as was the usual practice. However, within a short time, over 400 Canadian troops began protesting o ­ utside the police station then attacked it using broken paving stones and uprooted iron railings. When they broke in, the twenty-­four police officers inside, including Sergeant Green, an off-­duty 51-­year-­old who had heard the commotion and cycled in to help his colleagues, charged the attackers, beating them back but not before the soldiers had freed their drunken colleague. Eight constables, four sergeants, and an inspector were seriously injured and Sergeant Green was killed, struck by an iron railing. Seven of the attackers were subsequently charged with rioting and manslaughter, but two were acquitted and five convicted of riot and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment; that was then commuted through a Royal Pardon and deportation. Ferris (nd) suggests that a cover-­up occurred because of the potential political damage to the relationship between the UK and Canada, had a Canadian citizen been hanged for murder. Ten years later, one of the five deported— Allan McMaster, an ex-­blacksmith—handed himself into police in Canada and admitted the murder, but the case was not reopened by the British police (Webb, 2016: 85–7). There was still another spasm from the Royal Navy to come: in October 1919, forty sailors from Portsmouth, and a further forty-­eight from HMS Velox, Venerable, and Wryneck, deserted their ships and travelled to London to seek redress for their complaints that the war was over and they would not serve in the Baltic, and certainly not when the rules of engagement were so unclear. The crew of HMS Delhi, the flagship, was ordered to engage Bolshevik land batteries in October and they refused, stating that their duties did not include attacking Bolsheviks. Captain Mackworth threatened to blow up the ship and charged one man with sedition and mutiny; he received an eighteen-­month prison

Mutinies after War  179 sentence. Sylvia Pankhurst was also given a six-­month prison sentence for sedition after she published a pamphlet entitled ‘Discontent on the Lower Deck’ in the publication the Workers’ Dreadnought. And it would appear that some British Communist Party influence was established, but more in the anxieties of the establishment than anywhere else. At least one member was exposed on HMS Dragon when the commander suggested that the monies set aside for the Welfare Committee, to be spent on members of the crew in need, should be spent instead on a wedding present for the forthcoming marriage of Princess Mary and Viscount Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood. When Len Fagg, a member of the committee, objected, he was discharged from the navy and was then discovered to have been a member of the Communist Party (James, 1987: 159–61).

Canadian Forces 1919 As Churchill wrestled with Lloyd George over a response to the Bolshevik Revolution, a large anti-­Bolshevik western Siberian force was authorized in London in July 1918, to number 350,000 troops in total (including White Russians), but also troops from the USA, Britain, Japan, Romania, China, France, Serbia, Poland, Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Canada. The last group included 4,000 Canadians from the recently formed 259th Battalion of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force (CSEF). As the Siberian Sapper, the newspaper of the CSEF, noted, ‘Bolshevik missionaries are spreading their doctrines in every country in the world . . . . There is a mad dog running loose among the nations, and it would seem to be the duty of the nations to handle it as mad dogs are usually handled’ (quoted in Isitt, 2006: 233). The response of Joseph Naylor, President of the Federation of Labour and leader of the Vancouver Island Coal Miners, was equally virulent in its opposition to the CSEF: ‘Is it not high time the workers of the western world take action similar to that of the Russian Bolshevik and dispose of their masters as those brave Russians are now doing?’ (quoted in Isitt,  2006: 234). In the summer of 1918, labour unrest spread throughout British Columbia and resistance to the draft grew as the Labour leader Albert ‘Ginger’ Goodwin was shot dead trying to evade the Military Service Act. As living costs increased, food shortages appeared and discontent burgeoned, compounded by the military draft. The armistice, on 11 November 1918, effectively ended the First World War and ­simultaneously undermined some of the reason to continue with the Siberian campaign. Canada’s Acting Prime Minister, Sir Thomas White, telegraphed Prime Minister Robert Borden—then en route to Versailles to discuss the peace treaty—to suggest that Canadian troops be brought home from Siberia because the war was over, and because, unlike other nations, Russia owed no outstanding debt to Canada. Borden was having none of it, but, despite his determination, opposition to the campaign grew, and a meeting of the Victoria branch of the Federated Labour Party (FLP) was attended by 700 of the troops destined for Siberia. Some officers of the CSEF rushed the stage, singing ‘God save the King’, but the majority were sympathetic to the FLP’s opposition to the continued expedition. On 9 December, the Winnipeg labour council called for a General Strike against the em­bark­ ation, and members of D and C Company were switched around to dilute discontent, and seven soldiers were put on trial for desertion. On 21 December 1918, three months after its formation, 856 troops of the CSEF began the 3.5-­mile march from their camp to the troopship Teesta docked in Victoria, British

180  Mutiny and Leadership Columbia. Halfway there, the column stopped for a break, and, when some of the soldiers refused to line up to resume the march, Lt Col. Swift drew his pistol and fired over their heads. When this failed, members of Companies A and B were ordered to remove their belts and whip the recalcitrants from their companies into line. Subsequently, according to one contemporary account, they were marched onto the troop ship with fixed bayonets. There is some confusion about what actually happened, and Isitt (2006: 249) suggests that the indiscipline was exacerbated by marching the troops in alphabetical order, rather than in companies, so that some French-­speaking troops were under the control of non-­French speaking officers. When the Teesta and its sister ship, the Protesilaus, with the other half of the CSEF, arrived in Vladivostok on 12 and 15 January 1919 respectively, the reckoning was coming. On 24 January, ten members of the 259th Battalion (all French-­Canadian privates) were charged with ‘mutiny and wilful disobedience’ and nine found guilty. Their sentences ranged from three years’ penal servitude to the loss of a month’s pay. In April, as the Canadians prepared to evacuate Vladivostok, the legality of deploying conscripts was questioned and all the soldiers were released. Most of the troops involved in the mutiny were recruited from Quebec City and Montreal, staunchly French and markedly more radical than many of the more conservative English sections of Canada that had supported the Military Service Act, including Companies A and B, recruited from Kingston, Ontario, and London, Ontario. The battalion had already suffered a handful of casualties from the outbreak of Spanish influenza that swept through the world in the winter of 2018, and the weather in Victoria had been appalling. Ultimately, few Canadian soldiers saw military action in Russia, and at most they were involved in training White Russians and guarding sections of Vladivostok from assumed Bolshevik assault. In the event, the Russian transport workers initially refused to transport them because Vladivostok had turned into a Bolshevik city with significant violence done to the White Russian officers by the population. In February 1919, the labour situation deteriorated further in Canada, and by March Borden ordered them all to return. By June 1919 all members of the CSEF had returned to a Canada riven by General Strikes; n ­ ineteen never made it home. Nor did all those Canadians from the four divisions that made up the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in France, and who made it through the war and waited in Wales for transit back home, make it home. In fact, the CEF was marked by ­dissent from the beginning. The first units of the First Division, which arrived at Plymouth in October 1914, refused to carry their own bags or supplies off the ship, since this was ‘coolie work’, and large numbers of the troops deserted to the local pubs (Putkowski, 1989: 4). Seven months later, it took 200 armed British cavalry to clear the streets of Folkestone of rioting Canadians from the Second Division. And in September 1915 the Field Ambulance section from that division elected their own unofficial delegates to represent their grievances to their commanding officer in overt defiance of military regulations. The Third Division was equally defiant: in March 1918, as the German Spring Offensive required rapid responses from the allies, the CEF in Arras refused to move en masse and shot at their own military police trying to persuade them. Ironically, the problem that would later affect the British forces, notably slow de­mo­bil­ iza­tion, was the subject of a Dominion Forces conference in March 1917, where the costs of transporting CEF troops back home from France, and the dangers to morale, were all aired. Eventually six transit camps were established, five in England and one at Kinmel in

Mutinies after War  181 north Wales, and over January and February 1919 the CEF was transported there from France. This occurred at the same time that the unrest amongst the British troops forced the government to change the priority for demobilization from so-­called ‘pivotal’ men— those whom the government regarded as critical for the economy (and who had been called up last because of their importance)—to those who had been in uniform the longest. And as the CEF prepared for peace, thirteen mutinies broke out in various places: the Third Division protested about the continuation of military ‘bull’ at Nivelles in December 1918, while at the transit camps in Witley and Bramshott troops wrecked civilian shops in November 1918. But the most serious mutiny occurred at Kinmel Camp, near Rhyl, North Wales (Putkowski, 1989: 6–10). Kinmel Camp was built by McAlpines in 1915 and comprised twenty sub-­camps with their own messes, plus a camp hospital, post office, cinemas, a theatre, churches, and various local shops outside the camp in an area called Tintown. Although it had originally served as a training camp, by November 1918 it had both Canadian and British troops, with a mixture of Officer Cadets, and young Canadian soldiers, some of whom had already served in France. On 20 November, many of the Canadian troops had taken the train from the camp to Rhyl, returning late in the evening and proceeding to gatecrash a private party held by officer cadets. As the ensuing melee turned into a riot, the camp was cleared by British troops of No. 16 Officer Cadet Battalion (OCB) using rifles but no ammunition. That led to the removal of the Canadian troops, but by the spring of 1919 a new group of 19,000 Canadians were waiting for repatriation back home.3 Col. M.A. Colquhoun noted that there were ‘riots on a small scale every day or so’ (quoted in Putkowski, 1989: 13) as the men waited to go home in the dreary cold camps, or in nearby Rhyl, as shipping transports home were constantly postponed. On 7 January 1919, a riot occurred after a white soldier was arrested by a black sergeant, and the following month there were several reports of disturbances in Rhyl by off-­duty Canadian troops. These turned serious as the situation deteriorated: first, because the economic recession in post-­war Canada saw a rapid increase in unemployment and there was a consequent concern by the troops at Kinmel that by the time they were home the situation would be even worse; and second, because the number of ships able to transport troops home diminished as formerly re­quisi­tioned ships were returned to their civilian owners. This was further exacerbated when those ships that were still being used proved unsuitable and were removed from the available list. Worse, rumours spread that ships destined for use by the CEF were now being used by American troops instead. When it was confirmed that three liners had indeed been transferred, and the sailing of a fourth ship, the Haverford, that was destined for Canada had been postponed for the third time, 300 soldiers from Sailing Party No. 21, previously destined for that sailing, organized a protest parade. This was channelled by the Adjutant, Lt Col. Thackeray, into a meeting with three representatives. Colquhoun’s complex task was made immeasurably more difficult because it coincided with a decision by the Canadian Corps Commander, General Sir Arthur Currie, that the ‘first over, first home’ policy was to be replaced by sending troops home by division. This may have proved administratively easier to manage, but it also meant that some troops of the first division to go home, the 3rd Division, had only just arrived. 3  Between 60 and 70 per cent of the first two contingents of the Canadian Army to enter the war in 1914 and 1915 were returning British (Morton, 1993).

182  Mutiny and Leadership On Saturday 1 March, rumours of attacks on various canteens began to circulate, and troops were stationed to protect them as other soldiers refused to take part in the usual route marches. On the following Monday, Colquhoun sent his adjutant to inform the headquarters of the Overseas Military Forces of Canada (OMFC) at Argyll House in Aldwych, London, of the seriousness of the situation, but they returned with nothing new. On Tuesday, some soldiers began to protest and refused, again, to go on the route marches; instead they demanded to speak to HQ to get confirmation. That seemed to satisfy the dissenters, but by that evening, as the Military Police began to empty the bars around the camp, several were taken over and looted, and the discontent spread rapidly through the main camp where a group of around 500 marched on Tintown, with the intent to loot that too, despite the arrest of eight looters. A unit of the Canadian Reserve Cavalry Regiment was called but, when they arrived, they refused to drive the looters out, and, once Tintown was wrecked, a group of about 100 looters moved to sub-­camp 3’s guardroom to release the eight arrested men held there. This was followed by further looting, including one of the officers’ messes, where shots were fired, and Colquhoun, having failed to quell the riot in person—although he noted that looters often put their loot down to salute him and then picked it up again (Putkowski,  1989: 38)—ordered all ammunition boxes to be brought to his HQ, though one box remained unaccounted for. The rioting continued until 02.30 on 5 March, by which time twenty-­four rioters had been arrested, all eleven shops in Tintown ransacked (see Figure 4.1), and eleven canteens and several messes emptied of their contents (Putkowski, 1989: 14–22). That morning, the authorities struggled to reassert their authority by dispersing groups of soldiers, confining many to their barrack blocks, and re-­arresting all those who had been freed during the melee. At a meeting of the senior officers, it became clear that only about 10 per cent of the total camp soldiers were prepared to act against the rioters, and Colquhoun decided that it was pointless to try and coerce the soldiers given the limited resources available. Indeed, as the morning meeting concluded, 300 soldiers broke into

Figure 4.1  Kinmel Camp 1919: Tintown after the mutiny (CWM 20020051-­007_2, George Metcalf Archival Collection, Canadian War Museum)

Mutinies after War  183 the guardhouse of sub-­camp 8 and freed prisoners there, and Colquhoun decided to release all other prisoners on open arrest to ease the tension. It did not. Instead large groups of men appeared carrying red flags and, on meeting sixty dismounted cavalry, began throwing stones at them. After two charges, the cavalry retreated and the rioters moved on to attack the sergeants’ mess of sub-­camp 5, and then the cavalry guardroom, from where three shots were fired. The rioting continued throughout the day, and the canteen at sub-­camp 17 was attacked for a second time. This time, 350 loyal troops under Major Langford had been issued with rifles and live ammunition—despite Colquhoun’s specific order not to use live ammunition in defence of property—and indeed no shots were fired. However, a separate attack on a group led by Lt Col. French led to one of the attackers, Russian-­ born Sapper William Tarasevitch, being bayoneted. Furthermore, Corporal Joseph Young (a Glaswegian-­born veteran who had only been in the camp for twenty-­four hours and was apparently uninvolved in any of the riots) was also bayoneted. After that, shots were fired by both sides, though French then ordered his men not to fire and ordered a retreat to prevent their own weapons falling into the hands of the rioters, now carrying red flags. The riots continued throughout the day, with various skirmishes between the mutineers and the loyal troops, and one of the latter, Pte. David Gillan, was shot in the neck and died, though where the shot came from is disputed. Whoever shot him, the result was ten minutes of gunfire from both sides, and two mutineers, Signaller William Haney and Gunner Jack Hickman, were both shot dead by loyalist troops, taking the total of fatalities to five. Five other mutineers suffered gunshot wounds and sixteen had wounds consistent with blunt instruments, ten of which were mutineers. Seventy-­five mutineers were arrested, including eight designated as ringleaders, but the mutiny was over, helped no doubt by the news that some were designated to return to Canada on the SS Celtic within four days, on 10 March. In addition, a general amnesty was agreed for all non-­arrested troops, who also received a £2 pay advance. At the subsequent coroner’s inquest at Rhyl, the coroner initially complained that the Canadian authorities withheld information from him about possible unlawful killings but informed the jury, after the ten-­day inquest, that, since varying accounts of the fighting existed, the best option was to return an open verdict. A military court of inquiry concluded that shipping delays were the main cause of the ‘discontent’, compounded by the British Press reports of the newly arrived 3rd Division as being ‘battle hardened’ (to the annoyance of the other divisions that were actually battle-­hardened), and supplemented by the poor conditions and rations at the camp. This, boosted by alcohol and the presence of about ‘25–30 malcontents’, had encouraged somewhere between 100 and 800 rioters, who included ‘a number of jail birds recruited by the British Mission in the Western States. These were soon joined by a number of Russians, other foreigners and some French Canadians, men more easily excited than the average Canadian’ (quoted in Putkowski, 1989: 44). Despite the distinctly racist tones of the conclusion, the five soldiers condemned as leaders of the mutiny included one Russian, one French-­Canadian, one American, one Chippewa Indian, and one British-­Canadian. Furthermore, over half those arrested were either British or British-­Canadians. The inquest also criticized the senior leadership of the camp and that of the HQ staff in London. No evidence was taken from any of the recalcitrant soldiers, and no attempt was made to discover who the shooters were, on either side, though it insisted (without evidence) that the shooting was always started by the mutineers.

184  Mutiny and Leadership From the fifty courts martial, those found guilty received sentences ranging from 120 days’ detention to 2.5 years’ imprisonment with hard labour (Pte. Frederick Sherstotoff, for assaulting an officer) to five years (Pte. W. Hamelin, for waving a red flag) to five years’ penal servitude (Pte. Bert Morrison, for his leading role in instigating—and, as a Provost NCO, failing to suppress—a mutiny). Pte. Rufus Simon was arrested in Rhyl after the mutiny was over, after he was overheard talking about the mutiny. Despite defence witnesses insisting that he was not the individual accused by the court, and despite a witness for the prosecution (Gething) insisting that he recognized Simon from his Jewish accent— then admitting that he had not heard Simon speak—Simon was found guilty of mutiny and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude. Pte. Roy Henley, identified By Major Allen as a ‘tall Highlander’ (though he was only 5’ 4” tall), who had been permitted to inspect the sub-­camp 5 guardroom to ascertain whether there were any prisoners held, still received three years’ gaol. Sapper John Hiba, of Romanian extraction, who had attacked Col. French with a baseball bat, was sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. The heaviest sentence was reserved for Pte. Valentine Miculka, of Czech extraction, who received a ten-­year sentence for attacking a canteen and encouraging a crowd to release sixteen prisoners from the guardroom of sub-­camp 8. The total bill for the ‘disturbances’ was put at just under £70,000 (about £3.4 million in 2018 prices) (Putkowski, 1989: 22–54). As Roy Henley from the Canadian Black Watch surmised: We just wanted to be treated like men . . . We wanted to know that someone was damned well looking after us – or trying to. We got none of that. You can tie the riot down to one thing: lack of concern for the men by the higher-­ups. It’s an officer’s job to look after his men, irrespective of the conditions. Well, we had a lot of lousy officers. (quoted in Putkowski, 1989: 55)

The Royal Air Force 1946 Twenty-­seven years after the mutinies of Canadian troops in a foreign land, waiting to go home, a repetition of events developed, though this time it was the British Royal Air Force (RAF) that had hardly existed during the former mutinies, and they were in India and the Far East.4 As ever, this was not just a British problem, because American troops had protested vigorously against what they saw as slow demobilization in both the Pacific and European theatres. Pressed on by the ‘Bring Back Daddy’ campaign, the US government had struggled to balance the need for retaining forces of occupation in Germany and Japan, as well as the looming threat from the Soviet Union, with the need to get troops back home as soon as possible. Indeed, the US Navy converted ten aircraft carriers, six battleships, and twenty-­six cruisers to increase their carrying capacity, but it was to little avail, and protest marches sprang up from the Philippines to Germany. And while Ernie Adamson of the House Un-­American Activities Committee was convinced that the American Communist Party was behind the ‘mutinies’, General Eisenhower was adamant that it had nothing at all to do with politics, let alone left-­wing politics. Instead it was 4  The RAF was formed in 1919, and it was most certainly not present in the 1770s when, according to President Trump’s 2019 Fourth of July speech, the American Continental Army ‘took over the airports from the British’.

Mutinies after War  185 ‘acute Homesickness aggravated by the termination of hostilities’ and the men involved ‘were not inherently challenging discipline or authority’, hence no disciplinary action should be taken against them. By and large it wasn’t (Lee, 1966: 566–7). In January 1946, with the Second World War over, many in the RAF assumed that their time was up too; they had served their country on the contractual basis of their signing on for the Duration of the Present Emergency (DPE) and now looked set to recoup the fruits of not just a military victory but the election of a Labour Government in July 1945 on the basis of significant military votes. However, just as after the end of the First World War, there were British political leaders that had other things planned for them. As we saw in 1919, Churchill amongst others was keen to redeploy the British Army and Royal Navy to Russia, to put down the nascent Bolshevik regime before it had ramifications for the British Royal Family and the Empire. In January 1946, it looked like history was about to rhyme, if not repeat itself, this time in India. John Strachey, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Air in the new Labour government, was clear in a confidential minute: ‘My line in defence has been the obvious one that: first, a relatively large RAF and small army is by far the most economical way of meeting our world commitments; and second, that we face a huge transportation and troop task, largely for the sake of the other two forces. But the hard fact remains that we are proposing to release only 140,000 men in the first six months of next year’ (quoted in Duncan, nd: 2). On 17 January 1946, at about 19.30, roughly 800 RAF personnel from RAF Drigh Road (now Faisal Airbase in Pakistan) met in a darkened hangar, and, after a few moments, a voice shouted from the centre: ‘You all know why we’re here . . . Don’t look around and don’t say anybody’s name’ (quoted in Duncan, nd: 7, 13). They were protesting about a number of things: the slow demobilization and the conditions of service and, in a direct reflection of 1919, the use of British ships to send American troops home, or transport GI brides to the USA, or supplies to Indonesia to support the Dutch regaining control over their far-­flung empire, ceded to the Japanese in the early years of the war. Equally annoying, it looked like the British Army or Navy personnel seemed to take precedence over the RAF—a rumour that turned out to be true (Duncan, nd: 8–9). In fact, conditions were poor—and they had always been poor—but that was acceptable when the war was on, and now it was over. There were further complaints about using RAF engineers to service civilian aircraft for BOAC and Qantas. Within a few weeks, over 50,000 RAF personnel across India, Ceylon, and Singapore were involved in related mutinies, and there was some ­sympathy amongst RAF personnel for the Indian independence movement, as well as a concern that this was the main reason British forces were being retained in India. Indeed, this was one of the scenarios considered by the British Chiefs of Staff as late as June 1946, when plans for a further seven army divisions to control India were discussed. Towards the middle of January 1946, the poor food, intolerable conditions, and universal boredom—which had been acceptable until this point—suddenly became un­accept­able when station orders informed the men that on Saturday 19 January there would be a parade in best blue uniform, followed by a kit inspection. That blue uniform, designed originally for Cossacks and cold Russian weather,5 would replace the khaki shorts or 5  In 1918, at the birth of the RAF, the Yorkshire cloth manufacturer, AW Hainsworth, had been left with a large quantity of cloth designed for the Czar’s Cossacks but, with the revolution, that market disappeared, and the company persuaded the RAF that the blue-­grey woollen cloth was perfect for the new service. In effect, it had

186  Mutiny and Leadership lightweight trousers and open-­necked khaki shirt, complete with sandals, that everybody had worn for months in response to the stifling Indian heat and humidity. It was this pro­ verb­ial ‘bullshit’ that stimulated the meeting on Thursday 17 January at RAF Drigh Road. There, Leading Aircraftman Arthur Attwood, a 31-­year-­old electrician who had been an active member of the Electrical Trades Union before the war, took control of the mass meeting and volunteered to chair it in the absence of any other volunteers. Within thirty minutes the meeting had voted unanimously that, come Saturday:

· · ·

We would not prepare any kit for inspection; We would go to the parade ground at the scheduled time, but wearing khaki drill, not best blue, and we would refuse to parade; Anyone who had the opportunity to see the commanding officer would make it clear that we had strong grievances which we wanted to put to higher authority. (quoted in Duncan, nd: 13) The following day, the six-­person group that had taken over unofficial leadership decided that since the main issue was demobilization—and this was beyond the control of the RAF—a letter-­writing campaign amongst the personnel was necessary, so that each individual would write to their own MP and demand a quicker demobilization. This was followed by another mass meeting and the agreement that they: (1) should be allowed to put their collective complaints to HQ; (2) circulate a petition to the Prime Minister; (3) meet a visiting delegation from the UK; (4) stop kit inspections and Saturday parades; (5) get the food improved; and (6) reduce the number of hours worked. Another mass meeting agreed not to pursue their demands through a strike. The following day Air Commodore Freebody, representing HQ, arrived, and a group of twenty was chosen to meet him, first by the Station Warrant Officer and then, after protests, by the men themselves. Freebody agreed all their points, except the Saturday parades, but he did agree that best blue uniform was unnecessary. In the event, the station commander also accepted the negotiated deal and agreed that no punishments would be meted out, as long as the discontent did not recur. A letter-­writing campaign then commenced and a large scroll of paper was used to obtain signatures for the petition (to speed up de­mo­bil­ iza­tion) to be delivered to the Prime Minister (Duncan, nd: 16–26). On 24 and 25 January, the BBC began reporting on the work stoppages in India, not just at RAF Drigh Road but also at RAF Bamhrauli and RAF Jodhpur, and by the 26 January the ‘strike’ had spread right across the subcontinent, and RAF Seletar in Singapore ground to a halt. The result forced Roderick Carr, the Air Marshall Commanding, British Air Forces in South East Asia, to send a signal to all units: The Government plan for demobilization must be a balanced one: our industries at home require manpower, but this cannot be provided at the risk of endangering the safety of the world. There are still defence problems in India. The public press has recently made it clear that a political crisis is approaching, a crisis which may only be solved by little short of civil war . . . The Government at home are now fully aware that conscripts in the RAF nothing to do with the blue sky that it allegedly represents. See https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/939862/ RAF-­uniform-­blue-­Russian-­revolution-­Cossack-­AW-­Hainsworth-­Yorkshire-­mill, accessed 10 June 2019.

Mutinies after War  187 have little or no pride in their service. I do not believe that these misguided airmen who took part in the recent so-­called strikes appreciate that their action may be endangering the safety of India. Already their example has been followed by the Royal Indian Air Force [RIAF].  (quoted in Heritage Times, 2018)

There were a very small number of communists involved in the Drigh Road mutiny, but they only joined after the initial protest and, according to those involved, only in recognition that a leaderless group would inevitably fail and that no prolonged ‘strike’ could succeed given the difference between the RAF ‘mutineers’ and a traditional industrial strike action by organized trade unionists in the UK (Duncan, nd: 3). On 29 January British Prime Minister Clement Attlee acknowledged that ‘incidents’ had occurred at twelve RAF stations (later increased to twenty-­two), though actually as many as sixty incidents occurred across the Near and Middle East. No violence occurred at any incident in what was ‘the biggest single act of mass defiance in the history of the British armed forces’ (Duncan, nd: 27). Those incidents included RAF Cawnpore, the largest RAF base in India with 5,000 personnel, and RAF Seletar in Singapore, with 4,000 people, where aircraft could land but, since there was no refuelling available, they were then grounded. At RAF Kallang, again in Singapore, seven of the strike organizing ­committee were arrested, though they were then released after further protests. At RAF Rangoon in Burma, the strike had been called, once more, after a best blue uniform parade had been called. And, once more, the British newspapers saw a ‘well-­laid plot’ behind all the unrest as ‘airmen-­agitators’ appeared all over the place as the Indian Navy and Air Force followed suit in striking (Duncan, nd: 31–3). Even Wavell pointed the finger of blame at the RAF mutineers: ‘I am afraid that the example of the Royal Air Force, who got away with what was really mutiny, has some responsibility for the present situation’ (quoted in Duncan, nd: 34). Yet the discontent led to significant improvements in food and conditions generally, and demobilization was indeed speeded up. That might have been the end of the affair, but it was not. John Strachey made a broadcast to the RAF overseas insisting that their ‘ultra-­tolerant’ response would not be repeated, but the MP for Stockport, Norman Hulbert, who had reached the rank of Wing Commander in the war, demanded that the ‘communist agitators at the heart of the mu­tin­ ies should be severely dealt with’.6 Strachey at first refused, but a Special Investigation Branch7 review had been ongoing for some time with the intent of court-­martialling the ring leaders. Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, Air Officer Commanding SEAC (South East Asia Command), was adamant that it was ‘mutiny, whatever they called it’ and secretly instructed his senior officers to act ‘most severely’ with regard to the ringleaders (quoted in Duncan, nd: 63). In fact, by the time the Special Branch had arrived at RAF Seletar, many of those involved in the mutiny had already left or claimed that they could not remember the events properly. Park had asked whether he could use the army to quell the mutiny and was informed that it was up to him—but he, like all the other station commanders, would be held responsible for the outcome. Park had already had a run-­in with

6  Hulbert was a prominent member of the Anglo-­German Society, even after Munich, and had been a guest speaker at the Nuremberg Rally on 12 September 1938 according to The Times of the same date. 7  Special Branch, or the Special Irish Branch as it been originally, was part of London’s Metropolitan Police, formed in 1883 to investigate Irish republicanism.

188  Mutiny and Leadership the Seletar Station Commander, Group Captain Francis, whom Park thought was attempting to blame him for the mutiny. At Drigh Road, the investigation sought to blame the communists, especially Attwood, for organizing the Thursday meeting, so as to acquire a charge of conspiracy to mutiny. Attwood refused to answer their questions and was then sent to Bombay to be repatriated as part of his demobilization, but others were threatened when the investigators told them it was a mutinous offence not to prevent or report a mutiny—so that attendance at the Thursday evening meeting was tantamount to mutiny. Others were told that their wives would not be able to cope when they were in prison, and eventually five of the hundred men interviewed admitted that Attwood had chaired the meeting. Attwood had been held at Bombay while the Special Branch completed its investigation, and his colleague, David Duncan, then organized an Indian solicitor to defend him, setting up the ‘Attwood Defence Fund’ to pay for it. Having raised £300, Duncan set off to visit Attwood at his court martial in Bombay. Attwood was provided with an official defence counsel just forty-­eight hours before the trial, an Indian pilot officer with no experience of the law and no knowledge of the alleged offence. The court martial of both Attwood and Norris Cymbalist, who had allegedly led the mutiny at RAF Kallang, began on 2 May 1946 under the presiding officer, Group Captain Astley, and Attwood pleaded not guilty to mutiny. The five witnesses for the prosecution contradicted each other, but the defence counsel suggested that Attwood should change his plea from not guilty to ‘condonation’ because the station commander had promised that no recrimination would occur. When several other witnesses confirmed this, the court found the plea of condonation had been proved and ordered Attwood released from custody, while the verdict was subject to the usual confirmation by the confirming authority, Air Commodore Waring, Air Officer Commanding 225 Group, Bangalore. Waring refused and demanded that the trial be re­opened. It was essentially rerun, and this time Cymbalist was found guilty and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude, and, although Park confirmed the sentence, Strachey wrote to Air Chief Marshal Slessor, the Air Council’s member for personnel, insisting that the sentence was ‘a disproportionate and indefensible sentence to impose in consideration of all the circumstances’ (quoted in Duncan, nd: 66). It seemed to little avail initially, though at least Cymbalist’s sentence was reduced to five years by the Air Council. But Air HQ at Bangalore, having failed to confirm Attwood’s condonation verdict, then failed to confirm his ‘guilty to mutiny’ verdict, and Attwood was released on 25 June. Meanwhile, John Saville, a regimental sergeant major in the artillery and member of the British Communist Party, organized a Defence Committee to get the other mutineers released that included the Amalgamated Engineering Union, the London Trades Council, and the Tobacco Workers’ Union as well as the National Council for Civil Liberties. Two of the mutineers imprisoned, Stone and Noble, were released on 3 July. That left Cymbalist who was eventually released in November 1947, after a huge protest movement gathered pace across the UK, even involving British soldiers in Germany. Of 50,000 RAF mutineers, only six were charged and all eventually released. As far as the RAF authorities were concerned, it had all been the result of ‘a small but well-­organised minority’ of ‘agitators’ or even ‘professional political agitators’. Elsewhere, Park continued to blame the station commanders for not keeping in touch with their men. Moreover, where parades were necessary they were to be policed by the RAF Regiment and military police units to ensure discipline. And if there were agitators they should ‘be dealt with

Mutinies after War  189 most severely and not shown any leniency by Unit Commanders or Courts Martial’ (quoted in Duncan, nd: 80). Station commanders, for their part, insisted most of the ­complaints were not under their control anyway and were either the responsibility of the government or of senior command in the RAF.

Conclusion Mutinies after war seemed to occur almost spontaneously in both 1919 and 1946 and were particularly prevalent amongst British and dominion forces amongst troops who had signed on for the duration of the conflict but not to continue the war elsewhere, and certainly not to wait in line as other, allegedly less deserving, troops went home first. Given the proliferation of mutinies at the time, the authorities clearly failed to learn from their own history: the third refrain. This inequity, rather than any greater political intent, seemed to be at the heart of many of the post-­war mutinies and confirms de Tocqueville’s claim: It is almost never when a state of things is the most detestable that it is smashed, but when, beginning to improve, it permits men to breathe, to reflect, to communicate their thoughts with each other, and to gauge by what they already have the extent of their rights and their grievances. The weight, although less heavy, seems then all the more un­bear­able.  (‘Letter to Pierre Freslon, 23 September 1853’, cited in Boesche, 2006: 103)

What is also interesting about the post-­war mutinies is how they cast a different light onto the first refrain: the role of leadership. In each case there are small groups of leaders that emerge to control and direct the discontent, but the overwhelming numbers involved in the dissent limit the ability of the authorities to coerce the mutineers back into line. In other words, where the issue at the heart of the mutiny is so clearly articulated and manifestly popular—‘send us home’—the leadership at the heart of the mutiny is very ephemeral in its utility. Nor should we assume that mutineers always held the moral high ground in their resistance to authority: as we have seen, overt racism amongst mutineers was as common as rhetorical support for nobler ideals of equality. What many of these mutineers did hold is the strategic high ground because on many of the occasions the authorities were simply unable to control events—again, a demonstration of the point that power is rooted in the compliance, or non-­compliance, of subordinates. It is not held by the superordinate as if it were a possession, and the rapidity of the spread of mutinies highlights the fragility of the enthrallment of the mutineers to sovereign power. The response of the authorities to the demobilization mutinies also echoes the first refrain of social construction that we met in chapter 1, for where the mutineers just wanted to go home, many of their opponents saw communist agitators behind every palm tree or barrack block. And if, as we shall see, the British authorities were unwilling or unable to crush the mutinies, as the fourth refrain suggests, this was not the case when the British Foreign Battalions replicated the struggles of their white comrades. It is also worth highlighting the default assumption that charismatic individual leaders were responsible for all the trouble, our seventh refrain, when this actually seems highly unlikely given the scale of the dissent. But intriguingly those more experienced in leading dissent

190  Mutiny and Leadership were well aware that scapegoats would be sought to slake the thirst for revenge on the part of the authorities. Ironically, if the authorities had been more aware of the antecedent issues embodied in the third refrain, they might have been better prepared. Every single previous major ­military campaign had ended with quarrelsome troops and sailors desperate to go home, but, since no one on the establishment side seemed to read any history, they all appeared shocked at the entirely predictable reappearance of this phenomena. Finally, and despite all the evidence to the contrary, it is clear that the default response of the authorities to many of these mutinies is not to look into the proverbial mirror to understand the causes of revolt but to assume that a normally quiescent and loyal group of  subordinates could only have mutinied because of the underhand murmurings of a ­handful of politicized radicals with other agendas. In effect, the sixth refrain of quotidian dissent was simply brushed aside. That search for individual scapegoats meant the real structural causes were often obscured, that the problems could be suppressed for another day, and that the organization could continue in its allotted direction, unperturbed and untroubled by the vague possibility that the poverty of their relational leadership might, just might, have been the cause of the problem in the first place.

5

Mutinies in Civil Wars English Civil Wars 1646–9 The English Civil Wars killed about 10 per cent of the English population, lasted between 1642 and 1651, and comprised three separate campaigns: 1642–6, 1648–9, and 1649–51. The first campaign began in January 1642 when Charles I (1625–49) attempted to arrest five leading members of Parliament for organizing the Grand Remonstrance in November the previous year—an attempt to warn him against an apparent slide towards Catholicism. In fact, the trouble had been brewing for decades after Charles’s failed but expensive mili­ tary ambitions against Spain, France, and later Scotland, his refusal to accept that Parliament should have a voice, and his decree that it would, instead, merely provide the funds for his adventures. After Charles forced Parliament to comply in 1626, the latter eventually responded with the Petition of Right (1628) that forbade such funds without ‘common consent by Act of Parliament’, but within a year Charles dissolved it and ruled alone for the next eleven years, financing his wars through Ship Money, a tax levied ori­ gin­al­ly just on coastal regions. By April 1640 a Scottish rebellion against the imposition of a new prayer book led to two so-­called Bishops Wars, and when Parliament refused to finance further war efforts, Charles recalled—and three weeks later closed—the ‘Short Parliament’. However, in the presence of a Scottish incursion as far south as Newcastle, and in the absence of alternative funds, Charles was forced back to recall the ‘Long Parliament’ which then began extending its own power, forbidding Ship Money, and pro­ hibiting the dissolution of Parliament without its agreement. In October 1641 a Catholic rebellion in Ireland, that appeared to have Royalist sympa­ thies, fanned the fears of the Protestant Parliament and hence the Grand Remonstrance. In reality, the revolt was an attempt by the dispossessed Irish Catholics to regain control over the land previously taken by English and Scottish Protestants and involved brutality on both sides. The London Militia was formed in response, and, since the country did not have a standing army—and neither the King nor Parliament trusted the other side with control over such a force—the militia was intended as an army raised for, paid, and led by parliamentary nominees. The King rejected the idea, but the bill was passed anyway as an ordinance (a bill without royal approval) and accompanied by the claim that parliament could act independently of the King in defence of the country. Charles responded with commissions of array that implied he could act independently of Parliament in defence of the country, and the scene was set for the civil war with both sides claiming legitimate rights to self-­defence. By April 1642 the opposing sides in England were coalescing into war camps, and, when Charles was refused entry to Hull with its substantial armoury, the die was cast. Parliament raised an army in July, officially ‘for the safety of the King’s person, defence of both Houses of Parliament . . . and preserving of the true religion, the laws, liberty and peace of the kingdom’ (quoted in Hughes, 2017: 8), and Charles responded by raising his Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0006

192  Mutiny and Leadership standard—and essentially declaring war—in Nottingham on 22 August 1642. Conflicts were not restricted to opposing armies but increasingly occurred between citizens and soldiers as the costs of billeting and free quarter of the latter were borne by the former, and the collection of taxation became ever more difficult (Morrill,  1972: 56). Much of the money for the parliamentary forces was derived from county committees, established in late 1643 by Parliament, to raise local taxes, often on a weekly basis. And while the colleges of Oxford University, the royal HQ, were persuaded to give up their silver plate to fund the King, it was one of Cromwell’s first jobs to prevent a second wagon train of silver leaving Cambridge for Oxford in 1642. Thus local funding became both essential to the Parliamentary side and increasingly difficult to obtain. Cromwell wrote to the Mayor of Colchester in 1643: ‘I beseech you, hasten the supply to us; forget not money; I press not hard, though I do so need that I assure you, the foot and dragooners are ready to mutiny’ (quoted in Bennett, 2017: 52). After the indecisive Battle of Edgehill in October 1642, Parliament allied itself with the Scottish Covenanters by signing the Solemn League and Covenant on 25 September 1643, which effectively sealed Charles’s fate by combining the Parliamentary and Scottish armies. In return for their support, the Scots wanted a joint Presbyterian church, and they duly marched south into England in January 1644, from which point all English Parliamentary soldiers were required to sign the Covenant. The two armies then defeated the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor in July 1644, but it was the Battle of Naseby in June 1645 that saw the first—and decisive—entry of the Parliament’s New Model Army (NMA), and on 5 May the following year the King surrendered, first to the Scottish army, then to Parliament, and then to the NMA. The NMA had been formed in January 1645 as the only Parliamentary army designed to operate away from its regional base and indeed anywhere in Britain, and it was com­ posed of full-­time professional soldiers, not part-­time militia. It was formed by Parliament in frustration at the failure of the extant Parliamentary armies to bring the war to an end, especially after the second Battle of Newbury, when the King would have been defeated had the Earls of Manchester and Essex been more interested in victory over the King than peace with him. It was this that led to the Self-­Denying Ordnance that forbade Members of Parliament from also holding military office (except Cromwell). The NMA was recruited primarily from those with strong Puritan beliefs and remained the most disciplined of all armies at this time. The first mutinies occurred in 1646 at the most dangerous point for armies, as peace descended across the country, but the Parliamentary armies could not be disbanded with­ out the payment of arrears. Mutinies in twenty-­two English and several Welsh counties burst upon the scene, and Parliament raided Royalist sources to pay what they could, but it was never enough and discontent festered, especially in the increasingly indisciplined Western Army of Sir Edward Massie, a Presbyterian and a thorn in the side of Cromwell, the New Model Army, and the Independent majority in the Commons. Such indiscipline—on both sides of the war—was also a reason for the rise of the Clubmen: locally raised militias intent on protecting the locality from armies of either side. In Cheshire, troops systematically plundered villages (those loyal to Parliament and those loyal to the King) for food and clothes, and little attempt seems to have been made by their officers to restrain them, ‘preferring to ensure orderly pillage than face a mutiny from their hungry, ill-­clad troops’ (Morrill, 1972: 57). The commander of Parliamentary

Mutinies in Civil Wars  193 forces in Cheshire, Sir William Brereton, seldom intervened or disciplined those involved, primarily because the discontent was so widespread and because the cause was Parliament’s failure to pay his troops. A mutiny, as opposed to general lawlessness, did occur when troops from Macclesfield refused to join the siege of Chester, and Brereton’s own forces refused the same when he was absent in London to attend to the Self-­Denying Ordinance. Ironically, the indiscipline even served as an excuse for mutiny, thus Colonel Duckenfield’s troops refused to advance to Nantwich because they feared their own houses would be raided whilst they were away, so they disbanded themselves. Other soldiers demanded the County Committees that dealt with the sequestering of Royalist estates (the Sequestration Committee), or allowed Royalists back onto their land if they paid a fine and promised not to take up arms for the King (the Compounding with Delinquents Committee), pay them what they constantly promised but had never delivered. And on 14 July 1646, two of these committee officials were kidnapped by soldiers garrisoned at Nantwich and held to ransom. They were only released with a promise of an armistice for the perpetrators and the sharing of the con­ tents of a chest of money (Morrill, 1972: 58–61). By the winter of 1646, Nantwich was de-­garrisoned and paid off by Parliament, leaving Chester as the main garrison in the county. In turn, that mutinied in July 1648 after an alleged £3,000 that was available in the city was apparently transferred to Ireland. The troops responded by marching to Nantwich and capturing Colonel Massey, the governor of the city, two tax officials, and eleven other prisoners, marching them back to Chester and keeping them under lock and key until their demands—for £4,000 pounds and an agreement to quarter the soldiers better in the city. Parliament dithered and it was the local elite that secured the funds for the release of the prisoners, four weeks later. As Morrill (1972: 63) concludes, although the soldiers had self-­evidently organized them­ selves to mutiny—and succeeded—these were only local issues, resolved at the local level. Eleven months later, in June 1647, an increasingly disgruntled and unpaid NMA occu­ pied London and declared it would not disband until its own grievances, and those of ‘the people’, were settled. With the country still in turmoil and the victorious NMA still mo­bil­ ized, the arrears of the army were several times its annual budget, and one way of diverting attention and securing land for soldiers was by sending the army to Ireland to bolster the anti-­Royalist campaign there. Indeed, so great were the arrears and the discontent that spread from the lack of pay that dissent spread throughout the NMA, and the Levellers, a radical political movement, rose to prominence within the ranks. These minor mutinies amongst the provincial armies and general indiscipline persisted through England and Wales, almost always involving arrears of pay but never concerned with the political structure of the state. Violence and murder were not unknown in these disturbances, and several soldiers involved were put on trial in Leicestershire and in Kent in 1647, though the largest number of complaints from civilians occurred in the summer of 1646 against the Western Army of Massie, when several different units refused orders and marched across county borders to seek better conditions. Even Dublin witnessed a mutiny in July 1647, when Colonel Kinaston’s company attacked their own officers, and the mutineers were only talked out of more serious assaults by the governor of Dublin, Michael Jones. In York, the Northern Association’s Major-­ General Poyntz—another Presbyterian and originally born to minor gentry in Reigate before becoming a mercenary and then a Turkish slave—was captured by his own soldiers, possibly under the influence

194  Mutiny and Leadership of agitators from the NMA. He was imprisoned in Pontefract as the agitators made further progress in the area. In fact, one of Poyntz’s problems was that neither Fairfax nor any other senior leader in the NMA made any attempt to rescue him, and he was eventually taken to Reading, where he was released by Fairfax but relieved of his military position. Subsequently, the Northern Army declared itself aligned to the NMA. This was one of three significant mutinies in Yorkshire, an area impoverished by war. As with almost all these mutinies, few or no officers were involved, and almost all were locally organized and resolved. Furthermore, there was little attempt at first to link the discontent to a wider political context; that was to come through the NMA and not really until June 1647, when, at a rendezvous near Newmarket on 4th June, two representatives of the other ranks— called Agitators—and two officers from each regiment agreed to form the Army Council and issued ‘A Solemne Engagement of the Army’.1 The importance of the original Army Council was twofold: first, and for the first time, it embodied delegates from the other ranks into the senior decision-­making group at the head of the army; and second, it sep­ar­ ated the army from Parliament—from then on the army was not subject to parliamentary oversight. As Morrill (1972: 68) suggests, ‘only in the New Model Army did personal, immediate, objectives become underpinned by an ideology that saw that grievances were the inevitable result of a corrupt and unconstitutional political system’. Between 28 October and 1 November 1647 the democratic impulse in the NMA saw the Council of the Army, including representatives from the rank and file, and the senior leadership, including Cromwell and Ireton, meet in Putney Church to debate the future settlement of the kingdom. The Levellers proposed their manifesto, the Agreement of the People, as a way forward, and it demanded liberty of conscience, freedom from conscrip­ tion, general amnesty for all on both sides, equality before the law, and biennial parlia­ ments to safeguard the people, selected on the basis of representing the people not property. It made no comment about the monarchy. The army leadership of Cromwell and Ireton insisted that their much more conserva­ tive Heads of Proposals (Royalists banned from office for five years, religious tolerance, biennial parliaments, parliament in control of the state administration, army, and navy for ten years, bishops retained but their political power reduced) was the best solution. Ireton, in particular, was adamant that property rights was the only appropriate way to organize the franchise, and Wildman, Petty, Rainborowe, and Sexby were equally adamant that any freeborn English man (but not servants or beggars) had the same rights. The meeting then voted, and only three voted against the radical line (we can assume Cromwell and Ireton were amongst those). On 1st November this committee, tasked with generating a solution to the stand-­off between the King and Parliament, seemed to be edging towards a com­ prom­ise that would see the electorate expanded to include all Parliamentary soldiers, financial supporters of the Parliamentary side, and ‘as much enlargement to common free­ dom as may be’ (quoted in de Krey, 2017: 156). Self-­evidently this excluded all women. Charles, at this stage, would continue to be King and share power with a Council of State, and the nobility would continue in a separate House. All of this was to be decided by the sitting Parliament—the original focus of the radicals’ complaints—and led Wildman to

1  The Army Council with its delegate structure was abolished by Cromwell and replaced first with an officer-­ only (Army) Council of Officers and then the Council of State in 1653.

Mutinies in Civil Wars  195 insist: ‘The difference is as wide as ever, because the interest of the King and the lords had again taken precedence over the interest of the people’ (quoted in de Krey, 2017: 156). The radical demands of the Levellers soon spread into the ranks of the army, and Cromwell worried that the engagement of the senior leadership with radical subordinates was exacerbating, rather than reducing, discontent. De Krey suggests that the intransi­ gence of the radicals forced their supporters in the army to either accept the compromises suggested by Ireton and Cromwell or support the Agreement in totality, and on 8 November 1647 the army leadership terminated the meeting, much to the anger of the radicals. Cromwell demanded that everyone returned to their regiments, sweetened with Fairfax’s promise to secure six weeks’ extra pay and supported by Colonel Rainborowe (the most senior officer who sympathized with the Levellers), who suggested the army should hold a mass rendezvous to allow the rank and file to endorse the settlement. Fairfax countered by authorizing three separate rendezvous, which the radicals (rightly as it turned out) sus­ pected would allow him to isolate radical regiments and minimize the chance of solidarity with the Levellers. To that end, Fairfax insisted that every soldier signed a personal dec­lar­ ation of loyalty to him and the Army Council, effectively severing any ties between the soldiers and Parliament. Most agreed to sign because the Army Council had persuaded them that failure to sign would allow Parliament to renege on its promise to provide the back pay they were all owed, but the oath now provided the Army Council with a device to enforce loyalty. To add to this combustible context, Charles—on hearing from Putney what he regarded as a direct threat to the monarchy and himself (including an alleged assassination con­ spiracy)—escaped from Hampton Court Palace on 12 November, where he had been detained for eighteen months after he had surrendered to the Scots in May 1646. He fled to the Isle of Wight, arriving on 22 November 1647. There he hoped to reorganize his forces with the help of the Governor, Robert Hammond, but instead Hammond put him under house arrest at Carisbrooke Castle. Now both the Scottish and Irish Royalist armies threatened further incursions, and Cromwell decided to lead the NMA against what he regarded as the greatest threat to the new state: Ireland and its Royalist sympathizers. Many members of the NMA were less interested in such an adventure: their current pay had begun to return to normality in the last year, but many were still owed money from as far back as 1642. Moreover, many of those recent recruits that were not owed back pay had been recruited from the London area, and they were enthused by the new political ideas emanating from the Levellers. The first of three authorized mass rendezvous to discuss the Putney conclusions—or just process the oath of allegiance for seven regiments, depending on which side of the debate you were on—occurred at Corkbush Field, near Ware in Hertfordshire, on 15 November 1647. But the army radicals also planned to discuss their own manifesto, The Case of the Army Truly Stated, and had invited militant London weavers to join them. Colonel Rainborowe tried to give General Fairfax a copy of the Agreement of the People, but it was refused, and Major Scott was one of several officers who refused to sign the oath and encouraged his soldiers to do the same. At this point, two unexpected regiments (Colonel Thomas Harrison’s Regiment of Horse and Colonel Robert Lilburne’s [brother of the civilian radical John Lilburne] Regiment of Foot) arrived with copies of the Agreement of the People and wearing in their hatbands the Leveller motto: ‘England’s Freedom, Soldiers’ Rights’. Fairfax persuaded Harrison’s regiment to sign, but Robert Lilburne’s

196  Mutiny and Leadership regiment stoned the general, prompting Cromwell and a few of his officers to draw their swords, ride into the regiment, and arrest eight of the ringleaders who were promptly court-­martialled and found guilty, with three sentenced to death. As ever, one scapegoat was required from the three, and after lots were cast Private Richard Arnold was immedi­ ately shot.2 Several dissenters were then charged with sedition and appeared before Parliament or the courts but escaped further sanction. Yet the discontent rumbled on, and Charles continued to conspire against his enemies: he tried to escape twice, and a month after the failed mutiny at Corkbush, in December 1647, he rejected the settlement offered by Parliament. The House of Commons responded by terminating all negotiations in a ‘Vote of No Addresses’ on 11 February 1648, and in the face of more radical calls to impeach the King, supported by Fairfax and Cromwell, the King signed the ‘Engagement with the Scots’ that promised to bring Presbyterianism to England—at the point of Scottish pikes—in exchange for supporting him. One of the first acts of the Army Council was to call for Parliament to suspend eleven MPs whom it accused of plotting to destabilize the kingdom, and Parliament only acceded after some of the accused were allowed to flee abroad to prepare their defence. They were transported by the English navy, under Vice-­Admiral Batten’s orders, to France and Holland, much to the annoyance of the radical press who demanded a new navy board. In September 1647, several senior officers were dismissed and the new navy board, with Cromwell’s approval, appointed Rainborowe to the committee for the Admiralty, and then made him Vice-­Admiral in place of Batten (himself in secret negotiations with the King). As previous captain of the Happy Entrance, Rainborowe was no stranger to the sea and had already captained the Swallow under Vice-­Admiral Batten before joining the NMA where he first supported, then clashed with, Cromwell. Cromwell had declined to make Rainborowe a Vice-­Admiral in November 1647 with a remit to keep the King on the Isle of Wight, but by late December both officers were reconciled. In January 1648, the Independent (radical) faction in Parliament dismissed the Solemn League and Covenant, effectively dissolving the alliance with the Scots, and, despite opposition from the Lords, Rainborowe was duly commissioned (back) in the navy in April 1648, after the King’s Summer Fleet was renamed the Parliament’s Ships, without reference to the King. The navy, traditionally a bastion of Royalist sympathy, was now linked to the unrest in Kent, and several ships were taken by mutinous crews in protest against Parliament in general and the appointment of Rainborowe in particular.3 On 26 May 1648 five ships (including Rainborowe’s own flagship the Constant Reformation) mutinied, declared for the King, and openly sided with the Kentish rebels who had taken possession of several towns, including Rochester, Sittingbourne, Faversham, and Sandwich, and laid siege to Dover Castle. Samuel Kem, Batten’s own chaplain and a fervent Royalist, then boarded Rainborowe’s ship while the latter was at Deal Castle and helped foment the mutiny. The 2  Cromwell was ruthless in the application of military law but seldom strayed beyond it—even if many of his compatriots did. In Ireland, long held to be Cromwell’s moral collapse, there is scant evidence that he ordered or engaged in the mass execution of non-­combatants, though he was rigorous in executing those who refused his offer of surrender (in line with the rules of war at the time) and also clear that any soldier who broke Cromwell’s own rules for proper conduct against Irish or Catholic civilians would feel his wrath. En route to Drogheda in 1649, Cromwell had two of his own soldiers hanged after they stole chickens from an Irish woman—in direct contravention of his orders that his soldiers must pay for all goods (Reilly, 2000: 56). 3 The navy had mutinied in 1628 over poor pay, clothing, and food in both Plymouth and Portsmouth (Coats, 2011b: 42).

Mutinies in Civil Wars  197 mutineers issued a ‘Declaration of the Navy’ on 28 May which spoke of their support for the King and Parliament. But the mutiny was most vigorously against the army (and their supporters amongst the Independents in Parliament) who had ‘prevailed upon the renam­ ing of the navy without the King’s hand, had placed several landsmen into navy positions, and had appointed Colonel Rainsborrough4 [whose] insufferable pride, Ignorance, and insolency . . . alienates the hearts of the Seamen’ (quoted in Kennedy,  1962: 253). When Rainborowe arrived back with his wife and family, the mutineers refused to allow him on board, and he was sent back to London to give an account of their grievances. Even the appearance of Warwick failed to persuade the mutineers to change their minds, and the mutiny spread to the crews of ten ships, who threatened to blockade London until the Solemn League and Covenant was honoured. They also insisted that if Rainborowe was so intent on dispensing with the King then they could not support a man who, in the words of Batten (who had then joined the mutiny), ‘openly professed himself to be a leveller’ (quoted in Kennedy,  1962: 253). But after Fairfax led the NMA to storm Maidstone on 1 June, and the rest of the Kentish rebels surrendered at Canterbury, it was too late: the mutineers had no money, no supplies, and not enough support, and without the support of the Kentish forces the mutiny was doomed. The mutinous fleet then slipped away to Helvoetsluys in Holland, where it was met by Prince Charles (the future Charles II) who, with support from Prince William of Orange and with Prince Rupert in command, sailed for East Anglia on 17 July. It arrived on 22 July hoping to ignite a revolt against Parliament, promising an end to free quarter by the army and the defence of property rights. Prince Charles wrote to the Lord Mayor of London asking for £20,000 to equip the fleet or else he would be unable to protect trade—a clear threat that fell on deaf ears as the rest of the Parliamentary fleet in Portsmouth remained loyal to Warwick. Moreover, until then the Royalist fleet had relied on privateering to sub­ sidize its activities, and that was clearly seen by merchants as more of a threat to their livelihood than the taxes imposed by Parliament. The Prince even tried the same tactic with the Netherlands, promising to keep their trade flowing—if they paid the equivalent of protection money. With Batten now in charge of the Royalist fleet, and seemingly more intent on privateering than seeking out and destroying Warwick’s Parliamentary fleet, the initial optimism of the Royalists melted away, as did their supplies. By the beginning of September 1648 the Royalist fleet no longer had a Scottish base to rely on, and instead the Prince decided to escape back to Helvoetsluys, only to face a mutiny of his own as his crew decided to fight Warwick’s fleet instead of escaping. Frightened that the mutineers might offer the Prince to Warwick rather than fight him, the Prince demanded that all the officers and crew promise ‘not to deliver up his highness’ (quoted in Lea-­O’Mahoney, 2011: 214). They made the promise, confident that Warwick’s ships would come over to their side once they met up. When they did meet the Parliamentary fleet retreated and avoided engaging the Royalists for several days before the weather deteriorated, and the Prince, recognizing their supplies would only last for four more days, ordered his fleet to return to Helvoetsluys where it remained under the control of Prince Rupert until the spring of 1649. Under the watchful eye of Warwick’s fleet, and in the absence of pay or food, the Royalist sailors deserted en masse to the

4  Several version of this surname were used at the time.

198  Mutiny and Leadership Parliamentary side. In the end Rupert even had artillery set up on land to fire upon his own ships should they choose to desert, but eventually they did, leaving the royalist side bereft of any significance naval support (Lea-­O’Mahoney, 2011: 217–19). Back on land, when Charles’s Scottish army entered England, the Second Civil War erupted, and Cromwell moved the NMA north and defeated the Scots’ army at Preston in August 1648. By September the Parliamentary commissioners met the King in Newport on the Isle of Wight to discuss peace terms. The response from the Levellers, and the increasingly radicalized army, was a series of petitions demanding that the King and Lords be removed from all future governance systems. In the following month, ten NMA regi­ ments (including Ireton’s own regiment) sent petitions to Parliament decrying the likely agreement with the King and demanding that ‘all ‘criminal persons’ be brought to justice. Ireton met John Lilburne and other Leveller leaders to try to thrash out a common pos­ ition; whilst they were meeting on 29 October, news emerged that Col. Rainborowe had been murdered by Royalists in Doncaster. His funeral in London, on 14 November, 1648, was one of the largest ever witnessed, in a procession of sea-­green (from then on the col­ ours of the Levellers to mark Rainborowe’s naval heritage). Still the majority in Parliament sought a negotiated settlement with the King, and, despite Fairfax’s equivocal position, Cromwell and Ireton—with general support of the rank and file—decided to move Charles to London. After a meeting of the General Council on 18 November, they issued The Remonstrance of General Fairfax and the Council of Officers. This was probably written by Ireton but, in essence, it concluded that the army should abandon negotiations with the King and bring him to trial as an enemy of the people. It concluded salus populi suprema lex—the safety of the people is the supreme law—and, since divine intervention had defeated the King twice, the King would be brought to account because he had broken his sacred covenant with the people and placed himself above the law. In place of the current monarchy there were to be annual or ­bi-­annual parliaments (once the current Parliament had decided to dissolve itself), and the Commons had authority over both the King (who might be elected) and the Lords. After a suggestion by John Lilburne, a Committee of Sixteen (four MPs acceptable to the army, four officers (including Ireton), four civilian ‘Independents’, and four Levellers (Lilburne, Wildman, Walwyn, and Petty) met on 28 November to consider the Remonstrance and turn it into a wider agreement. However, Parliament refused to debate the Remonstrance, and on 6 December 1648 Colonel Thomas Pride, accompanied by his own Regiment of Foot and Colonel Rich’s cavalry regiment, led a purge of Parliament of any remaining Royalist sympathizers, leaving the so-­called Rump Parliament. The King himself was then imprisoned in London—under the authority of the army. Once it became clear that Ireton was unimpressed by the Levellers’ adamant defence of liberty of con­ science, and insistent that such liberty only pertained to Christian—but not Catholic— conscience, Lilburne withdrew from the Committee of Sixteen and published what came to be known as the Second Agreement. Meanwhile the new draft Agreement was put before the Rump Parliament on 20 January 1649. While the Levellers insisted that their Second Agreement be put to the people for agreement, the army and Parliament insisted that the Rump Parliament was the legitimate authority—on behalf of the people—and the Draft of the Agreement of the People was duly put to the vote. In fact, both the Leveller’s Second Agreement and the Rump’s Agreement of the People had much in common: both extended the franchise to male housekeepers above the age of 20 who were not beggars or servants,

Mutinies in Civil Wars  199 and neither document mentioned the monarchy or the House of Lords, but all Royalists were to be excluded from standing for (a reformed) Parliament for fourteen years. Religious toleration was extended to all Christians—except those of the Catholic Church— and the law was deemed not to operate retrospectively, something the senior officers were concerned about given the upcoming trial of the King. There were many other issues to resolve, especially the Levellers’ demand for local governance, but the trial of the King intervened in the negotiations, and on 30 January 1649, after a trial that Charles consist­ ently refused to recognize as legitimate, he was executed at Whitehall, and the monarchy and the House of Lords were both abolished. The country, or the Commonwealth as the republic was named in May 1649, was both shocked and in a shocking condition: years of war, drastic levels of taxation, a succession of poor harvests, and interrupted trade provided for a febrile environment, ripe for further convulsions, and by April the Diggers, driven by Gerrard Winstanley’s communist ideals, had begun taking over common land in Surrey. Removing the monarchy and replacing it with the new forty-­person Council of State (including Cromwell, Fairfax, and also the radical republican Henry Marten, but not Ireton) (de Krey, 2017: 211) placed England and Wales effectively under a military government—but it was never going to satisfy the Levellers. John Lilburne, whilst supporting the principle of the new Commonwealth, tried once more to engage the people, rather than just the army, in establishing a new society—in effect to rejuvenate the Agreement of the People. Lilburne even suggested the Rump Parliament continue sitting until a new one was elected, so concerned was he that the Council of State was a military dictatorship in waiting. Disgruntled soldiers, who had con­ cerns of their own beyond any support for the Levellers, had already petitioned the Council of State for redress of their grievances in February 1649. The Council’s response, fearing a revival of the dissent that had degenerated into the Ware mutiny in November 1647, insisted that all future petitions be approved by regimental officers first and not be circulated amongst other regiments (contrary to the demands of the Levellers for unre­ stricted freedom to petition). On 1 March 1649, Lilburne and Overton wrote to Fairfax demanding their ‘birthright’ to petition, and in response Fairfax demanded that all members of the Council deny the demand in public; only one, Captain-­Lieutenant Richard Bray, refused, and he was dis­ missed from both the Council and his regiment. The Levellers responded with a flurry of writing and petitions demanding an end to the military dictatorship and a new system for governing the NMA with elected regimental representatives. The Council of State—recog­ nizing that the execution of the King had divided the country yet further—was never going to ask the same people to show support for the new arrangements, and, facing en­emies on all sides and recognizing that the Levellers were increasingly critical of the line taken by the NMA leadership, Cromwell had Lilburne and his compatriots, Walwyn, Overton, and Thomas Prince, arrested and incarcerated in the Tower of London on 28 March 1649, charged with organizing ‘meetings . . . dangerous and prejudicial to the safety of the Commonwealth’ (quoted in de Krey, 2017: 234). After all, despite Lilburne promis­ ing to support Cromwell ‘to the last drop of my heart blood’ on 3 August 1648 in a letter written from the Tower of London, Walwyn had warned other Levellers that ‘All the quar­ rel we have at this day . . . is no other than . . . a pulling down of one tyrant, to set up another,

200  Mutiny and Leadership and instead of liberty, heaping upon ourselves a greater slavery than that we have fought against’ (quoted in de Krey, 2017: 191–2). Cromwell was as exasperated with the Levellers as they were with him, and he said at the Council of State meeting that authorized the arrests: ‘I tell you sir, you have no other way to deal with these men but to break them or they will break you’ (quoted in Robbins, 2003: 128).5 The response of Leveller supporters in London was instantaneous, with 10,000 signing a petition for their release, as the imprisoned Levellers began writing furious responses and warning of impending disaster if the Council of State continued to rule unrestrained by the people. On 23 April, a 10,000-­signature petition from London Women was submitted to parliament, demanding ‘a very equal share and interest with men in this Commonwealth’ and reminding the commons that women had suffered more than most in the civil war and once helped to deliver England from the Danes. Meanwhile, Overton encouraged the soldiers of the NMA to refuse to go to Ireland or disband, and he demanded a new Council of State made up of elected representatives from each regiment, though most of the Leveller leaders preferred to negotiate with Cromwell and Ireton over a new Agreement. On the same day as the women’s petition, another one surfaced aimed directly at encouraging Col. John Hewson’s Regiment of Foot to join the Levellers in their quest to reform Parliament and to refuse to embark for Ireland. About 300 men (roughly a third) of Hewson’s Regiment of Foot did indeed refuse to embark for Ireland and also insisted on the Levellers’ programme being enacted. The regiment was one of the original twelve infantry regiments of the NMA, and their place on the Irish campaign was drawn by lot, not experience. But their distrust of their leaders proved too much, and the 300 were instantly dismissed from service, their places filled from other regiments, and the unit shipped to Ireland in July that same year. That was just in time to participate in the brutal assault upon Drogheda in August 1649 that reflected the bitter hatred between Protestants and Catholics, manifest in massacres across Europe when terms of surrender were refused in the Thirty Years War (Wilson, 2010). Whalley’s Regiment, this time in Bishopgate, London, did likewise, and, led by Trooper Robert Lockyer, they demanded back pay and implementation of the Levellers’ pro­ gramme. They were ordered out of London but refused and only surrendered after a per­ sonal appeal from Fairfax and Cromwell. Fifteen troopers were court-­martialled, and six were found guilty and sentenced to death. Cromwell sought leniency but he was ­over-­ruled by Fairfax—still the Commanding Officer of the NMA—who insisted on a symbolic

5  Ironically it had been Cromwell who had saved Lilburne twice before: once when Cromwell used his maiden speech in the House of Commons to successfully argue for Lilburne’s release from prison in 1640 as part of the deal with Charles I over war funding; and a second time in 1642, when Lilburne (then a soldier in the Parliamentary Army) was captured by Prince Rupert at Brentford, taken to Oxford, Charles’s Royalist HQ, and, along with other Parliamentary prisoners, sentenced to death for treason (in effect fighting for the wrong side). When Cromwell discovered Charles’s intentions he got Parliament to agree to execute an equivalent number of Royalist POWs if Charles carried out the executions. Lilburne’s heavily pregnant wife then rode to Oxford with Cromwell’s threat and Lilburne was subsequently swapped for a Royalist POW. Lilburne was subsequently re­arrest­ed by Parliament after he libelled the leaders of the Presbyterian faction for their tepid response to Charles’ actions, and he was then successfully defended by John Cooke, soon to become the first Solicitor General of the English Commonwealth, who led the prosecution of Charles 1, and John Bradshaw, President of the High Court of Justice at the same trial. These three (Lilburne, Cooke, and Bradshaw) successfully argued for the right not to incriminate oneself under oath (the basis of the 5th Amendment in the US Constitution) (Robertson, 2018: 62).

Mutinies in Civil Wars  201 scapegoat: Trooper Robert Lockyer was duly shot by firing squad in front of St Paul’s cathedral, and his funeral (echoing that of Colonel Thomas Rainborowe who was as­sas­sin­ ated in 1648) was a huge (3,000–5,000 mourners) but orderly demonstration of Leveller supporters in their colours of sea-­green ribbon, carrying bunches of rosemary. The imprisoned Levellers responded with The Agreement of the Free People of England that decried the use of martial force against soldiers of the NMA and insisted that their intention was not to overthrow the regime but to return it to its true purpose and reach a settlement that had political accountability at the heart of the new democratic institutions: annual parliaments voted for by all freemen, and a Committee of Representatives to replace the Council of State and organize the transition. The following month, on 5 May 1649, a second petition was submitted by women wear­ ing the now traditional sea-­green colours, entitled the Humble Petition of divers w ­ ell-­affected Women, and it addressed Levellers as ‘friends’ and, referring to Robert Lockyer’s execution, insisted ‘slay one, slay all’. Even London apprentices began to elect agitators from each ward to represent their interests, and, as the Leveller pressure inexorably mounted on the regime, the Rump Parliament, with Cromwell’s support, began discussing measures to elect a new representative body and to pay the NMA’s arrears of pay, but dissent was already manifest in the West of England and Cromwell left London to confront it. The most serious mutinies broke out first at Salisbury, involving Colonel Adrian Scrope’s (another regicide who was subsequently hanged, drawn, and quartered for trea­ son against the late King in October 1660) Regiment of Horse. Once again, drawn by lot for Ireland, the regiment refused to go and demanded the restoration of the representative Council of Agitators; dissent also spread to Ireton’s Regiment of Horse in Bristol and Harrison’s Regiment of Foot in Oxford. Scrope’s and Ireton’s regiments seem to have decided to organize a rendezvous at Old Sarum on 11 May, while a second group from Oxford, led by William Thomson, made for Banbury on 6 May. Neither group initially expressed overt support for the Levellers as the reason for their action, and both suggested that arrears of pay and uncertainty about the conditions of the Irish campaign were more important. However, the Unanimous Declaration of Scrope’s and Ireton’s mutineers did demand a new General Council be formed with representatives from each regiment, as well as a promise not to disband until their other grievances (primarily pay) had been set­ tled and the country’s freedom secured. Yet no mention was made of the various Leveller demands from new governance systems beyond the General Council and, as for Ireland, Cornet Henry Denne, a radical leader in Scrope’s regiment, promised that they would be ‘in the van for Ireland’ once their demands had been met. Lilburne’s response was to deny that he either had called for a revolt by the troops or was supportive of their action. Thompson’s rather smaller group of Oxford mutineers, however, were much more sympa­ thetic to the ideals of the Levellers, though they made no mention of Ireland or arrears. In effect, and this is not uncommon, the mutineers ranged across a whole gamut of political sympathies and were as differentiated in their justifications as any other group of soldiers. Indeed, we seldom get to understand what most of the mutineers thought, and instead we merely hear what their leaders said. Thompson’s mutineers were confronted near Banbury on 9 May and most surrendered to Col. John Reynold’s regiment. In response to the general unrest in the NMA, having sent Pride’s regiment to secure the Leveller prisoners in the Tower in London, Fairfax and Cromwell then assembled two loyal Regiments of Horse and three of Foot, and, after they were promised that Parliament

202  Mutiny and Leadership would look after their concerns, they were marched towards Salisbury to put down the mutiny, but not before Cromwell explained what was about to happen and why: He was resolved to live and die with them, and that as he had often engaged with them against the common enemy of this nation, so he resolved to persist therein, against those revolters which are now called by the name of ‘Levellers’ not doubting that they would as one man unite, and with unanimous spirit follow him, for the subduing of them, and bringing the chief ring-­leaders thereof to exemplary punishment. (quoted in Robbins, 2003: 129)

Cromwell and Fairfax set off in pursuit of the mutineers with assurances that the sale of Royalist lands would provide the funds for the full payment of arrears and that the Rump Parliament would establish a fair and representative new parliament. By 12 May some of Scrope’s mutineers had accepted Fairfax’s assurances and left the rebel camp while negoti­ ations proceeded through Major Francis White (a political radical yet also a loyal officer to Fairfax), but these stalled when the rebel agitators demanded a reconstruction of the General Council to include representatives from each regiment. As the negotiations con­ tinued, mutineers from Harrison, Scrope, and Ireton’s regiments met in Burford, and Fairfax interpreted this as an act of deception, and, covering forty-­five miles in one day, Fairfax and Cromwell reached Burford on the evening of 14/15 May 1649. They promptly rode into the town where, after a brief exchange of fire, around 300–400 mutineers were surrounded and imprisoned in the church, while the remaining 800 drifted away home. On the morning of 15 May, and while Major White and Cornet Henry Dunne were work­ ing on a draft agreement to end the mutiny without bloodshed, Cornet (2nd lieutenant) Denne and Cornet Thompson (the brother of Thompson who had led the Banbury mutiny) and two corporals (Perkins and Church) were court-­martialled and sentenced to death, and three of the four were shot against the walls of the church and buried in the churchyard (see Figure 5.1) (Cornet Denne was pardoned at the last moment after express­ ing remorse).6 The civil war mutinies, involving around 2,500 soldiers and spreading as far as Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight, were over (de Krey, 2017: 245–53). This was the turning point for the new regime: it was going to be either a democratic republic rooted in the Agreement of the People or a military republic under Cromwell, and it turned out to be the latter. As Rees (2018: 4) suggests, The Levellers revolted against this turn of events in word and deed. The title of Lilburne’s pamphlet England’s New Chaines Discovered was a four word summary of their view. Their supporters in the army mutinied and were defeated by forces under Cromwell, at Bishopgate in London, at Burford and in the Oxford Garrison. That broke the Levellers as an effective and coherent organization.

6  The Banbury mutiny leader, Thompson, was killed in an exchange of fire at Wellingborough. On 8 September a further mutiny occurred within the Oxford garrison, led by Sergeant Radman who took over New College. When the college was overrun, Radman escaped and two privates (Biggs and Piggen) were executed for mutiny in Gloucester Green, Oxford (See Figure 5.1) (Moody, 1996: 33–4).

Mutinies in Civil Wars  203

Figure 5.1  Burford Mutiny 1649, Plaque, Burford Church and Oxford Mutiny 1649, Plaque, Gloucester Green, Oxford (Author’s Collection)

de Krey (2017: 252–3) is more sceptical that the mutinies were strongly inspired by dedi­ cated Levellers and much more confident that the regime chose to label the mutineers as Levellers as a way of maintaining the figment of loyalty from the NMA to their military leaders. It also enabled them to explain the mutinies as the result of Leveller ‘seduction’ and ‘deceit’ who had intended to despoil the country with atheism, to abolish both private property and the natural hierarchy. That none of these claims were true was irrelevant; the mutinies were defeated and the Levellers were on the defensive, configured by the regime

204  Mutiny and Leadership not as the embodiment of popular support for the Commonwealth but as enemies of the people. This was not the end of the Levellers; they disappeared from political discourse for hundreds of years, but many of their ideas and idealism returned 300 years later.

Krondstadt 1921 If the Levellers were the defeated radical rebels of the English Civil War, the sailors of the Krondstadt garrison were the equivalent for the Russian Civil War. On 7 March 1921, troops loyal to the Bolshevik Government attacked mutinying sailors of the Soviet Baltic Fleet at Krondstadt, after the latter had issued an ultimatum to the government demand­ ing the return of the pre-­war elected Soviets, without Bolshevik control over the election or the result. Ten days later, on 17 March, the Bolsheviks occupied the city having taken about 10,000 fatalities; the defenders sustained between 500 and 1,500 deaths. Like the mutineers at Burford and Oxford, the Krondstadt mutineers rebelled against their erst­ while sympathetic military hierarchy: the Red Army and the Bolshevik Government. But why? The first overarching frame for the Bolshevik authorities was to understand the cause of the mutiny: was it an externally funded and led, dangerous White counter-­revolution or the inchoate but legitimate concerns of loyal sailors in the Red Fleet? The naval base at Krondstadt guarded the entrance to Petrograd—the route most likely to be used by White Counter-­Revolutionaries and their Western Allies, especially if the mutiny could hold out until the ice broke up and supplies could be ferried in, just as the Bolshevik army assault would switch from ice-­borne troops to a naval assault. The second frame for Bolshevik understanding of Krondstadt was what was to be done about it, and that was locked into the answer to the first: for radical Bolshevik supporters, Krondstadt represented a painful dilemma and an existential threat. On the one hand, the sailors involved had played a significant role in the overthrow of the Czarist regime and were held in high regard by, amongst others, Trotsky. So, eliminating the mutiny was going to be excruciating to all that held the ideals of the revolution in high regard. On the other hand, allowing the mutiny to continue, or conceding their demands, was perceived by the authorities as threatening the entire revolution. For anti-­Bolsheviks, and these included both anarchist elements and counter-­revolutionaries, (especially in retrospect) it would seem that the elimination of dissent in Krondstadt was merely the precursor of the eradi­ cation of all dissent—the thin edge of a very slippery and bloody slope. The third frame for understanding is particularly pertinent to the reader of events nearly 100 years later: without hindsight, what was the context of Bolshevik authority? Was it a coercive and crude dictatorship already deeply ensconced in power in Russia and heading for total control, or a young, chaotic, and ill-­disciplined fledgling revolutionary state beginning to turn the tide against the White Russians but without allies and without a manual for governing a medieval peasant-­based, failing, and exhausted state? In truth, Bolshevik Russia, under the drastic centralization of state control under War Communism, was probably closer to the latter than the former—but it was heading in the former’s direc­ tion. And while the Russian civil war formally ending in October 1920 with victory over the White Russians, and the end of the Western power’s blockade and military interven­ tion, the conflict continued against Nestor Makhno’s anarchists and other anti-­Bolshevik

Mutinies in Civil Wars  205 sections until October 1922 in the central areas. Indeed, it continued until 1934 in some peripheral regions, so the scene from Lenin’s Moscow remained more like a scene from a Hieronymus Bosch dystopia than a William Morris idyll. Industrial production was barely 20 per cent of pre-­war rates, and a famine in 1921 brought the country to the edge of col­ lapse as the Bolshevik government forcibly seized grain from the peasantry—and much else besides, in the policy of prodrazverstka—for the continuing war effort and to maintain some semblance of industrial production. ‘Prodrazverstka saved the Bolshevik regime from defeat, for without it neither the army nor the urban population, from which the government drew its main support, could have survived. Yet the inevitable price was the estrangement of the peasantry’ (Avrich, 1991: 9). Predictably, the peasants responded by either hiding grain or only growing enough to feed themselves, so that by 1921 agricul­ tural output had declined to barely half of the pre-­war level. Not that the peasants were inherently anti-­Bolshevik. Indeed, the land decrees of 1917 and 1918 had abolished the private ownership of lands, which were primarily owned by the nobility, and redistributed it amongst the peasants—but that had been abandoned under War Communism as the state demanded centralization of control and ownership. All this is important because the sailors at Krondstadt were primarily drawn from peasant not industrial families. Indeed, the proportion of Krondstadt sailors from peasant back­ grounds increased between 1917 and 1921 so that by the time of the mutiny 75 per cent of them were originally peasants by origin, and a disproportionate number of the provisional Revolutionary Committee were either Ukrainian by birth or at least not Russian (Avrich, 1991: 89–93). Yet these Ukrainian peasants had also been vigorous members of the revolutionary movement in 1917, so perhaps the origins of the mutineers is less important than their radical disillusionment with the direction the Bolsheviks were taking in 1921. Certainly, party membership in Krondstadt dropped by 50 per cent in 1921. Worse, with the collapse of White Russian resistance, some 2.5 million troops—half the Red Army—were demobilized in the first half of 1921, merely adding to the problems of mass unemployment, hunger, and discontent amongst the civilian population. As a result, groups of ‘brigands’ roamed the countryside and insurrections were common, with 118 over the winter of 1920/1, the most serious of which, led by Antonov, previously a Socialist Revolutionary, involved 50,000 insurgents (Avrich,  1991: 13–14). But without adequate weapons, or a practical strategy for achieving their utopian ideals, they were seldom in a position to threaten the Red Army. By December 1920, the Eighth Congress of Soviets in Moscow saw the development of further collectivization of agriculture, despite vociferous opposition from peasant repre­ sentatives, but, in the dire situation facing the Bolsheviks, with industrial production all but collapsed, Lenin persisted with War Communism. As the transportation system ground to a literal halt, what food supplies there were quickly became the property of the black market, and the price of bread, for example, increased tenfold in 1920, while real wages had dropped by over 90 per cent during the same time frame. Inevitably, cities became depopulated as peasants returned to their villages in search of work and food, further weakening the industrial support for the government. Trotsky’s response was the ‘militarization of labour’ as veterans were deployed onto the railways and into the factories to stave off a total collapse, the ‘workers’ control’ of 1917 was transformed into a Taylorist system of centralized coercion, and the once-­independent but loyal trade unions became co-­opted into part of the same party control. It was this

206  Mutiny and Leadership tinder box of bitterly disappointed Bolshevik supporters and fellow travellers that now faced a future that seemed anything but the utopia they had struggled for throughout the civil war. Even previously sympathetic leftists, such as Alexander Berkman, railed against the persistence of War Communism in the absence of war and became increasingly suspi­ cious that the Bolsheviks had become a self-­serving elite as dissent became increasingly eliminated. Thus, by the beginning of 1921 the Bolshevik regime was under dire threat from all sides—and from the inside (Avrich, 1991: 22–34). ‘What’, to quote Lenin’s 1901 paper, written in response to his assessment that the working class could not spon­tan­ eous­ly lead a revolution, ‘is to be done?’ The route to the Krondstadt mutiny started on 22 January 1921 when, in response to transport problems and heavy snow preventing supplies from reaching the cities, the gov­ ernment cut the already slim bread ration by one third. Within three weeks, the murmur­ ings of discontent became transformed into factory demonstrations across first Moscow and later—and more seriously—Petrograd, and while the government sent deputations to the factories, nothing assuaged the discontent which turned into a rash of strikes and demonstrations against both ‘Communists and Jews’ (Avrich,  1991: 36). In Petrograd, groups of armed military cadets (kursanty), loyal to the Bolshevik government, were sent to quell the disorder, and by 24 February martial law was imposed upon the city and a curfew enforced, as the government sought to label the discontent as c­ ounter-­revolutionary, and factories were shut down in an attempt to force the strikers back to work. Instead the discontent escalated, and the original economic demands for food and wage rises were displaced by overt political demands for political and social freedom. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries then began trying to organize the protests against the Bolshevik government and demanded a return to the original directly elected Soviets, free of Bolshevik control, or the reinstitution of the Constituent Assembly revoked by Lenin in October 1917. In reality, the discontent in Petrograd fused the economic and political issues but was effectively stamped out by Zinoviev, the local Bolshevik party chief, rigor­ ously enforcing martial law, ensuring the mass arrest of opposition leaders, and—equally important—granting food concessions to those workers willing to return to work. Indeed, this was the turning point in the slow unravelling of War Communism—but also the slow fuse twenty miles west at Krondstadt. Krondstadt was built under the direction of Peter the Great who took the island of Kotlin (meaning kettle or cauldron) from the Swedes in 1703. It became the naval base of the Russian Baltic Fleet and protected access to St Petersburg (subsequently renamed Petrograd—City of Peter—in 1914 at the start of the First World War to remove the Germanic ‘St’ and ‘Burg’). Access to the fortress was only possible over the ice during the winter, as the Gulf of Finland regularly froze over between November and March, and the total population was roughly 50,000, half civilians and half military. The latter had accumulated a reputation for fiery independence for many years, being involved in disputes from the beginning of the twentieth century, especially the 1905 revolution when their naval comrades on the Potemkin in the Black Sea mutinied in June 1905. On 25 October 1905, 3,000 sailors in Krondstadt, after meeting in the main square, rioted through the town, leaving seventeen dead, until troops restored order—but only until the next out­ break in July 1906, after which thirty-­six of the leading sailors were executed. Even at the height of the revolution in 1917, the Krondstadt sailors demonstrated their own radical intent, setting up their own Soviet and refusing to acquiesce to the central authority of the

Mutinies in Civil Wars  207 Bolshevik government, modelling themselves on the Paris Commune of 1871, and estab­ lishing a variety of committees for the self-­governance of everything from housing to food to the defence of the city. For them, Lenin’s call for ‘All power to the Soviets’ meant what it said; it was not a statement of propaganda but a statement of truth. And that included dismantling all the vestiges of Czarist authority, including executing seventy-­six senior naval officers, and initial and widespread support for the revolutionary government in Petrograd and Moscow. Such was the support of the Krondstadt sailors for the revolution that Trotsky called them ‘the pride and glory of the revolution’ (quoted in Avrich, 1991: 61), though they were wont to engage in excessive displays of violence towards their per­ ceived enemies, including two former ministers of the Provisional Government who were murdered by sailors from Krondstadt in January 1918 while in a Petrograd hospital. But the gap between the Bolsheviks and their erstwhile radical supporters in Krondstadt soon appeared, as the former began to seize control of all the arms of government and brooked no dissent, even from former admirers. In October 1918, unrest amongst the sailors of Petrograd against the domination of the Bolsheviks was snuffed out by troops loyal to the Bolshevik Government. But the civil war fomented further discontent: the formal military ranks and titles, which were abolished in the revolution and replaced by officers being elected to office by vote from below, sup­ ported by ‘comradely discipline’, began to be peeled back under Trotsky’s policy of reinvig­ orating the Red Army by reintroducing ‘specialists’. These were the very same officers previously dismissed—but this time under observation by the proliferation of political commissars. This policy, once proved successful in the army, was then introduced to the navy in an effort to displace the power of the elected ship’s committees. However, not only were the sailors more radically independent than the soldiers but, with the civil war over, they had begun to acquire home leave and witnessed for themselves the effects of War Communism on their own villages. As a consequence, home leave was severely curtailed, provoking further protests in December 1920 aboard the battleship Sevastopol in Krondstadt and the worsening of discipline in the Baltic Fleet (Avrich, 1991: 65–8). With scurvy spreading, an equivalent political disease shook support for the Bolsheviks which dropped by 50 per cent in late 1920 and early 1921 in terms of party membership, and when discontent spread through Petrograd in February 1921 some of the sailors decided to send delegations to see for themselves what was happening. What they found was a city under military lockdown, and they returned forthwith, held a meeting on board the battle­ship Petropavlovsk in Krondstadt, and agreed the Petropavlovsk resolution that was to frame the mutiny. In short, the resolution called for new elections to the Soviets, free­ dom of speech for all (including non-­Bolshevik political parties_, free trade unions, free­ ing of political prisoners, equality of rations for all, abolition of privileges, freedom to farm for peasants, and the abolition of political departments in the fleet—the only reso­ lution pertaining to their own situation—plus sundry other demands. It was signed by Petrichenko, a Ukrainian, the elected Chair of the Squadron Meeting, and while the eco­ nomic demands were not that different from the ones already planned by the government, the political demands embodied a significant challenge, especially the demand for new elections to the Soviets and the removal of the political departments in the navy. It was, in effect, a call to Lenin to abide by his call ‘All power to the Soviets’ and a denial of his prior statement in ‘What is to be done?’ That had called for the Bolshevik party to be the van­ guard of the revolution and to displace the working class as the midwife of history.

208  Mutiny and Leadership On 1 March a mass meeting of the sailors in Anchor Square, the main square in the city, was attended by 15,000, and even the Bolshevik party members present endorsed the Petropavlovsk resolution, having thrown two Bolshevik leaders out of the meeting. They then called for fresh elections to the Soviet and despatched a thirty-­strong team of repre­ sentatives to Petrograd to garner support; they were all arrested and disappeared. On 2 March the Krondstadt Soviet, chaired by Petrichenko, was duly elected by the 300 dele­ gates present, though a third of the representatives voted onto the Soviet were still Bolshevik supporters. The Soviet elected a five-­person presidium who proceeded to arrest the two Bolshevik leaders, Kuzmin and Vasiliev, as well as the political commissar Korshunov. At this point in the proceedings, rumours spread that the government had sent fifteen trucks of armed soldiers to break up the meeting, and the Krondstadt Soviet responded by establishing a Provisional Revolutionary Committee to administer the city in the face of Bolshevik attack. In fact there was no such attack planned, and it may have been a group of Bolsheviks attempting to flee the city that started the rumour. Irrespective of what actually happened, the Revolutionary Committee proceeded to organize the defence of Krondstadt and banned all movement out of the city; the mutiny had started (see Figure 5.2) (Avrich, 1991: 69–89). What did not happen, despite some suggestions from the ‘technical specialists’ (military officers formally attached to the old regime), was an immediate attack upon Petrograd where the Bolshevik forces were disorganized. For some mutineers even rumours of such an attack was a step too far, both because the suggestion came from untrustworthy sources and because—at this point—most believed a compromise was possible. But, as Avrich (1991: 218–20) suggests, and indeed as Lenin had noted in 1908 in an article on the Paris Commune, one of the reasons the Commune ultimately failed was because the

Figure 5.2  Krondstadt 1921: Mutineers in Krondstadt, Russia (GL Archive/Alamy)

Mutinies in Civil Wars  209 Communards did not immediately attack the government at Versailles while the latter were disorganized. The excessive magnanimity of the proletariat . . . instead of annihilating its enemies, it endeavoured to exercise moral influence on them; it neglected the importance of purely military activity in the civil war, and instead of crowning its victory in Paris by a deter­ mined advance on Versailles, it delayed long enough for the Versailles government to gather its dark forces in preparation for the bloody week of May. (Lenin, quoted in Avrich, 1991: 220)

Inside Krondstadt, the Provisional Revolutionary Committee enlarged its own member­ ship and set up smaller committees to oversee food supplies, transportation, justice, and civic affairs. It also imposed a curfew from 23.00 hours, while the rebel newspaper the Izvestiia was published daily, and localized control in each organization and institution was delivered to a troika of delegates as the newly established Soviet, or Krondstadt Trade Union Council, as it was known, became the debating chamber for the mutineers. Perhaps inevitably, the Bolshevik Government represented the mutiny as the work of counter-­revolutionaries, either Socialist Revolutionaries or White Russians or both, and Trotsky and Lenin noted that reports of the mutiny had been published in French and subsequently American newspapers before any mutiny had actually occurred. The mu­tin­ eers, equally inevitably, denied any foreign intervention or counter-­revolutionary intent and published a list of all Revolutionary Committee members, none of whom were Socialist Revolutionaries or White Russian. Indeed, none were officers, though some ­of­fi­cers did help the mutineers with preparations for the defence of the island against the Bolsheviks, and there were no soldiers—this was an entirely naval insurrection. There were plans from outside to support the mutineers, and then direct them towards an attack upon the Bolshevik government, but the plans assumed the mutiny would be delayed until the spring had melted the ice and provided a further level of defence for the fortress. In fact, after the failure of the mutiny there were communications between some of the mutiny leaders and counter-­revolutionary forces outside the USSR, and the latter (including Herbert Hoover) had engaged in securing food and materials for the mu­tin­ eers, often under cover of the Russian Red Cross, but there was no evidence that these links existed before or during the mutiny. Nor did the mutineers ever intend to support the return of the old regime; what they wanted was the return of the immediate ­post-­revolutionary regime in 1917, when all power lay with the Soviets, not the Bolsheviks. Even Lenin privately recognized as much, admitting that what he called a ‘petty bourgeois counter-­revolution’ was really rooted in the discontent of the peasantry; but ‘the people’ could not be trusted to start or complete the revolution—only the Bolshevik Party could do that through a dictatorship. And if Lenin wanted proof of his fear, it fluttered from the masthead of the Izvestiia: ‘All Power to the Soviets but Not the Parties’. And even for the mutineers, ‘the Soviets’ did not include the middle classes or the landlords. This was to be a ‘toilers’ republic’, not a liberal democracy; hence their antipathy towards the Constituent Assembly. But their greatest ire was focused on the Bolshevik government, whom they blamed for all their ills, irrespective of the evidence that the civil war was the main culprit (Avrich,  1991: 108–30; 160–4). As the Izvestiia insisted, ‘Everything is fine—the land is

210  Mutiny and Leadership ours but the grain is yours, the water ours but the fish yours, the forests ours but the wood yours’ (quoted in Avrich, 1991: 164). For the mutineers the utopia was rooted in free peasants and small producers; it had little to do with whatever form of workers’ control might take over the factories in the absence of Bolshevik domination, and it differed radically from every political party exist­ ing at the time, and therefore it cannot be explained as a party-­political revolt. The Socialist Revolutionaries wanted a return to the Constituent Assembly, the Mensheviks were con­ cerned with the industrial proletariat, and the Anarchists wanted the dismantling of the state—none of which had much interest for the Krondstadt mutineers who rather tended to speak in the language of ‘anarcho-­populists’: land to the peasants, the social but not the socialist organization of production, bread and products to the toilers, and a focus on the Russian, not a global, revolution. In fact, Avrich (1991: 174) suggests they are better seen as descendants of the primitive rebels of seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century Russia, alienated from the communists—the ‘commisarocracy’, as they called the Bolsheviks—a new privileged elite represented by Trotsky, not Lenin, for the former had inaugurated War Communism with all its centralization and militarization, whereas Lenin was, according to the mythology, misled by his advisers, in much the same way that the Czar had allegedly been duped by his advisers for centuries about the poverty of the peasant. The mutineers also attacked Trotsky’s Jewishness as a cause of the problem, for this had self-­evidently led to the first ‘Jewish Republic’ at the expense of the Christian Russians. But the ultimate ‘crime’, as far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, would have been a call to remove the Bolshevik Party altogether, yet ‘Soviets without Bolsheviks’ was never an aim of the mutineers, and only 300 of the 1,500 party members in Krondstadt were arrested by the mutineers and, unlike the prisoners or hostages taken by the Bolsheviks during the uprising, no Bolshevik prisoners were executed or shot (Avrich, 1991: 177–8, 182–7). Ultimately, as Avrich (1991: 190) suggests, There were, broadly speaking, two fundamentally opposed trends within the Russian revolutionary tradition. One was the centralist trend, represented by Lenin and his party and aiming to replace the old order with a revolutionary dictatorship; the other, pursued by the anarchists and SRs, was towards decentralized self-­rule, the absence of strong gov­ ernmental authority, and trust in the democratic instincts of the people. Krondstadt, with its roots in peasant particularism and spontaneous rebellion, belonged squarely in the second category.

Whatever the causes of the mutiny, the Bolsheviks, with their traditional distrust of spon­ taneity, were determined to end it as soon as possible, since it posed a radically more dan­ gerous threat than did the vestiges of the counter-­revolutionaries and because it threatened the legitimacy of the government from the ranks of former supporters, not its permanent enemies. Thus any attack upon the mutineers by the Red Army had to be framed as an assault upon traitors, intent on returning the old regime, not an assault upon misled loyal­ ists trying to rescue the red flag and return it to its rightful place. Otherwise, insisted Lenin at the Tenth Party Congress, it would become ‘a step, a ladder, a bridge’ built upon ‘petty-­bourgeois anarchistic spontaneity’ (quoted in Avrich, 1991: 191) that would ul­tim­ ate­ly lead first to a rerun of something like the failed Pugachev rebellion of peasants and

Mutinies in Civil Wars  211 Cossacks from 1773 to 1775 and then to White restoration. Bukharin, speaking at the Third Comintern (also after the crushing of the mutiny) was more sympathetic: ‘Who says the Krondstadt rising was White? No. For the sake of the idea, for the sake of our task, we were forced to suppress the revolt of our erring brothers. We cannot look upon the Krondstadt sailors as our enemies. We love them as true brothers, our own flesh and blood’ (quoted in Avrich,  1991: 134). Victor Serge, originally an anarchist who subse­ quently supported the Bolsheviks in the civil war, reproached the authorities for misman­ aging the Krondstadt situation and failing to offer sufficient concessions to secure a peaceful resolution, but he reluctantly supported the government (though he did not par­ ticipate in the assault) because to allow the mutiny would be to facilitate the return of the old regime. Moreover, with the spring thaw on the way, and the possibility of reigniting the civil war, the exhausted government was hardly ready to engage in a lengthy period of negotiations with rebels for fear of the rebellious virus spreading to the mainland and into the rest of the armed forces. That had already occurred on 2 March when the First Naval Squadron at Oranienbaum elected their own Revolutionary Committee. Within a day the Bolsheviks had sent a train of kursanty to deal with the rebellion. The same day, forty-­five mutineers, including the Chair and Secretary of the Oranienbaum Revolutionary Committee, were executed. A full week elapsed between the Krondstadt mutineers issuing the Petropavlovsk reso­ lution and a military response from the government. During that period, as the central government prepared for a military assault, the Petrograd Soviet, chaired by Zinoviev and attended by the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, met on 4 March to discuss the mutiny, and while Zinoviev denounced the mutiny as a White-­sponsored counter-­revolution, others protested against his attacks, and a Krondstadt sailor began reading the Petropavlovsk resolution before pandemonium broke out and the meeting was abandoned. The following day Trotsky—hitherto a hero of the Krondstadt sailors— returned from quelling a revolt in Siberia and issued a ‘final warning’ to the mutineers to surrender unconditionally or face the consequences. The Bolshevik’s Petrograd Defence Committee dropped even more threatening leaflets on Krondstadt by plane, threatening to shoot the rebels ‘like partridges’, and began taking the families of the sailors hostage. Goldman and Berkman suggested a commission to mediate the mutiny, and on 6 March the Petrograd Soviet telegraphed the mutineers to suggest such a meeting and gave them twenty-­ four hours to respond, but it was summarily rejected by the Revolutionary Committee, and the proverbial die was set. It was, as Trotsky later called, ‘a tragic neces­ sity’ (quoted in Avrich, 1991: 230). The following day, 7 March, Tukhachevsky led a group of about 20,000 troops of the Seventh Army to support the initial assault force of cadets, Cheka units, and volunteers against the 13,000 sailors of Krondstadt, complete with the superior naval gunfire pro­ vided by the naval forts and ships in the five miles of frozen water between the mainland and the fortress. At 06.45 a short artillery duel began, followed quickly by an infantry assault from the north and south with Red Army units in white uniforms blinded by the snowstorm and threatened from behind by the follow-­up Cheka units. The assault petered out under fire as the attackers suffered the first of 10,000 fatalities and the mutineers called on Russia to join them in a third revolution to finish the job started in February and October 1917.

212  Mutiny and Leadership The second attack, on 9 March, was much better planned: it involved aircraft and a­ rtillery and the infantry was led by battalions of volunteer Young Communists and cadets and Cheka units, all singing the ‘Internationale’ as they stormed across the ice. In support were loyal—but non-­Russian—regiments from Ukraine, the Polish front, complemented by Chinese and Tartar troops. However, an array of small-­scale attacks failed to penetrate to the fortress, and by 14 March the Bolsheviks called a halt to make preparations for a final and much larger assault. As they did so, another mutiny broke out in Oranienbaum amongst riflemen of the 27th Omsk Division who were determined ‘to go to Petrograd and beat the Jews’ (quoted in Avrich,  1991: 197). A further attempted mutiny was dis­ covered in Peterhof Command School, but a radical change in morale amongst the Bolshevik forces seemed to be linked to the end of War Communism, when Lenin announced at the Tenth Party Congress on 15 March that taxes would replace forced ­requisitions. As the spirits of the attackers rose, so those of the defenders fell: with dwin­ dling stocks of food (there was no flour left by this point), ammunition, medical supplies, and fuel, even the comparatively light casualties suffered so far provided little comfort, especially as sleep deprivation eroded their confidence and as support from Petrograd’s factory workers—or anywhere else—failed to materialize. Instead, at 14.00 on 16 March, the final assault began with an artillery and aerial bom­ bardment that lasted until dark. At 03.00 the next day, with 35,000 troops in the southern attack and 15,000 in the north, complete with two days’ worth of food and ammunition, the assault began in total silence, and by 05.00 the first of the defending northern forts had been taken. By the middle of the day the fortress itself was under attack. The attack on the southern side was less successful, but by daybreak on the 17th the fortress was under attack on all sides. Despite this, fierce hand-­to-­hand fighting continued for the rest of the day, but as the end became clear about 800 rebels became the first to abandon Krondstadt, including ten members of the Revolutionary Committee and their leader Petrichenko, who fled over the ice to Finland. By the following day (19 March) fully 8,000 had fled— roughly half the total number of mutineers—and at 23.50 the mutiny was declared over, 10,000 having died putting it down. On the rebel side around 600 had died, 1,000 were wounded, and 2,500 taken prisoner. From the latter group thirteen were tried in closed court as ringleaders of the mutiny, though none were from the Revolutionary Committee, and all condemned to death. Reports of executions of the others were common, but most were sent to forced labour camps, from which few returned. Many of the 8,000 refugees in Finland returned on promise of an amnesty which the Bolsheviks failed to uphold. Petrichenko, the leader of the mutiny, stayed in Finland, consorted with various ­anti-­Bolshevik groups, but ended up joining pro-­Soviet groups there, and in 1945 he was repatriated by the Finnish authorities to the USSR. He died in a prison camp soon after (Avrich, 1991: 210–16). As for democratically elected representatives on ships or in military units, Krondstadt had certainly led to the permanent abandonment of that idea. Instead centralized author­ ity and the insertion of ‘trustworthy’ party members prevailed as opposition, of all kinds, was gradually removed, dispersed or forbidden, as Lenin declared all political opposition illegal in May 1921. Krondstadt’s legacy was the inversion of its intent: it had called for all power to the Soviets; it got all power to the Bolsheviks. Indeed, that discipline even cur­ dled the Bolshevik Party as 25 per cent of the membership were purged by the autumn of 1921 (Avrich, 1991: 227–9).

Mutinies in Civil Wars  213

Conclusion Mutinies in civil wars pose a particular dilemma for the authorities: in the English Civil War, and at Krondstadt, the authorities were previously the rebels, and dealing with insub­ ordinate subordinates has always proved a difficult dilemma in balancing sympathy for prior allies with the iron will to see off any dissent that embodies a threat to that same rebellion and all the sacrifices therein. Ironically then, if civil wars are often the scenes of horrendous internecine warfare, where prior rules of war seem scattered to the wind, mutinies against the victorious rebels provide an echo of betrayal that neither side can be comfortable with. In the programmes of both the Leveller-­based mutineers and the Krondstadt mutineers, there is also a romantic streak rooted in the ideals that they hold dear and try to get the establishment to recall, but so often, as with Lenin and Cromwell, it is the more ruthless side that prevails, supported by a better established and more resilient infrastructure of force. Here it is the first refrain that dominates proceedings: the leader­ ship. Rebel and mutinous forces are composed of a wide variety of groups and individuals, but there are precious few examples of a successful rebellion treating a subsequent mutiny with kid gloves, and plenty where the iron fist is all that is visible. Perhaps this is the les­ son: having a common enemy may be sufficient to ensure solidarity until the fall of that very enemy, and at that point the revolution begins to eat its own children. In both situations then, the importance of the second refrain becomes clear: know your enemy. The first refrain is exemplified by the disputes about what the mutinies repre­ sented: betrayal of the original revolt, or a misunderstanding of what was possible in the circumstances they all found themselves in? The antecedence of the third refrain is ­self-­evident: without the first revolt there would have been no mutiny—but in both cases it was the establishment that learned more and organized better than the mutineers. As for the default response to crush, rather than negotiate with, erstwhile comrades who were now mutineers, both cases exemplified a joint approach where the new authority desper­ ately sought to avoid bloodshed, but in the face of perceived intransigence on the part of the mutineers, and in the continuing context of civil war, both the Bolsheviks and the New Model Army’s leadership showed a willingness to use all force necessary to quell dissent. The scapegoating of the fifth refrain was present in all cases, as was the presence of quotid­ ian dissent, the sixth refrain. The role of the charismatic leader—as symbol if not as cause—is common throughout the cases; and the eighth refrain, the contingency of life, is all too evident. If King Charles had not acted the way he did there might not have even been a civil war in England and thus no mutinies, and if the civil war in Russia had ended sooner the sailors might have decided not to take up arms against their former comrades in the Bolshevik Party. Where both mutinies fail is the weakness of their relational leader­ ship (the ninth refrain) and the ease with which erstwhile rebels are tempted back into the arena of the enthralled (the tenth refrain). If solidarity within the non-­mutinous armies had been stronger and if the mutineers had encouraged their non-­mutinous comrades to break their own enthrallment, then things might have been different. But these are all big ifs.

6

Mutinies and Ethnicity The British West India Regiment 1801 & 1837 Between 1793 and 1802 the war between the new French Republic and Britain (amongst other European states) was played out not just in Europe but across the West Indies. A posting to the West Indies, even excluding the dreadful four-­month voyage and the subsequent combat with the French, was a posting to hell.1 Only 40 per cent of the British troops sent to Saint-­Domingue returned, and between 1793 and 1801 about 70,000 British soldiers and sailors died in the West Indies, 90 per cent from yellow fever2 and malaria (Frykman, 2010: 167).3 The uniforms, designed for the Aldershot parade ground, made no concessions to the West Indian climate, and a diet of salted meat, flour, and rice—without fruit or veget­ ables—was always a recipe for chronic illness. The Commander-­in-­Chief of the British forces, Lt General Vaughan, wrote to the British Home Secretary in 1794 thus: I am of the opinion that a Corps of one thousand men composed of blacks and Mulattoes, and commanded by British Officers, would render more essential service in the Country than treble this number of Europeans who are unaccustomed to the climate. And as the enemy have adopted this measure to recruit their armies, I think we should pursue a similar plan to meet them on equal terms.  (quoted in Dyde, 1997: 15)

This was not the first time African slaves had fought for the British. The American Revolutionary War (War of Independence) between 1775 and 1783 included ex-­slaves who gained their freedom by fighting for the British against the Americans. That should not have surprised General Washington who, on 12 November 1775, issued an order that ‘neither negroes, boys unable to bear arms, nor old men’ would be allowed into the American army. A week earlier, on 14 November, ex-­slaves were involved in the Battle of Kemp’s Landing against the Americans. Lord Dunmore, the British Governor of Virginia, then fleeing Williamsburg to HMS Fowey in Chesapeake Bay, read a proclamation declaring that all slaves who escaped to British custody from masters in rebellion against the 1  Ironically, the popular fear that pirates were the main danger of the region, if the conventional ‘enemy’ did not kill you, was widely misunderstood: of the 681 Spanish shipwrecks in the West Indies and off that part of the Americas between 1492 and 1898, 91 per cent were due to weather conditions, 4 per cent to hitting a reef, 1.4 per cent to naval engagements of the major powers, and only 0.8 per cent to pirate attack (Jones, 2019: 37). 2  Slaves in the West Indies died from overwork, underfeeding, accidents, murder, and diseases like dysentery, typhoid, and tetanus but rarely from yellow fever, to which many were immune since it had been in Africa for generations. In his attempt to crush the slave revolt and re-­establish slavery in Saint-­Domingue, Napoleon despatched 65,000 troops in 1802 and lost between 50,000 and 55,000 of them, mainly to yellow fever (Snowden, 2019: 132). 3  A BBC4 documentary ‘Nelson’s Caribbean Hell-­Hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered’, aired on 23 September 2019, suggests that the copious consumption of rum in the West Indies, made using lead pipes, may have inadvertently led to widescale lead poisoning.

Mutiny and Leadership. Keith Grint, Oxford University Press (2021). © Keith Grint. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192893345.003.0007

Mutinies and Ethnicity  215 British Crown would be freed. Dunmore formed the ex-­ slaves into the Ethiopian Regiment, and they had ‘Liberty to Slaves’ embroidered on their uniform sashes. However, to allay the fears of slave-­owning loyalists, the Ethiopian Regiment were initially used as unarmed labourers and not involved in combat. Nevertheless, as the war turned against them, the British Commander-­in-­Chief, General Henry Clinton, recruited an armed regiment of ex-­slaves, the Black Pioneers that fought at the Siege of Charleston.4 The American army subsequently recruited around 5,000 free Black men to serve, but any such soldiers captured by the British fighting for the Americans were sold back into slavery. By the end of the war Britain had some 20,000 ex-­slaves in its army (Jasanoff, 2012). In fact, ex-­slaves from the French West Indies were already actively supporting the British after it became clear that the French 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man only covered white men, not black men, and not even white women at this point (Snowden, 2019: 119–22). By 1793, the British Army’s Captain Robert Malcolm had already formed an irregular unit of ex-­slaves—Malcolm’s Rangers—to fight alongside regular British units or to hunt down escaped slaves, and by 1794 there were 3,000 irregulars who acted as independent skirmishers, without the usual British uniforms or disciplined firing drills. General Vaughan then wrote to the Secretary of War, Henry Dundas, for permission to recruit more free blacks (or if necessary buy slaves) to boost the army, much to the chagrin of the plantation owners’ representative body—the West India Committee—for whom the prospect of armed black soldiers was worse than a French invasion. Nevertheless, in the face of revolts by indigenous groups in British-­owned St Vincent, the British government authorized Vaughan’s request, and eight regiments of 600 infantry were to be raised by 1795, all with white officers. In the event, recruitment proved impossible: few free black men were willing to surrender their freedom to the British Army, and no plantation owners supported the cre­ ation of armed black regiments. The response was to authorize the direct purchase of slaves by the British Army, and by 1807—when the slave trade (but not slavery) was abolished by the British—the British Army had become the largest single buyer of slaves anywhere and purchased over 13,000 slaves at a total cost of £900,000 (about £71 million in 2020 prices). By 1798, the war with the French had turned into the war with the Spanish too; and the British state authorized the raising of four more black regiments, and they were incorporated into the West India Regiments (sometimes called the West Indies Regiments) and allocated unit numbers (Dyde, 1997: 20–4; Harling, 2006: 30–1). Between 1798 and 1806 the British Army bought 7 per cent of all slaves sold in the British West Indies.5 As might be expected, the various white governing assemblies in the islands were apoplectic in their collective outrage, not just because of the military threat the WIR posed but also the ideological consequences of allowing ‘them to entertain notions of equality, and acquire habits pernicious to the welfare of the country’ That the ‘welfare’ of the country was what these soldiers were willing to die for seems to have escaped the notice of the slave owners but, as one said, slaves should ‘not be distracted from the task of making 4  One of these slaves was Harry Washington—a slave of General Washington—who subsequently acquired his freedom and returned to his homeland in Africa (Klein, 2019). 5  See https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/slaves-­red-­coats-­west-­india-­regiment, accessed 25 May 2020. Slaves were not cheap: in 1801 the British Army spent £32,600 (£1 million in contemporary terms) purchasing and clothing 272 African slaves for the West India Regiments.

216  Mutiny and Leadership money for their owners to so trivial an employment as the defence of the country’ (quoted in Dyde, 1997: 25). Despite the unbridled bigotry of the plantation owners, by 1800 there were twelve West India regiments with approximately 10,000 soldiers in all. It was never the intention of the British Army to allow black soldiers to secure a commission and anyway, since commissions were still bought until 1875, it was clear that a military salary was never intended to provide a British officer with the kind of living that almost all of them had been used to as children of the aristocracy.6 But each regiment required over forty officers, and, because commissions across different regiments could be exchanged for considerable sums of money, service in a West India Regiment was often seen as a necessary stepping stone to secure a position in a more prestigious regiment elsewhere. The 8th WIR, for example, was led by Col. Andrew James Cochrane Johnstone, eighth son of the Earl of Dundonald, who was married to the third daughter of the Earl of Hopetoun. Having bought his various commissions from the age of 16, Johnstone became MP for Stirling at the age of 21 and colonel of the 8th WIR and Governor of Dominica in 1797. He was instructed by the army in 1801 to organize improvements to the defences around Prince Rupert’s Bluff and to pay his troops the standard extra 9d. per day owed to all soldiers of the British Army who were required to do civilian labour where none was unavailable. Johnstone organized the work but never paid his soldiers the extra fee. This was not an isolated example of military corruption, and the writings of William Cobbett and William Wordsworth in the 1790s were influential in exposing just how widespread the malpractice was (Murray, 2014). Rumours spread amongst the WIR soldiers that they were to be re-­enslaved once the site they were clearing was finished and on 9 April 1801, two British warships appeared in the harbour to replenish supplies, though rumours es­cal­ ated amongst the black soldiers that the ships were to carry the soldiers away as slaves. That night the soldiers mutinied, taking over the fort, and seven of the eleven officers were murdered, three were taken hostage while the rest escaped, including Major Gordon who raised the alarm. Johnstone declared martial law and transported a local (white) militia unit to the fort, where they were supported by the marines from the two naval ships. Johnstone now had 1,300 men against the mutineers’ 500, and the latter used one of the hostages to bargain for an unconditional surrender before the fort was stormed. On entering the fort, Johnstone was faced by the mutineers on parade with their former hostages now in front of them. Johnstone was expected to order the mutineers to ground their arms but instead he harangued them, and when the mutineers appeared unimpressed Johnstone ordered the white troops to open fire. In the ensuing confusion around fifty mutineers were killed and fifty more wounded: the mutiny was over. Within three days the ensuing court martial, held by Johnstone, found seven ‘ringleaders’ guilty ‘of exciting and joining in mutiny’; they were transported to Martinique along with the rest of the mutineers where the seven were shot dead. On 24 May a Court of Enquiry sat to determine the cause of the mutiny, and gross irregularities in the pay and rations of the soldiers were found, leading to the execution of twenty-­four more mutineers and the disbandment of the regiment. Major Gordon was sent back to England on half-­pay while Johnstone was dismissed 6  In 1795 the cost of the lowest rank officer, an ensign, in a British infantry regiment would be around £450 (£57,600 in 2018)—then around five times the annual salary of a skilled worker. A commission as a lieutenant colonel would cost almost £5,000 (about £640,000 in 2018).

Mutinies and Ethnicity  217 as Governor of Dominica, sent home on half pay, and demoted from brigadier to colonel. His first task once home was to prosecute Gordon for embezzlement, misuse of public funds, and dereliction of duty, but he was acquitted. Johnstone then faced the same charges and was also acquitted, though he left the army, returned to Caribbean, and plotted to defraud the London Stock Exchange; he was arrested but disappeared and was never seen again. Ex-­slaves were, like all British soldiers at the time, enrolled for life, and they were treated in the same way as white soldiers in terms of pay and conditions of service, but once they were out of uniform they were ‘amenable to the Slave Laws’. At the end of their careers, General Abercrombie had suggested in 1797, they should be treated as freemen and given a pension of a shilling a day, but the government of the day disagreed, and it was not until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 that the British government clarified the law by amending the Mutiny Law to the extent that ‘all Negroes purchased by or on account of His Majesty, His Heirs, and Successors, and serving in any of His Majesty’s Forces, shall be, and taken to all Intents and purposes whatever to be free’. That, at a stroke, freed 10,000 black soldiers and was the largest single act of manumission in the Americas up until that time (Dyde, 1997: 29). At the same time, the Abolition Act also enabled the British forces to seize any slave from an enemy or slave ship and enlist these ‘recaptives’ directly into the army or the navy. In effect, most recruits for the WIR before the Abolition Act were bought directly from slave ships; after the act most were seized from slave ships. By 1819, as the wars with the French and Spanish came to a close, the WIR was reduced from twelve to two regiments.

Figure 6.1  Donald Stewart 1837 (formerly named Daaga), British West India Regiment, awaiting execution for leading a mutiny (Chronicle/Alamy)

218  Mutiny and Leadership Slavery in the British Empire was abolished in 1833, but the process of taking recaptives from ships that did not recognize British law continued, and in 1837 the 1st WIR, then under the command of Lt Col. William Bush, took 280 slaves off ships stopped by the Royal Navy and incarcerated them in Trinidad. One of these slaves, known as Daaga but renamed as Donald Stewart by the British Army, was allegedly a slaver himself from Guinea. On 18 June the recaptives led by Daaga mutinied, though no officers were injured. Nevertheless, the white 89th Regiment, stationed at Port of Spain were called, along with the Militia, and together they restored order, shooting forty mutineers in the process. Five others were charged with mutiny and three of these executed—including Daaga (see Figure 6.1)—with the other two imprisoned for life (Ellis, 1885).

The Sepoy Mutiny, the Rebellion, and the 1st Indian War of Independence 1857–8 If there was a long history of black soldiers in the British Army, there was a longer one of Indian soldiers in the British East India Company (EIC). The rebellion against the British East India Company, sparked by the ‘mutiny’ of sepoys (meaning ‘Indian infantry’, from the Persian word for ‘soldier’) and sowars (Indian cavalry troopers) in 1857, was also the site of a bloody transmogrification from mutiny to rebellion. Indeed, the events of 1857–8 are known by the British as the ‘Indian Mutiny’ or the ‘Great Uprising’, but this (as has already been suggested) implies a military rebellion against a legitimate authority, whereas many Indians did not regard the rule of the East India Company as legitimate and hence considered the ‘mutiny’ as instead a rebellion or indeed the 1st War of Independence against an illegal occupation. It is covered here not because I regard the East India Company as a legitimate occupier of India but because it is precisely this dispute about the nature of the dissent that pervades almost all the cases covered and echoes the first refrain: what counts as a mutiny—or something else—is a social construction, not an objective fact. Indeed, the dispute about the nature of the events in 1857 started as soon as the British regained control in 1858 (Chakravarty, 2013: 136). As we have seen, the sailors at The Nore did not regards themselves as ‘mutineers’ but as loyal—yet dissatisfied— subjects; the authorities regarded them as ‘mutineers’ and dealt with them as such. So a dispute about the ‘true’ nature of the dissent does not resolve the question of which ex­amples count as mutiny and which as rebellion or even a mere dispute. Equally im­port­ ant, the desire to codify the behaviour of subordinates, in this case sepoys, into a binary division between either loyalty or mutiny—and nothing in between—elides the greater likelihood of most subordinates, most of the time, working on a scale that encompasses both ends but often sits at neither pole. As Singh (2006: 2) suggests, in reality ‘there were always degrees of submission and varying degrees of rebellion expressed by the rank-­andfile, and that the varying degrees were linked, so that initial instances of insubordination shaped later mutinies’. The English East India Company (EIC) received its original charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600, when, ironically, the Dutch trade with the East Indies was so rewarding that Dutch merchants came to London to buy English ships to continue their business in spices (Dalrymple, 2019). The EIC spent most of its time building a trading empire based on calico, silk, china, and tea, in the subcontinent of India and eastwards to China. At the

Mutinies and Ethnicity  219 beginning of the EIC’s interventions, the Indian subcontinent really comprised two zones: an interior that the Europeans (primarily Portuguese, English, and Dutch) avoided; and a maritime trading zone that the EIC and its European competitors sought to dominate, initially as a way of controlling the spice trade from further east, but that quickly shifted to recognizing the value of Indian produce, especially fine cotton, jute, indigo, tea, and opium, usually working through Indian agents (Gilmour, 2018: 93; Roy, 2018: 20–38).7 The EIC grew to the point where it controlled roughly half the world’s trade (Dalrymple, 2019: xxx) and operated, according to Edmund Burke, as ‘a state in the guise of a merchant’ (quoted in Dalrymple, 2019: 3). By the eighteenth century, the EIC had shifted towards constructing a political, rather than just a trading, empire as Mughal India (originally developed from 1526 by Babur who claimed an Indo-­Persian link back to Genghis Khan and Timur the Great) declined into what Dalrymple (2019) describes as the ‘anarchy’, not just in terms of declining central authority but also a flowering of a host of individuals and organizations competing with violence and treasure to inherit the vast wealth of the empire. The disintegration of the Mughal Empire triggered a move from the countryside to the cities by the richest Indian families, and the EIC took advantage of that, forming settlements in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta (Ferguson, 2017: 98). During the seventeenth century, the Mughal Empire, which contained a quarter of the world’s population in north and central India, also had the world’s largest manufacturing base, long before the EIC turned up. Indeed, at this time the Mughal Empire controlled 25 per cent of the world’s manufacturing, while Britain had just 3 per cent. Gun making in Mysore, for example, was so technically sophisticated that in 1787 Tipu Sultan, the ruler, sent back 500 imported French guns because the quality did not reach that of indigenous guns. As Dalrymple (2019: 321) suggests, although the British represented the Tipu as a barbarian, he had 2,000 books in his library covering ‘law, theology and the secular sciences, as well as amassing a large collection of modern scientific instruments including thermometers and barometers’. Later, William Congreve manufactured rockets at the Royal Laboratory in Woolwich which were copies of the original Mysorean rockets used against the British. As the English iron manufacturers had done with the colonial American iron manufacturers in the 1740s, the East Indian Company tried to suppress Indian arms manufacture in favour of British providers in the 1770s to prevent the Indian colony becoming more independent of Britain and to prevent competition. As the official policy of the EIC concerning the Fort William munitions laboratory in Calcutta stated: ‘No Indian, black or person of mixed breed, nor any Roman Catholic of what nation soever, shall, on any pretence, be admitted or set foot in the Laboratory of any of the military magazines, either out of curiosity or to be employed in them, or to come near them so as to see what is doing or contained therein’ (quoted in Satia, 2018: 178–9). In fact, the EIC seldom produced small arms in its factories for fear of these falling into the ‘wrong’ hands, and concentrated on producing swords, but indigenous gun production continued, and the supply of arms, 7  In 1773 the British took control over the Bengal production and distribution of opium and sold it through companies such as Jardine and Matheson, via Calcutta to China (where it was illegal) in huge quantities—1,400 tons per annum by 1838 (Windle, 2012). Under the British monopoly laws of 1838 it became compulsory for Indian peasant farmers to set aside a proportion of their land to grow opium poppies. As late as 1930 there were 7,000 opium shops in India, all British owned (Tharoor,  2017: 226–7). George Orwell’s father, Richard Blair, spent most of his professional life working in the Opium Department of the EIC (Gilmour, 2018: 193).

220  Mutiny and Leadership particularly muskets, proceeded apace into the Indian subcontinent as various small states sought to defend themselves from each other, the British, or any other power. They were needed: between 1739 and 1761 northern India was invaded in sequence by the Persians, the Afghans, and various other armies (David, 2003: 2). What distinguished the EIC from its rivals was better pay for those volunteering to fight under its banner and a safer, and thus a more rewarding, place to invest money (Dalrymple, 2019). The EIC’s army began to employ sepoys in large numbers after the battle of Madras in 1747, and the British military presence in India derived from the ‘Army in India’: regular British Army regiments on postings, and the four regional armies of the EIC, the largest of which was the Bengal Army in the Punjab which operated alongside the Punjab Frontier Force. There were two other armies in the south, based in Bombay and Madras (Roy, 2013: 25). And while the indigenous forces were never able to unite against the EIC, the latter’s naval power enabled the rapid transfer of troops whenever a local force looked in danger (Amin, 2012). Before the mutiny, the ratio of Indian to British troops (the latter sometimes called Queen’s Regiments)8 was about six to one; afterwards it was closer to two to one (Gilmour, 2018: 237). But whatever the ratio, the likelihood of troops seeing action in India after the victories over Tipu Sultan in Madras in 1799 were extremely small—until the mutiny (Gilmour, 2018: 260–1). Only the Bengal Army was really involved in the mutiny and there were no attacks in Bombay, Calcutta, or Madras. Intriguingly, then, the mutiny was focused on Delhi, the old Mughal capital, and seemed to suggest that the mutiny was intended to turn back the clock to an older time, before the British, rather than as in the independence movement up until 1947, which was an attempt to construct an alternative Indian state in the future, after the British had left (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 4). The unscrupulous Robert Clive was originally an employee of the EIC, who accumulated £400,000 between 1765 and 1767 from India (about £40 million in 2019 prices) but then transferred to the British Army. There he was involved in the defeats of the Bengali Nawab and his French East India Company allies at the battles of Plassey (Palashi) in 1757 and Buxar in 1764 (Tharoor, 2017: 11). Bengal was the most populous, the easiest to travel over (because of the rivers), and the richest province in India—and this was one of the main reasons for the Nawab of Bengal to try and overthrow the EIC in the 1756 attack that ended with the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta.9 The EIC then effectively controlled vast swathes of India either directly or, more often, through an array of puppet-­rulers, many of whom acquired significant wealth through the EIC. Indeed, until around 1770, most of the wealth generated by the activities of the EIC stayed in India (Roy, 2019). By 1750 the EIC was the largest European trading company in India, and in Bengal, in particular, it had acquired significant support from local businesses who clearly thought that the EIC 8  It was also common for the EIC to employ mercenaries, a handful of whom fought for the rebels in the Great Mutiny. The rebels also employed mercenaries in larger numbers from Afghanistan and the Arab territories, and there are accounts of some Anglo-­Indians joining the rebellion: seven of Felix Rotton’s sons fought with the rebels, as did several European mercenaries, but the most famous was the Scottish Sergeant Major Robert Gordon, from the 28th Bengal Native Infantry, who fought against his former comrades at Delhi under the pseudo­nym Abdulla Beg. He was captured and court-­martialled, but the British could not decide whether he had been coerced or had helped the rebels freely, so he was sent home and discharged from the British Army (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 41, 43, 60–5). 9  The Black Hole of Calcutta was the name given by the British to the prison in Fort William that held a number of prisoners (somewhere between 64 and 146, mostly employees of the EIC) for three days in June 1756 by soldiers loyal to the Nawab of Bengal. Most died from either suffocation or heat exhaustion. Calcutta was then captured by a relief column led by Clive in January 1757.

Mutinies and Ethnicity  221 was a better option for making money than working with the post-­Mughal array of competitive warlords (Roy, 2018: 52–4). That era also coincided with the French Revolution which stranded large numbers of French soldiers in India without employment, so many became mercenaries for the various Maharajas vying for their own fiefdoms as the Mughal Empire disintegrated. The Mughal Empire covered an area from Afghanistan to Myanmar, controlled most of India, and lasted from 1526 until it was eventually extinguished in 1857. Although a large economic centre, the income of the array of small kingdoms that became ‘India’ had fallen between 1600 and 1750 and began to rise after 1810, when the EIC took a great role in economic affairs beyond simply trading (Roy, 2019). The initial economic returns to Britain, which had been considerable in the eighteenth century, started to decline, though Clive and other senior officials of the EIC accumulated vast personal fortunes as they each began ‘shaking the pagoda tree’: the money tree that India was often perceived to be by those seeing to emulate the Nabobs—extremely wealthy individuals in the manner of the governors of the old Mughal Empire (Gilmour, 2018: 23). Between 1765 and 1815 the British took £18 million every year from India and taxed the local population at 50 per cent (Tharoor, 2017: 9). Indeed, a refusal to pay any land tax to the EIC by the Indian peasant farmers would have been a much more formidable weapon to dislodge the British than a disjointed mutiny (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 4). But the corruption that accompanied the riches prompted the British government to pass the Judicature and Regulating Acts that established a supreme court in India and attempted to rein in the acquisitive and often dubious actions of the EIC. That did little to terminate the corruption, and the government of William Pitt the Younger passed the 1784 India Act, which effectively switched legal control from EIC officials in India to a Board of Control chaired by a cabinet minister in London, though in practice India was still controlled by the IEC Directors in India. That Act also carried with it the exclusion of all Indians from senior positions in the administration or the army, including children of British-­Indian marriages (Gilmour, 2018: 39–40). By the early nineteenth century, after a series of wars, battles, and dubious legal machinations that transferred territories to the EIC, it effectively controlled two thirds of India, in theory. In practice, although the reforms brought canals and irrigation to large swathes of India, hostility to the EIC’s support for the suppression of child marriage, widow-­burning, and female infanticide was growing daily, as was the cultivation of opium (Tharoor, 2017: 228–9). The British government attempted to defuse the situation through the Government of India Acts 1833 and 1853, which gradually displaced the company’s financial and regulatory responsibilities, but despite acting as an Indian Parliament it had no Indians within it. The EIC had a significant military force which, by the turn of the century, was just over a quarter of a million strong and thus twice the size of the actual British Army, though most of its military victories were in alliance with particular Indian groups against others; indeed, 80 per cent of the EIC armies were of Indian origin. In 1857 the Bengal Army comprised 84,000 troops, of whom 30,000 were Brahmins (high-­caste Hindus), 27,000 Rajputs (warriors from the Kshatriya caste), just under 13,000 Muslims (mainly sowars in the cavalry), 1,000 Christians (mainly drummers), and nearly 16,000 middle-­ caste Indians. The Brahmins and Rajputs were collectively known as Purbiyas, and this was the group that the British sought to displace from their dominant position—deemed by the EIC to be preventing modernization—by insisting in 1851 that 20 per cent of the infantry

222  Mutiny and Leadership should be Sikhs. That proportion never reached more than 4 per cent by 1856, and when the mutiny arrived in 1857 approximately 70,000 soldiers of the Bengal Army were involved (87 per cent) (Roy, 2013: 26). However, such was the desire to recruit ‘loyal Sikhs’ over ‘disloyal Purbiyas’ that within six months of the mutiny 34,000 new soldiers had been recruited, mainly Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Pathans. Retrospectively, these groups were then deemed to be more appropriately ‘martial’ in their ‘natural’ abilities, in contrast to the Purbiyas and Muslims whose martial character had, apparently, suddenly been lost overnight (Roy, 2013: 32–3). At the beginning of the EIC there was no written military code, and discipline was the provenance of the commanding officer alone; should an officer be involved then a ‘Court of Request’ was summoned. In 1752 a code of military law was established for the British troops of the Madras Army which mirrored the regulations appertaining to the regular British Army, and the Indian troops were assumed to fall under the same regulations, except that a Native Court Martial was used for Indian troops (Sane, nd: 4). The reliance of the EIC on its armies meant that any ‘mutiny’ was not just a small problem of (in)dis­cip­ line in the army but a radical threat to the entire regime (Rand and Bates, 2013: xvi–xvii). Of course, since most of the narratives of the events of 1857 sprang from senior officers and officials in the EIC, it is not surprising that the events are recorded primarily as a mutiny, but that is not necessarily how those mutinying or rebelling saw those same events. But because most of the sepoys and sowars were illiterate we have few sources for these alternative accounts (Roy, 2013: 25). The predominant role played by the Indian troops in the EIC armies also implies that the rule of the company was often overtly coercive and draconian (as it certainly was in response to the mutiny). But the EIC controlled large parts of India through the compliance of its own Indian troops, and that is why the mutiny so rapidly threatened the status quo: because many of the indigenous sepoys withdrew their compliance. The particular legal malpractice that most upset many wealthy Indians was the Doctrine of Lapse. Under Hindu custom, the sons of the ruler had to perform the funeral rites to prevent their father from descending into hell, and the Raja of Satara had adopted a son to do this in 1848, since he had no natural heirs. However, the new Governor General, Lord Dalhousie, invented a new doctrine whereby those who died without male heirs ceded their territory to the EIC. Dalhousie, despite internal opposition warning him of mounting discontent, then applied the doctrine to annexe Sambhalpur in 1849 and Jhansi and Nagpur in 1854—the latter complete with an annual revenue of £400,000—‘too good a “plum” not to pick out of the “Christmas Pie” ’ as Dalhousie told a friend (quoted in David, 2003: 6). Certainly Disraeli, then the leader of the opposition against Palmerston’s government, cited the doctrine as one of the prime causes of the mutiny, the others being the annexation of territory and ‘tampering with the religion of the people’ (cited in Forster, 2013: 5). Marx downplayed the role of religion and instead situated the revolt against the background of wider anti-­colonial resistance in the east. The following year, the maladministration of Oudh gave the EIC the excuse to sequester the revenue but not sufficient excuse to annex the territory, making Wajid Ali (the King of Oudh) a titular figure without power or money. On 4 February 1856, unimpressed with the EIC’s attempted outright theft, the King refused to sign away his kingdom— which was a problem because 25 per cent of the Bengal Army’s (the largest of the EIC’s three armies) sepoys came from Oudh, and, since only one in seven soldiers in the armies

Mutinies and Ethnicity  223 of the EIC were British, treading carelessly over sepoy sensibilities was never a clever strategy. Originally, the British had been careful about such cultural sensitivities, recognizing the particular intricacies of Indian life, but by the time of the mutiny all that had gone, to be replaced by an attitude best summed up by Lord Macaulay’s view that the Indians had ‘medical doctrines that would disgrace an English farrier . . . Geography, made up of seas of treacle and butter’ (quoted in Hibbert, 1980: 51). Dalhousie also introduced a series of ‘liberal’ legal changes that further threatened the old order, including allowing Hindu widows to remarry and to convert to Christianity to retain a share in property rights. He also continued the educational reforms that, from the 1813 Act, had started schools and had allowed Christian missionaries into the country. In 1835 Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Education’ insisted that education should be in English to develop an English-­educated Indian middle class that could ‘be the interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern—a class of persons Indian in colour and blood, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ (quoted in David, 2003: 73). In fact, the subtext of introducing Christianity also made it common for the British to seek a religious-, nay Muslim-, inspired conspiracy (what some British civil servants in India called ‘musselmanophobia’) even though many of the mutineers were not Muslim by faith. A report in 1859 found no evidence of any such conspiracy, and in fact the British had not always been prone to this view of Muslims in India. Moreover, the linked assumption that the target was Christians belies the pretence of the British that the EIC was only interested in its secular mission, even though most British civil servants in India were, in some way, linked to the Anglican Church. As Padamsee (2014: 78) concludes: ‘the contours of Muslim ‘conspiracy’ were partly determined by a crisis over official self-­identification . . . the founding paradox of their (British) claims to administrate a system predicated on the occlusion of their own religious identity’. Nor were the old fears about European missionaries groundless: during the late sixteenth century Portuguese priests were involved in proselytising in several areas and had been accused of polluting wells with cattle so that all who drank lost their Hindu faith and were forced to convert to Catholicism (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 30). At the time of the mutiny, the Indian population was about 150 million and the EIC had 300,000 troops, of whom only 14,000 were European (mostly British) (Hibbert, 1980: 63). The Bengal Army, comprised 86,000 soldiers in seventy-­four regiments of regular Bengal Native Infantry (BNI), fifty-­four of which were involved in the mutiny; only three were considered loyal, and one of those was a regiment of Gurkhas from Nepal. Gurkhas had been recruited from 1815, and whereas regiments of EIC troops were often comprised of ethnically heterogenous battalions or companies, Gurkha battalions had only Gurkhas within them and tended to be located (unusually) in permanent homes near the Himalayan border (Gilmour, 2018: 39–40). The second-­largest armed force, the Madras Army, had fifty-­two regiments and only one directly involved in the mutiny, though Dutta (2016) suggests that discontent and dissent was much more widespread than the single mutinous regiment. The Bombay Army had twenty-­nine regiments, and only three of these were involved in the mutiny. The Bengal Army was initially recruited, following the template of the British Army, primarily from agricultural labourers. However, the recruitment stalled and instead the British turned to the traditional warrior caste, and, while the demarcation of caste was never solidified until later in the nineteenth century, service in the Bengal Army was seen

224  Mutiny and Leadership by many as a way of enhancing their own status against the castes of farmers and serfs. Thus by 1815, 80 per cent of the Bengal Army comprised high-­caste Hindus, though the presence of Sikhs and Muslims did not compromise the social coherence of the group, initially. However, the dominance of the high-­caste Hindus came to be seen as deleterious to the quality of the army as caste appeared to be placed above duty to the EIC. Hence the 1834 General Order, issued by Lord Bentinck, opened the Bengal Army up to lower-­caste Hindus, as well as more Muslims and eventually Sikhs, so that the proportion of h ­ igh-­caste Hindus had fallen to 66 per cent by 1842 and 53 per cent on the eve of the mutiny in some regiments (David, 2003: 22–4). Whatever the ethnic make-­up of the army, trouble was clearly brewing long before the mutiny broke out in 1857. In 1849 Sir Charles Napier, commander of the Bengal Army, noted that as many as a third of the army’s regiments were in ‘mutinous spirits’ after the batta (extra payment for foreign service of 2–3 rupees) was withdrawn. Napier immediately responded by turning the three irregular Gurkha battalions into regular battalions with improved pay and equipment and disbanding the most mutinous regiment (the 66th Bengal Native Infantry) to be replaced by the new 66th Gurkha Native Infantry. Napier then resigned as Commander-­in-­Chief, warning his superiors over the imminent danger of a mutiny, which Dalhousie had dismissed with his ‘entire dissent’ (quoted in Hibbert, 1980: 61). In 1855 Dalhousie had been replaced by Lord Canning, and within a year Canning (against the advice of some in the EIC) had opened up the Bengal Army to the ‘General Service Enlistment Act’. This effectively meant that all newly recruited troops (though the rumours implied it would operate retrospectively to include all troops) could be sent anywhere the EIC wanted to send them, rather than keeping the troops close to their recruitment areas. As a consequence, regiments now lived in isolated camps where most of their communications were with other regiments, not their homes. The Bengal Irregular Cavalry was primarily composed of Muslim recruits, and while ten of the eighteen regiments ­mutinied, three actually fought against the mutiny. Similarly, the Muslim-­dominated artillery units either did not participate in the mutiny or, if they did, did not kill any British officers. Despite the complexity of the Muslim response to the mutiny, the British often assumed that it was Islam that was at the heart of the issue (Padamsee, 2014; Powell, 2014) even though the British relied on Muslim sepoys to put down the mutiny. If the Indian troops of the EIC armies regularly complained about their British uniforms in the heat and humidity, their British officers regularly complained about the uniform nature of their lives. With most of India now pacified under EIC control, the role of combat had been displaced by the relative tedium of parades, guard duties, and exercises. But at least the British officers (even the unmarried ones) had pampered domestic lives in their servant-­endowed villas (fifteen Indian servants per British officer was not unusual). Irrespective of rank, no British NCO or officer could be ordered to perform any duty by an Indian officer, irrespective of rank, and the close social connections between the early EIC officers and their sepoys had long stretched to generalized British disdain for their native troops. Similarly, whereas the British officers of the 1820s and 1830s had often taken Indian mistresses or married local women, this practice had reduced by 1850 (Gilmour, 2018: 283–336). India, for the typical English man, was a place where ‘[e]verything was sodden . . . a detestable country. [Its people were] savages. One Englishwoman, on being asked what she knew about India and the Indians, responded: ‘Oh nothing, thank

Mutinies and Ethnicity  225 goodness. I know nothing about them. Nor do I wish to’ (quoted in Hibbert, 1980: 37). Frank Brown, who had lived in India for thirty years before the mutiny, summed up the change thus: ‘thirty years ago . . . the English were not the absolute masters everywhere. Now they are, restraint is cast away . . . and [they] display a supercilious arrogance and contempt of the people’ (quoted in Hibbert, 1980: 39). Thus in the mutiny, the only Bengal Native Infantry regiments that did not mutiny in any way—and were allowed to retain their weapons throughout—were the 21st and the 31st, both regiments led by British men with Indian family ties. As David (2003: 34) suggests, in contrast to the officers of old, ‘By the mid-­nineteenth century the typical [British] Indian Army Officer was of modest social origins, ill-­educated and only interested in India as a means of bettering himself.’ The British who worked for the EIC, in any capacity, were as likely as not to have family connections to the company and more often than not would have a connection to the Anglican Church—another reason to stoke the Indian fear that the Christianization of India was at hand (Gilmour, 2018: 79). While the more academically oriented young men interested in a position with the EIC entered their civil service college at Haileybury, the rest went to the military academy at Addiscombe, which never approached the standards achieved at Sandhurst or Woolwich and focused on mathematics but not military science (Bourne, 1979; Gilmour, 2018: 78). In effect, the EIC British officers were not the equivalent of the British Army officers with their aristocratic origins and their disdain for their salaries (many commissions were bought, and inherited wealth was assumed to make the salary no more than a method to pay off expensive mess bills). This was in marked contrast to the relatively well-­paid sums available to Indian Army officers. They could start on 182 rupees (£18) a month and could supplement that with extra-­regimental duties that were only available to those willing to abandon their regimental positions, as many were, and oversee the rapidly expanding demand for EIC governance across Bengal. On the eve of the mutiny that policy left the Bengal Army with fewer than half its allocated British officers. Even before this, in 1850, when Napier resigned as commanding officer, he had noted that ‘officers looked at their regiments merely as stepping stones to lucrative civil appointments’ (quoted in David, 2003: 36). But if the British officers, and their civil service equivalents from the EIC, had an overwhelmingly Anglican background, over half the British soldiers in India had Catholic Irish origins, and a significant proportion of the rest were Scottish (Gilmour, 2018: 95, 99). The meagre pay of Bengal Army sepoys, on the other hand, was 7 rupees a month (about 14 shillings)—two thirds of a private soldier in the EIC’s European Regiments at 10 rupees a month, while a regular British Army private received 15 rupees a month (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 132). That may have been a meagre reward for the conditions British soldiers experienced in India where sickness rates were twice those of regiments in Britain (Hibbert, 1980: 46). Equally significant, the rewards of the sepoys had declined through inflation by 50 per cent over the fifty years to 1857, and some had to pay for elem­ ents of their uniform and buy their own food. It was worse for those in the cavalry, the sowars, who had to buy and feed their own horse (‘silladari’), a consequence of which many sowars had, at best, nags and old horses bought cheap at market (Gilmour, 2018: 240). Various commanders of the army had tried to secure pay increases, but it was to no avail, and the previous method of supplementing their income—by prize money in the various military campaigns—had been severely restricted. Moreover, Bengal sepoys had to

226  Mutiny and Leadership build their own 10 ft by 8 ft mud hut, had to live without their families (unlike the Madras and Bombay sepoys), and existed in what the Times called ‘relics of barbarism’. Even Florence Nightingale, although she never visited India, was prompted by the data she accumulated to write: ‘The native troops had no barracks, no lavatories, no baths, no kitchens . . . [T]the squalor of their huts was indescribable, bodies of animals and human beings were left unburied for days; the water they drank was stinking. Consequently, though temperate, the Bengal Native soldiers were decimated by disease’ (Hays, 1989: 153). But at least they were not decimated by the floggings that had become commonplace until the new Articles of War in 1845 which centralized all punishments and made summary punishment by regimental commanding officers all but illegal, though after a significant backlash from officers in the field it was then reintroduced but limited to punishment for mutiny, insubordination, and drunkenness. As for promotion by merit—and the constraints this might have on Indian soldiers—it did not exist. Instead everything was by seniority, so that young talented soldiers were often led by old talentless soldiers (Hibbert, 1980: 48). It was therefore, in the words of Sita Ram Pandy (a Bengal Army sepoy), not the presence of the lash that drove the mutineers to act but rather ‘the feeling of power that the sepoys had, and the little control the sahibs were allowed to exert over them’ (quoted in David, 2003: 44). What irked the British officers even more was the new legislation that allowed sepoys to appeal against their convictions to the commander in chief, and many did. So poor was the Bengal Army’s discipline, in the eyes of the British officers, that the United Services Gazette in February of 1857—before the cartridge issue had arisen—wrote of the average sepoy as ‘a lackadaisical, discontented idler, prompt to seize excuses for refusing to do his duty, and absolutely rendering the presence of British necessary . . . to keep him to his allegiance’ (quoted in David, 2003: 44). That allegiance, if it ever existed, had worn precariously thin by 1857, both amongst the sepoys of the Bengal Army and indeed some of the civilians also disadvantaged by the activities of the EIC. That included Baji Rao II, the last Peshwa of the Maratha Confederacy, who, after defeat in the Third Maratha War in 1819, lived in exile in Bithur with his titles and pension until he died in 1851. At that point, his adopted son, Nana Govind Dhondu Pant, tried to secure his title and pension from the EIC but to no avail; in the knowledge that the case was doomed—but that the British Army had faced defeats in both Kabul (1842) and the Crimea (1854)—Nana tried to organize resistance to the EIC. Initially this was ignored, but after the annexation of Oudh opinion began to swing in his favour. But if the kindling was set, the spark was still missing; it arrived in the form of rifle cartridges. The 1857 mutiny was not the first one in the EIC’s history. The first recorded mutiny was in 1647 by British troops over pay, and a further mutiny occurred in 1757 over allowances, boots, and alcohol, which resulted in the flogging of thirty British mutineers. Seven years later, in 1764, Clive’s own Lal Paltan (Red Battalion) of sepoys mutinied over the distribution of prize money; Clive had twenty-­four mutineers blown from the guns.10

10  ‘Blown from the guns’ meant being tied by the wrists to the wheels of a cannon across its mouth, loaded with extra powder but no shot. Usually the victims were executed simultaneously leaving just their arms dangling and still attached to the wheels. Only their blackened heads normally survived the explosions, scattered hundreds of feet from the cannons. The punishment was first used by the Moguls, not the British, and its speed of execution was deemed by some as preferable to a long slow death by hanging, though for others it prevented reincarnation since the body was no longer in one piece. Gen. Sir Hector Munro was the first exponent of this form of execution in 1764 when thirty-­four Indian rebels were executed in Bengal (Sane, nd: 70).

Mutinies and Ethnicity  227 There were a further twenty-­five mutinies between this and the Great Mutiny of 1857 (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 4–5). It is also worth noting that the Hindustani word for mutiny was ‘ghadr’, which translates as ‘ingratitude’ rather than ‘rebellion’, a grievance with the authorities rather than a revolt against them (Hibbert, 1980: 62). This implies that the vocabulary of motive for the Indian mutineers and their British enemy might have been radically different. Ironically, one of the reasons that the British regained control over the north of India during the Great Mutiny was because of the loyalty of the south, where a mutiny—resonant with the causes of the Great Mutiny—had developed in 1806 in Vellore in the state of Tamil Nadu in about one third of the Madras army of the EIC which then comprised 7,900 British troops and 55,000 sepoys (Moodley, 2001: 89). Mutinies in the Madras Army had been relatively common in the late eighteenth century and usually related to the absence or tardiness of pay (Sane, nd: 5–6). The symbol of dissent at Vellore was the newly introduced headgear, a turban, but, as later, the typical British response was to assume that the turban was a smokescreen for the real problem—a conspiracy of discontented Indian elites. ‘It was easier’, suggests Frey (2013: 4), ‘for British policy makers to accept that Indian princes might be treacherous than to countenance the possibility that sepoys might have political abilities and aspirations of their own.’ The g­ overnor of Madras, Lord William Bentinck, had been ordered to reduce the military budget after almost half a century of warfare, and, having pacified the Madras region by 1799 with the Battle of Srirangpattanam and the defeat of Tipu Sultan, the army’s new commander-­in-­chief, Sir John Cradock, had embarked on replacing the surfeit of unofficial rules with a set of regulations and introduced some radical money-­saving reforms, including uniforms and a new turban designed by Major Bosc of the 2/14th Native Infantry. Many of the changes also saw a change in the social contract between an entrepreneurial army—where desertion and re-­enlistment was commonly linked to the changes in the labour market—and a new professional relationship where drill and discipline displaced money as the social glue that held the army together (Moodley, 2001: 91). After 1799, only junior positions were made available to the Indian troops, and the so-­called ‘Black Commandant’ position was abolished (Sane, nd: 6). That not only brought shame on Indian officers but also fractured the communications between the Indian and British sections of the army by reducing Indian officers ‘to the role of mere enforcers of rules rather than negotiators’ (Frey, 2013: 17). In effect, the British remained unaware of the conspiracy because the only information they received was the good news they wanted to hear, not the bad news they needed to hear: Prozac Leadership (Collinson, 2012). In January 1806 the new 150-­page manual of Regimental Orders, covering discipline, dress, and drills, arrived, along with requirements for Hindus not to wear caste marks, Muslims not to wear beards, both to wear a white calico stock around the neck (that the Indian troops believed to be made of cow leather), and both to use a new belt that resembled a cross—offending all non-­Christians (Krishna et al., 2013; Moodley, 2001: 90). In fact the role of rumour, not just in the Indian mutiny but in all mutinies is almost universal (see Wagner [2010] on rumours in the Indian Uprising). The new styled turban, or ‘European Hat’ as it was called, was also believed by some Indian Troops to designate the wearer as a Christian (Sane, nd: 16). In April that year the new turban arrived at Vellore, ninety miles west of Madras, where the garrison guarded the imprisoned Tipu Sultan. One of the sepoys of the 2/4th Native Infantry declared it to be a ‘Portuguese drummer’s topi (hat)’ implying it was something only a pariah or untouchable would wear. It was what

228  Mutiny and Leadership they perceived as the demeaning status that so annoyed the sepoys, and not necessarily any threat from Christianity implied by the religion of the drummers. Indeed, as Frey (2013: 14–16) suggests, most of the Indians regarded the Europeans generally as being of no religion, quick to imbibe alcohol and engage in duels rather than proselytize to the sepoys. In 1844 it was still the custom in Madras for British officers to be taken back to their houses from a mess night in wheelbarrows, and the traditional requirements of appropriate etiquette (heavy mess uniforms irrespective of the weather, and byzantine cultural codes of conduct—no politics, no religion, no military matters) continued then, as they do now. In 1797 the memoirist William Hickey dined with Arthur Wellesley’s regiment in Calcutta and was persuaded to participate in the usual twenty-­two formal toasts, leaving him unable to get out of bed the following day (Gilmour, 2018: 275, 278). In fact, the framework of the pre-­mutiny relations between British officers and Indian sepoys was ‘live and let live’, where the British engaged in their ‘profanities’ and the Indians maintained their own customs, cultures, and rituals of caste and religion—until the new turban arrived. Yet it was not just the turban but all the associated changes that came with Cradock’s attempts to standardize the increasing diversity of the Madras Army that endangered the status quo. Thus the new regulations required the removal of all beards, offending the Muslims, and the removal of all caste marks, offending the Hindus. On 6 May, after the 2/4th Native Infantry informed their CO, Lt Col. John Darley, that they would not wear the turban, he challenged each soldier to wear the turban and they all refused. Ultimately order was restored through the intervention of Indian officers, but the 2/4th Native Infantry was disbanded and replaced by a new unit, the 2/23rd Native Infantry, that complied with the order and continued to guard Tipu Sultan along with the 1/1st Native Infantry (an elite, mainly Muslim unit originally recruited from the old army of Tipu Sultan and the most prestigious regiment in the Madras Army). But the au­thor­ ities had not finished yet: on 29 June two ringleaders of the 2/4th mutiny (one Muslim and one Hindu) were sentenced to 900 lashes each and discharged from the army. Nineteen others received 500 lashes each (Sane, nd: 23). At about 02.00 on 10 July 1806, after the arrival of 2/1st Native Infantry en route elsewhere, the sepoys of the 1/1st, led by their own Indian officers—Subedar (Captain) Noor Mohamed, Subedar Sheikh Hussain, and Jamadar (junior officer) Sheikh Cassim—mu­tin­ ied. Lt Col. Forbes, the CO of 1/1st, should not have been surprised because Mustafa Beg, a sepoy gunner from the regiment, had already warned him that a mutiny was being planned, but Forbes did not believe him (Sane, nd: 25). At first, at least half the sepoys took little part in taking over the fort, but the mutiny resulted in the killing about 100 of the 383 British officers and soldiers from the (British) 69th Foot in the resulting battle over the garrison fort at Vellore. The 1,500 mutineers were eventually defeated by the survivors of the 69th Foot and a unit of Indian cavalry, Col. Gillespie’s 19th Light Dragoons from the nearby Fort St George, who arrived about 08.00 after hearing the news from an escapee. Gillespie had built a reputation as a violent but effective soldier in Jamaica and the 19th Light Dragoons were known locally as ‘The Terror of the East’. In a frenzy of killing between 650 and 800 mutineers were killed, including somewhere between 300 and 350 who were executed without trial by firing squad or bayonetted to death on Gillespie’s orders. About fifty prisoners were herded into a courtyard and shot with grapeshot from two Galloper guns (small artillery cannon pulled by one horse). Four hundred and

Mutinies and Ethnicity  229 forty-­six Indian soldiers escaped from the fort and were later apprehended and taken for trial. The total British casualties were 130 dead and 53 wounded (Moodley, 2001: 87, 89; Tharoor, 2017: 166; and Sane, nd: 66). During the fighting one British child was killed, and it seems that this was in revenge for the killing of an Indian child shortly before, but no other British children or women were attacked (Sane, nd: 46). As Moodley (2001: 93) concludes ‘the sepoy violence was discriminating’. In the subsequent enquiries it was decided that the Mysorean princes were at the heart of the ‘Muslim conspiracy’, and they were exiled to Calcutta. The other ‘cause’, according to the third enquiry, was the change in uniform. Nineteen mutineers were court-­martialled and executed on 23 September 1806: six blown from the cannons, five shot, and eight hanged. Five more were transported and two were acquitted (Sane, nd: 69–70). All three Madras units involved in the mutiny were disbanded. Craddock was called back to Britain—and had to pay his own fare (£3,500)—while the new turban was abandoned, as were most of the new regulations, allowing the return of the close relationship between the British and the Indian elements, which is one explanation for the general refusal of the Madras Army to support the 1857 mutiny (Frey, 2013: 6). Gillespie was awarded £2,500 and died in the Anglo-­Nepal War in 1814 (Sane, nd: 75–6). On 1 November 1824, another mutiny occurred in the Bengal Army at Barrackpore when the 47th Regiment of the Bengal Native Infantry (BNI) refused to leave the parade ground, en route to the 1st Anglo-­Burma War, because their belongings had been left behind since the usual bullock trains could not be hired in time. The sepoys, led by Bindee Tiwari and now joined by some members of the 62nd and 26th BNI, submitted a petition to General Sir Edward Paget, requesting that their grievances be addressed or that they should be allowed to leave the service. Paget arrived on 2 November, along with the British 47th (Lancashire) Regiment of Foot and the British 1st (Royal) Regiment, plus some horse artillery, and he demanded the mutineers lay down their weapons. When they hesitated, Paget ordered an artillery and infantry attack upon them, killing somewhere between sixty and a hundred sepoys. Eleven of those subsequently captured were hanged the same day, and many others received prison sentences. Bindee Tiwari was hung in chains to die of starvation (Dempster, 1976; Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 30). The weapons that the 47th Regiment BNI had refused to lay down—which turned out to be unloaded—were some of the almost half a million percussion smooth-­bore muskets in India. Their replacement, the 0.577-­bore Enfield rifle, had been due in India in 1854, but the Crimea War had seen the supplied diverted there, so that they did not arrive until May 1857, and only one Bengal regiment (60th Native Infantry) and one British regiment (60th Rifles) had received them prior to the mutiny. The cartridges for both muskets and muzzle-­loading rifles at the time were similar in design, comprising a paper tube containing the powder and either the old musket ball or new rifle bullet, and both required the shooter to bite off the top of the cartridge—as had always been the case—and pour the contents into the barrel, pushing the cartridge, and the ball or bullet, down with a ramrod (LeClair, 2015). However, the rifling on the Enfield required one third of the powder to be greased to facilitate the spinning bullet, and that was usually made of beef tallow or pig fat or both. In fact, the Enfield rifle had been tested in 1853 in India to assess its utility in the local conditions, and at that point General Gomm, the Commander in Chief, had warned the EIC’s Military Board that ‘unless it be known that the grease employed in these cart­ ridges is not of a nature to offend or interfere with the prejudices of caste, it will be

230  Mutiny and Leadership expedient not to issue them for test to Native corps’ (quoted in David, 2003: 53). Gomm’s concerns went unheeded and the tests included use by the sepoys with no apparent concern. In 1856 the Bengal Army’s Ordnance Department began manufacturing the cart­ ridges at Fort William, Dum-­Dum, and Meerat, using animal tallow, but which animal’s fat was used was unclear (Hibbert, 1980: 54–5). On 22 January 1857 Matadin Bhangi, a Dalit11 worker in the Dum-­Dum arsenal, al­leged­ly asked Mangal Pandey—a Brahmin (high-­caste) sepoy—if he could take a drink from the sepoy’s brass canteen and was refused on the grounds that it would defile the vessel. To which the worker allegedly replied that soon the sahibs ‘will make you bite cart­ ridges soaked in cow and pork fat, and then where will your caste be?’ (quoted in David, 2003: 54). Indeed, the symbolism operates in both political directions: for some Indian mutineers it embodied all that was both wrong and dangerous about the British, attempting to defile India and convert both Muslims and Hindus to Christianist. For some of the British, the response of some of the mutineers to the cartridge embodied all that the former took for granted in the latter: Indians were childlike in their excitability and Luddite in their responses to technical advances. As General John Lawrence, Chief Commissioner of the northwest provinces, insisted, ‘The mutiny was due to the greased cartridges, and greased cartridges only’ (quoted in Kaye and Malleson, 1971: 280). This was vigorously denounced by Disraeli who called the argument ‘absurd’ and insisted that the dispute was not just a mutiny but a manifestation of the ‘general discontent’ of the Indian people (quoted in Thakur, 2016: 561). Even if Disraeli was right, what the cartridge did— irrespective of any material aspects—was funnel all the discontent from the Indian side, and all the colonialist attitude from the other side, into a potent, easily understandable, and immediate symbol of Indian discontent and British imperialism. Moreover, as Tiwari (2014: 4–5) argues, the implication of the conversation between Bhangi and Pandey is not that the defiled cartridge provoked the mutiny but that it was the Dalits, the ‘untouchables’, that ignited the rebellion, not because the British offered them the possibility of a life without the disadvantage of caste imposed by the indigenous hierarchies (that was never British policy), but because it was those at the bottom of the social hierarchy who played a leading role in the rebellion and those at the top (the Indian elites) who betrayed the rebellion by remaining loyal to the British. Equally important for the Dalits, an early proclamation from the mutineers in Delhi was that all castes should stick to their caste privileges; in effect, the rebellion offered the Dalits little. In the words of Birjas Qadr, heralded by the mutineers as the King of Awadh on 5 July 1857: All Hindus and Mussalmans know that four things are held dearly by every human being: (1) religion and faith; (2) honour and esteem; (3) life of self and relation; (4) property. These four were protected under the rule of the Indians, under whose government ­no-­one interfered with religion; everyone followed his own faith and everyone’s honour was ­protected in accordance with their position. No mean person, for example sweeper (churha), leather-­worker (chamar) . . . could claim equality with them. But the English are the enemies of these four things . . . [T]hey have brought the honour of the high classes on 11  The Indian Caste system divided the Hindu population into four castes: Brahmins (priests or teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (farmers and traders), and Shudras (labourers). Dalits (‘Depressed classes’) comprised a ‘fifth’ group that remained ‘untouchable’ to the four other castes.

Mutinies and Ethnicity  231 a level with that of the lower people—sweepers and leather-­workers. In fact, the English show preference to the lower castes over the higher classes. On the complaint of a sweeper or a leather-­worker, they seize the person of even a Nawab and a Raja and disgrace him. (quoted in Gupta, 2014: 18)

Similarly, the EIC prisons embodied a ‘caste-­blind’ system that did not recognize any religious or caste differences on the grounds of equality of treatment—so food and water, for example, was shared, irrespective of local prohibitions—but that very equality eroded the differences embodied in the heart of both the religious and caste divisions in Indian society. And while the prisons were never at the heart of the rebellion, they were taken by many as the symbol of what the British intended for the rest of the population—a harbinger of doom (Anderson, 2014). The reduction of the mutiny to an ‘oversight’ by the British also implies that prior to this event the East India Company had constructed a civil and civilizing mission that many Indians welcomed, whereas in all likelihood the rebellion had been festering for many years (Daechsel, 2014: xv, xviii). The ‘civilizing’ rhetoric of the EIC also provided an equivalent narrative to explain the mutiny: self-­evidently ‘the rebels [were] cast as bloodthirsty savages, driven by superstition and primitive passions. Secret conspirators were believed to have manipulated the gullible masses, stirring up animosity against the British by spreading false rumours’ (Wagner, 2019: 2). And while the brutality of the mutineers against the British troops and civilians was clearly just a manifestation of their savagery, the equivalent brutality of the British against the mutineers and their civilians was deemed by the British as both appropriate and necessary to restore the very civilization which had been undermined by the mutiny (Roy, 2013: 28). As Lord Stanley said in a speech to the British House of Commons, ‘Only by great exertions—by the employment of force, by making striking examples, and inspiring terror, could Sir J. Lawrence save the Punjab; and if the Punjab had been lost the whole of India would for the time have been lost with it’ (quoted in Wagner, 2019: 6). This concern over the cartridges also coincided with the first weapons training sessions at various depots, and on the first evening reports came in that the troops had objected to handling the cartridges and asked that beeswax and oil be used instead. Major General Hearsey, CO of the Presidency Division and one of the few British officers to be well integrated into Indian life with an Anglo-­Indian family and fluent in Hindustani, decided to allow the sepoys to grease the cartridges themselves using local vegetable materials. His decision led to Colonel Birch, the Military Secretary, ordering all cartridges to be issued without grease to ensure this, and orders were given by Colonel Abbott, the Inspector General of Ordnance, that if tallow was deemed to be essential then it should be sheep or goat-­based. But it already seemed too late: on 26 January the senior Indian officers of the 34th Native Infantry, along with Wajid Ali (the King of Oudh) and others from the 2nd, 34th, 47th, and 70th, tried but failed to seize key points in Calcutta. Two days later, British property at Barrackpore and the Raniganj railway and telegraphic office were burned by elements from the 2nd, 19th and 34th Native Infantry; the latter two regiments were from the disbanded Oudh army. Despite the tardy efforts of the British to assuage the minds of the sepoys, a parade of the 2nd Native Infantry at their barracks in Barrackpore on 4th February led to significant dissent, even though the cartridges contained no grease or tallow, and the rumours spread that the British were attempting to turn all Indians into Christians. The British authorities

232  Mutiny and Leadership responded by pointing the finger of blame directly at the followers of the King of Oudh whose agenda—they insisted—had nothing to do with greased cartridges and everything to do with regaining his land and power. Whatever the cause of the unrest, General Hearsey was clear that by 11 February there was ‘a mine ready for explosion’ (quoted in David, 2003: 58). On 25 February, sepoys from the 19th Native Infantry stationed at Berhampore, 120 miles north of Calcutta, refused to use blank cartridges for an exercise and their commanding officer, Lt Colonel Mitchell, responded by warning them that any sepoy refusing the order would be posted overseas to Burma or China. Since that involved crossing the sea, and contravened some of the sepoys’ cultural mores concerning leaving India across ‘black water’, some of them seized their weapons and Mitchell responded by ordering elem­ents from the 11th Irregular Cavalry to guard two artillery pieces that were trained on the dissenting sepoys. At 03.00 hours Mitchell gave up threatening them, and the sepoys returned to their beds and the dissent petered out, but, after Canning’s intervention, the regiment was ordered to be disbanded at Barrackpore, about fifteen miles from Calcutta. For the sepoys, disbanding a regiment was a catastrophe, not an inconvenience, for it meant the loss of permanent employment, a pension (however meagre), prize money, or loot12 (though only half a British soldier’s share), medical help, uniform, and a route to the same regiment for their sons (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 30–1). A week after Mitchell’s mini-­mutiny, the rumour mill generated ever-­greater concerns. First was that the flour used by the sepoys had been mixed with the ground bones of cows and pigs, even though all the flour was made by Indian flour mills (Anderson, 2014: 55). Second was that the cartridges must have been originally intended to turn all the Indians into Christians, otherwise why would the British have now withdrawn them? (Ram, 1873/1988: 612). Third was that chapatis, in groups of four, were being distributed across Bengal and that somehow signalled some impending disaster for Indians, most probably related to being forced to accept Christianity (Hibbert, 1980: 59). The religious threat persuaded General Hearsey to assuage the anxieties of his troops, and he began at Barrackpore with the 34th BNI, under Colonel Steven Wheler (an evangelical Christian): ‘No person is permitted to force you to become Christian, nay I now tell you, if any officer or other person dare in this cantonment to annoy you by preaching to you on these subjects, to come and complain to me, your general and I will punish him if he is an officer’ (quoted in Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 32). This was in direct conflict with Wheler’s activities, which he subsequently admitted in an article in the Illustrated London News: ‘As to the question whether I have endeavoured to convert sepoys and others to Christianity, I would humbly reply that this has been my object, and I conceive is the aim  and end of every Christian who speaks the word of God to another’ (quoted in ­Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 32). At about 16.00 on 29 March, the day before the 19th BNI was due in Barrackpore alongside fifty soldiers from the British 53rd Regiment designated to oversee the disbandment, Mangal Pandey, the sepoy from No. 5 Company 34th BNI that had been insulted by Matadin Bhangi’s request for a drink, allegedly refused to put on his uniform. He then 12  ‘Loot’ has its origins in the Hindustani word ‘lut’ meaning ‘depredation, pillage, spoil, or booty’. The distribution of prize money was formalized in Britain in 1708 when an Admiralty Prize Court was established (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 129–30).

Mutinies and Ethnicity  233 called on his sepoy comrades to rise up against the British before they were all slaughtered by the approaching 53rd Regiment. When James Hewson, his Sergeant-­Major, intervened, Pandey fired his musket at him, but missed, and then reloaded and shot at Lt Bempde Baugh, the adjutant, hitting his horse. Baugh and Hewson both fired back at Pandey, also missing their target, and Pandey then inflicted sword wounds on both his targets. Havildar (sergeant) Pultoo (a Muslim) then restrained Pandey but was himself attacked by other sepoys and called upon Issuree Pandy, the Jamadar (the Indian junior officer on duty), to arrest Pandey. Pandy refused, citing Pandey’s high caste—and the significant presence of that group in the regiment—as the reason neither he nor the guards on duty could intervene. In effect, it seems clear that Pandey was not acting alone but was deeply integrated into a conspiracy to mutiny (Forster, 2013). Meanwhile the commanding officer of the 34th, Colonel Wheler, arrived and ordered other sepoys to take Pandey prisoner, but they also refused and Wheler retreated (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 32–3). On hearing the news, Major-­General Hearsey ordered nearby British troops to march to Barrackpore, and he raced with his two sons to Barrackpore where he immediately confronted Pandey, who was again calling on his sepoy comrades to rise up and defend their religion and caste because the British were coming to kill them all. On seeing Hearsey, Pandey then attempted to kill himself, but the musket shot only superficially wounded him and no other sepoys joined him. Hearsey then reprimanded the sepoys for allowing the event to occur, which they put down to Pandey having taken an excess of bhang (edible cannabis, and a common practice at the time). The subsequent court martial was comprised of fourteen Indian officers, with Wheler as the Prosecutor and a British Judge Advocate.13 Both Sepoy Pandey and Jemadar Pandy were found guilty of mutiny and hanged from a banyan tree on 8 and 21 April respectively on Barrackpore parade ground in front of four Indian infantry regiments and a significant number of British troops. When the sentence was read out at Pandey’s execution there was, according to Captain Robert Tytler, ‘a murmur of disapprobation throughout the whole Regiment. Though it lasted but a few seconds, it struck me forcibly as something extraordinary, never having witnessed anything like it before’ (quoted in Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 35). After they were pronounced dead, General Hearsey shouted to the assembled troops: ‘Men, Sepoys, witness the punishment for mutiny’ (quoted in David, 2003: 74). Two weeks later, the 34th BNI was found guilty of ‘passive mutiny’ and, like the 19th BNI, disbanded. The 10th BNI, however, continued and was active in putting down the mutiny later that year, most notably at Awah where its sepoys were involved in the summary execution of twenty-­five mutineers, at Kotah, and in the crushing of the Rhani of Jhansi at Gwalior (Mercer, 2016). Elsewhere the discontent continued, most notably at Ambala, the site of one of the musketry depots, where once again sepoys from the 71st BNI refused to use the cartridges on 16 March, and three days later the new Commander-­in-­Chief of India arrived. General Anson was well known for securing his position through his aristocratic network, as well as being recognized as disdainful of anything Indian. A week later, on 23 March, Anson told the Governor of Bombay that ‘the sepoys have been pampered and given way to, and have become . . . insolent beyond bearing’ (quoted in David, 2003: 63). 13  Whether Pandey was high on drugs or an early hero of the war of independence depends very much on who is assessing the evidence. Forster’s (2013) review suggests a line between the two extremes.

234  Mutiny and Leadership By this time the British assumed that the issue of the cartridges had been ‘solved’ by a change in firing drill so that, as of 3 April, cartridges were not to be bitten but torn by hand, and Canning, the Governor General, wrote in a letter to Lord Granville (President of the Council of India) that ‘It has been a much more anxious matter than Persia, ten times over; for a false step might have set the Indian Army in a blaze’ (quoted in David, 2003: 75). And, since it was in the interests of the British to regard the dissent as purely a military affair—a mutiny, not a political insurrection—he then turned down an offer of extra British Army troops and instead reduced the size of each Native Industry Regiment from 1,000 to 800 sepoys in order to save sufficient funds to provide for four new British EIC regiments. Shortly after this, live firing of the new Enfield rifles began with cartridges that had been greased by sepoys with their own mixture of ghee (clarified butter) and beeswax, but a rash of fires coincided with the action at Ambala depot, though not ­Dum-­Dum or Sialkot. Nevertheless, the fear of impending doom swirled around the British officers. As Lt Martineau from the Ambala depot wrote to the assistant ­adjutant-­general at Army HQ, ‘Feeling . . . is as bad as can be and matters have gone so far that I can hardly devise a suitable remedy . . . . I can detect the near approach of the storm, I can hear the moaning of the hurricane, but I can’t say how, when or where it will break forth’ (quoted in David, 2003: 77). The storm arrived on 13 April in Meerut, HQ of the Bengal Artillery and the depot with the highest proportion of British (two regiments) to Indian troops (three regiments), when arsonists burned down several buildings. Ten days later, Carmichael-­Smyth, Colonel of the Indian 3rd Light Cavalry, without reference to his commanding officer and alone amongst the commanders of the Indian troops, ordered the ninety skirmishers of the regiment (an elite group) to take part in live firing with their new tear-­off cartridges, but immediately two Muslim corporals from the skirmishers informed their comrades that the cartridges had been deliberately tainted with pork and beef fat and that, to avoid being shamed by the rest of the regiment, they must not comply with the colonel’s orders. That morning eighty-­five skirmishes (forty-­eight Muslims and thirty-­seven Hindus) refused to touch the cartridges; the five who did were all NCOs (three Muslim and two Hindu). All eighty-­five skirmishers were then tried for ‘collective disobedience’ by fifteen Indian of­fi­ cers, having concluded that, since the cartridges were actually two years old and had not be tainted by any animal grease, the defendants were found guilty, fourteen to one. All were sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. That effectively meant the end of their careers for some who had served almost forty years and were due to receive their pensions. On Saturday 9 May the skirmishers were paraded in front of both armed British and unarmed Indian regiments and were publicly shackled and marched to the gaol where they were imprisoned and guarded by a small number of Indian troops. That night, Carmichael-­Smyth was warned that the garrison would mutiny in the morning and rescue their comrades, but he dismissed the report. The next morning the British attended church, and, despite the constant warnings from their Indian servants about the impending attack, no preparations were made to defend the British. At 17.00 unrest in the bazaar led to the dispersal of sepoys who had been informed that the British were coming to disarm them, and at 18.00 sepoys guarding the magazine began leaving their posts, with their muskets. Shortly after, sepoys from the 20th Infantry seized their arms and began advancing upon the British enclosure, shooting dead John Finnis, Colonel of the 11th BNI, as well as Captain Macdonald on the parade ground. As ever, there are lots of examples where civilian and

Mutinies and Ethnicity  235 military Indians both killed and saved British civilians and soldiers. Macdonald’s wife and her three children were clothed in Indian garb by her servants, but, while the children were taken to safety, Mrs Macdonald was murdered (David, 2003: 91). Lt Gough recorded the events thus: ‘Most of them [his own mutinous troops] were mounted and galloping to and fro; the lines were being burnt and there was a general rush to the magazine, where men helped themselves to the ammunition—regardless of its being “unclean cartridges” ’ (quoted in Hibbert, 1980: 85). This does not mean that the cartridges were not an ­important element of the mutiny, but they were clearly not as important as some have assumed. When news of the mutiny filtered through to the British command, at about 18.00, it took an hour to get any action as Colonel Custance insisted on a roll call, ordered the cavalry to change from their white drill uniforms to their service dress, and find an officer who knew the area where the mutiny seemed to be occurring. By the time the column set off to find the mutineers under Brigadier Wilson (it should have been Major-­General Hewitt’s command but Hewitt was overwhelmed by the crisis), the mutineers had disappeared and it was too dark to pursue them. Whether they should have even thought about leaving the British survivors almost alone in Meerut is a moot point. When daylight came the body count started: there were over forty-­one British dead, including eight officers, twelve soldiers, eight women, and eight children. Whether the events in Meerut were premeditated is unclear: certainly there were rumours of an impending mutiny, but quite how much the actual events were orchestrated and how much it was more or less spontaneous remained unclear. Hewitt was relieved of command, and many British officers held him responsible for not dealing the mutineers a decisive blow early enough to stifle the mutiny at birth. The mutineers had actually set off for Delhi after a meeting to plan their next action, despite some of them just wanting to go to their homes. Delhi had few British troops, and Rao and Dutta (2012) suggest this space, almost free of the British and often suffused with religious festivals and symbols, was a significant attraction since it enabled the mutineers to speak and agitate openly without fear of immediate repression—always an important problem for mutineers. Delhi was also the home of the disgruntled 72-­year-­old Bahadur Shah II, grandson of the last Moghul Emperor and King of Delhi, whom the mutineers hoped would support them. He lived in the Red Fort, the opulent home of the Moghul emperors, where, as a pensioner of the EIC, he ruled the fort but nothing else. The British had refused to recognize his favourite son, the 11-­year-­old Mirza Jawan Bakht, after the eldest son died in 1849, and instead the EIC favoured the new eldest son, Mirza Fakir-­ud-­din, who would have lived on the inherited pension—on condition he vacated the fort to the British. In fact he died, and was probably poisoned, in 1856, and still the British opted for the then eldest son, Mirza Bahkt, as heir-­apparent. That was sufficient for the King to begin plotting against the British, even to the extent of asking for military assistance from the Shah of Persia. But while it seems that the King was forewarned of the mutiny at Meerut, it is not proven that he was an active accomplice in the events. When the mu­tin­ eers arrived at Delhi, on the morning of 11 May, there were attempts to close the city gates at the order of Captain Douglas, the commandant of the Palace Guard, but it was too late, and several of the British inhabitants of the Red Fort were killed, though neither of the two female victims were raped, despite rumours to the contrary. Indeed, the rumour mill was on overtime on both sides. Lt John Chalmers from the 24th Punjab Pioneers wrote to a friend: ‘Hundreds of Europeans have been murdered in cold blood; European ladies

236  Mutiny and Leadership violated, publicly exposed, and then tortured to death. Soldiers have amused themselves by pitching European children about from bayonet to bayonet’ (quoted in Roy, 2013: 29). That there was no evidence of the violation, torture, or bayoneting seems not to have mattered. In Delhi, at the Kashmir Gate, elements of the 38th and 54th attacked their own British officers, killing five of the eight. The two remaining companies of the 54th, who remained loyal to the EIC, along with two artillery pieces, then took over the gate and awaited events. Ironically that included the return of 200 sepoys from the mutinous 54th who claimed they were misled. Meanwhile all the British and European residents of Delhi were ordered to move into the Flagstaff Tower on the Ridge, a military cantonment, where the primarily female occupants (including Harriet Tytler, the wife of Captain Tytler) began stocking up food and ammunition to withstand the expected attack. A similar scenario played out at the main magazine, with an enormous store of gunpowder, muskets, and cannons. It was defended by two elderly British officers and six British civilians against the attacks of sepoys from the 11th and 20th regiments, and whilst the defenders used various cannons against the attackers, ultimately the former were struck down by the muskets of the latter, and at that point Conductor Scully (the most senior warrant officer rank) lit the powder trail that blew up the entire magazine, including five of the defendants14 and hundreds of others, sepoys and onlookers alike. The blast was heard in Meerut, over forty miles away, and while the munitions were denied to the mutineers they still had access to the new magazine outside the city. Meanwhile the British at the Kashmir Gate were attacked by elements of their own previously loyal troops, and the survivors—five officers, six women, and an Indian servant— set off for the north of the city but were slowed down when one of the women (Mrs Forster) could not keep up and had to be carried by two of the officers. Eventually she proved too heavy and, having become unconscious, she was left on the journey and never seen again. At the Flagstaff Tower a dispute arose between the British officers as to whether they should stand their ground or try and retreat to Meerut, as Captain Tytler suggested— protected by his allegedly loyal troops from the 38th and some from the 74th regiments. However, as the bedraggled convoy made its way from the Flagstaff Tower, the magazine blew up, and the sepoys took that as a signal to leave the convoy; it then proceeded at a snail’s pace, pursued by mutineers. Sixteen hours later, and several members lighter, the eight men and six women arrived at Karnal, where they stopped to send a letter to the Meerut Garrison, in French, begging for a rescue column. They were later captured by some villagers but again saved, first by an Indian fakir and then by a German civilian. At this point the rescue party from Meerut arrived and eventually the group, then numbering seventeen, were escorted back to camp. Back at the Red Fort, Mainodin Hassan Khan, thanadar (Chief of Police) of Pahargunge, pleaded with the King to restore order, but the King responded that he had no power with which to restore order; however, he ordered two of his chobdars (mace bearers) to go with Mainodin and do what they could. Over the next two days Mainodin rescued about fifty British civilians, mainly woman and children, and smuggled them back into a cellar room 14 Some survived, including Lt. Raynor and Conductor Buckley, who each received the newly instituted Victoria Cross; since posthumous awards did not begin until 1902, the other defenders of the magazine who died received no formal recognition (David, 2003: 118).

Mutinies and Ethnicity  237 in the Red Fort. For his part, King Bahadur Shah seemed impotent and unable to act de­cisive­ly either in favour or against the mutiny, though eventually the growing number of mutineers (who were hungry since the shops had all closed) forced the King to ride through Delhi on an elephant ordering the shops to reopen, but it was to no avail. The King then wrote the famous ‘Delhi Proclamation’—at the demand of the mutinous ­of­fi­cers—offering salaries to all those willing to join the King’s army and defeat the British. Following this, the British civilians hidden in the cellar of the Red Fort were discovered, taken outside, and murdered. Only a handful of Muslim prisoners, plus a certain Mrs Aldwell who claimed that she and her three children were Muslims from Kashmir, escaped the slaughter. The King, meanwhile, had been proclaimed Emperor (David, 2003: 120–22/6). The accumulation of rebels in Delhi did not necessarily augur well for the mutineers. Many of those flocking to the city were Muslim landless peasants (ghazis), not sepoys, and that generated an increased demand for food without an equivalent increase in military firepower, let alone discipline or a centralised command and control system (Bates and Carter, 2013). So although the British frequently explained their success through the su­per­ior­ity of the Christian god over anyone else’s god, in reality the primary factor was much more mundane: the poverty of the rebel logistics.15 Of course, the British alleged that the bravery of their soldiers was another factor in this, as Robert Dunlop, a civilian volunteer in the ‘Khakee Ressalah’, stated: ‘the weak and childish but cruel and treacherous native character [in contrast to] . . . a patent fact that the proud contempt that the ­Anglo-­Saxon bears to the Asiatic has proved, to a great extent, the salvation of our Indian Empire’ (quoted in Dalrymple, 2013: 61). Interestingly, this claim to racial superiority might also explain why the British placed so much emphasis on bravery and combat. As Wesseling (1988) (quoted in Chakravarty, 2013: 143) suggests: Colonial armies were accustomed—and often compelled—to attack continuously, irrespective of their chance of success, in order to sustain the image of European superiority. It is not difficult to discover the connection between this approach and the predominant mentality of 1914–18, which focused sharply on willpower, morale, and holding the offensive.

Several British writers later noted how the exposure of the rear positions of the British and supply lines to Karnal left them open to a simple attack but the mutineers were too militarily incompetent to realize it. As ever in mutinies, wherever they occur, the mutineers— unlike conventional industrial strikers—have little infrastructural support from the local community because, hitherto, the sovereign power is the institution that provided it. Dalrymple (2013: 62) captures the problem: ‘The rebel sepoys had created turbulence and chaos, but could not restore order.’ Even though 100,000 of the 130,000 rebels in the Bengal Army were in Delhi, the food supply simply could not cope with this rapid influx of people, let alone when the supplies to the city were disrupted, and the city’s shops refused to serve the rebels because so many of the former had been looted by the latter. 15  The Indians rebels would not be the first military unit to overlook the importance of winning the war through logistical superiority rather than just winning the battle through the bravery of soldiers: see Grint (2014) on this issue as an explanation for the Allied success on D-­Day, 1944.

238  Mutiny and Leadership Efforts were made to cajole or force the city’s moneylenders to facilitate the purchase of food from outside but to little avail, and by mid-­August the sepoys began leaving in search of food elsewhere. Equally problematic, even though Delhi had the largest magazine in the region, no guard was placed on it, and it was immediately open to indiscriminate looting by the rebels. Worse, a stray British shot blew up a gunpowder plant in Gali Churiwallan on 7 August killing 500 people and leaving the rebels desperately short of powder. Hence the poverty of the rebel supply line forced three quarters of them to leave Delhi by September 1857—just as the British (whose spies had informed them of this) attacked them (Dalrymple, 2013: 68–73). At Agra, the capital of the North-­Western Provinces with thirty million people, Charles Raikes (a judge and senior official at Agra) had been expecting the mutiny, for it was like ‘the bursting of the thundercloud I had been long and anxiously watching . . . [T]he fabric of the Bengal Army was tottering to ruin’ (quoted in David, 2003: 125). The Lieutenant Governor of the province, John Colvin, could do little about it: there were only three regiments of British troops in the province, and two of those were engaged in the action at Meerut. The other was the 3rd Bengal Europeans stationed at Agra (along with the 44th and 67th BNI). Yet, he seemed to persuade erstwhile enemies of the EIC that the real cause of the mutiny—and therefore the future threat—came from a rejuvenated Mogul Empire, and that they should therefore ally themselves with the British. And, since the ­Anglo-­Persian War was now over, those British troops were heading to India. In an attempt to quieten the rebellious mood, Canning, the Governor-­ General, issued a ­proclamation on 16th May insisting that the British had no intention of ‘interfering’ with the religions or castes of Indians, and that claims to the contrary were ‘deceptions’, saying not to ‘listen to false guides and traitors, who would lead them into danger and disgrace’ (quoted in David, 2003: 127). That same day, a more draconian order allowed court martials to convene with min­ imum protocols and also gave them the power to carry out punishment without reference to any higher court; it also attempted to soften this by allowing commanding officers to summarily promote Indians.16 Meanwhile, calls for reinforcements from all over Britain’s far-­flung empire went out, especially to help retake Delhi and to calm the petrified British residents of Calcutta. General Anson, the Commander-­in-­Chief, was told of the mutiny while he was in Simla at the foothills of the Himalayas on 12 May, but he remained in place until the 14th as he sent out orders demanding that all the magazines across the country be secured against the mutineers. He then ordered the three British regiments down to Ambala to meet up with British cavalry and artillery units, supported by what he thought would be the loyal Gurkhas of the Nasiri Battalion. He was wrong: on 14 May the Gurkhas refused to march. Worse, the regiments that left the Himalayas had gone with such speed that no tents and insufficient ammunition were taken, and, since the EIC had taken away the animal transport as part of a cost-­cutting measure the previous year, there were no draught animals to rectify the problem. As such, Anson preferred to wait until he had sufficient forces available to march on Delhi, much to the consternation of Canning who insisted on an immediate assault. By 23 May, Anson, with a combined force of three

16  As ever, we know more about the British than the Indian participants, primarily because the extant literature is British in origin, but Akhtar (2017) lists some of the mutineers in an attempt to even up the coverage.

Mutinies and Ethnicity  239 British infantry regiments, one British cavalry regiment, and an assortment of artillery and Indian troops, was ready to leave Ambala. When Anson’s mission set out for Delhi, British officers in Lahore decided to secure the huge magazine at Ferozepore and assess the loyalty of the sepoys from the 45th and 57th Native Infantry on 13 May. As the parade was marching away, elements from both regiments attacked the British before being driven off by loyal Indian troops from the 10th Light Cavalry. But the greatest recriminations were directed at the British officers. As Bartle Frere, Commissioner of Sind, wrote to Brigadier John Jacob: ‘Even you, who foresaw all this, can have no idea of the utter incapacity of the Bengal officers to meet the crisis. One of their best men, Innes, was at Ferozepore . . . After [the mutiny on 13 May] the Brigadier allows the colonels of the regiments to go and reason with the men! . . . He has the wolf by the ears’ (quoted in David, 2003: 136). By this time the wolf had grown exceedingly threatening: mutinies had broken out in twenty-­six camps, and in six others the sepoys and sowars had been disarmed to prevent any such action (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 5). The city of Peshawar, in the Punjab, was the most northerly part of the EIC and close to the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan. It was also the home of two British infantry regiments and John Nicholson, the Deputy Commissioner of Peshawar, was something of a Victorian living legend in the area, having decapitated the chief of a robber gang in front of the latter’s accomplices and killed a tiger with a sword. All the Indian correspondence at the post office was seized by the British authorities and it pointed to a significant conspiracy to mutiny on the part of all the local native regiments. Nicholson and his superordinate, Herbert Edwardes, decided that force, not reason, was necessary and decided to form a column of British troops to ‘move on the first station that stirs next . . . This disaffection will never be talked down now. It must be put down—and the sooner blood be let, the less of it will suffice’ (quoted in David, 2003: 139). A meeting between the senior British of­fi­ cers and civilians took place on 13 May, at which Nicholson stated that he knew a mutiny was coming: ‘Neither greased cartridges, the annexation of Oude, nor the paucity of European officers were the causes. For years I have watched the army and felt sure they only wanted the opportunity to try their strength with us. Mutiny is like a smallpox. It spreads quickly and must be crushed as quickly as possible’ (quoted in David, 2003: 139). Despite the thoughts of Edwardes and Nicholson, the flying column was denuded of many troops who were sent to retake Delhi instead, leaving Peshawar at the mercy of its own mutinous troops, and 21 May a letter to that affect was intercepted by the British authorities. On the morning of 22 May, Brigadier Cotton ordered that four regiments of Bengal infantry be disarmed and, faced with British artillery, all four regiments surrendered their weapons. The 55th BNI under Colonel Henry Spottiswode was stationed at Hoti Marden, and when Brigadier Cotton’s British troops arrived to disarm the 55th, Spottiswode begged in vain for the action to be abandoned, given what Spottiswode took as their unimpeachable loyalty. When Cotton refused his request, Spottiswode shot himself dead and the 55th regiment took off, pursued by Nicholson at the head of the 400 irregular native cavalry. One hundred and twenty of the 55th infantry were killed in the pursuit and a similar number taken prisoner. All 120 were sentenced to be ‘blown from the guns’, though ultimately only forty were executed in that fashion a week later in front of the entire Peshawar garrison and thousands of civilians. The remaining prisoners were deemed to be too young or actually Sikhs, and thus loyal to the British (David, 2003: 146).

240  Mutiny and Leadership The mutiny, meanwhile, spread through the north-­west: Muzaffarnagar was taken over by mutineers on 11 May, and four days later Indian sappers mutinied, killing their two British officers at Meerut, despite the presence of British troops who chased the fifty sappers down, killing all of them. At Aligargh, on 20 May, the public hanging of a mutineer in front of the 9th Native Infantry was followed by one of the sepoys breaking ranks and proclaiming the dead man a martyr to their faith—which led to a collective mutiny. Four days later, General Anson’s column set off for Delhi, complete with one Lt William Hodson. Hodson, who may have been the role model for Harry Flashman in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, had fought at the Battle of Ferozeshah in the First Sikh War, and had been so appalled by the efforts of the Native Infantry that he sought, and gained, a transfer to the 1st Bengal Fusiliers: ‘the finest regiment in India, with white faces too’ (quoted in David, 2003: 150). Hodson then transferred to the new Corps of Guides, an elite native force, and it was Hodson who insisted that they be armed with the new rifles and exchange their traditional British scarlet uniforms for a looser fitting, and locally appropriate, clothing, dyed in ‘dust-­coloured’ or, in the local Hindustani (a hybrid language of Hindi and Urdu used by Europeans in India) language, khaki. However, his abrasive manner led him eventually to being relieved of command (he was subsequently acquitted of all charges of improper use of regimental funds) and returned to the 1st Bengal Fusiliers. Whatever his personal faults, Hodson was an extraordinary soldier: he rode 250 miles in forty-­eight hours in advance of Anson’s column, and the commander responded (just before he died of cholera on 26 May) by giving him command of a corps of irregular cavalry—Hodson’s Horse—comprised mainly of Sikhs, once again wearing khaki uniforms but with scarlet turbans. Anson’s temporary replacement, Major-­General Barnard, reached Alipore, eleven miles from Delhi, on 4 June and operated a scorched-­earth policy, burning villages and hanging anyone who appeared to resist. As one private from the 9th (British) Lancers wrote, on entering a village and taking prisoner Indians allegedly responsible for killing British civilians: ‘their heads were shaved and pork fat rubbed all over them and then spat in their mouths; according to their beliefs this sent their soul to hell . . . [T]hey were hung and buried under the tree. All these men confessed their guilt before death’ (quoted in David, 2003: 154). At least they had some kind of trial, however poor. Harriet Tytler came across a Muslim who had been hanged because he had been late making bread for the British troops; ‘I cannot understand how such a cruel deed was allowed, for they in turn should have been hanged, but I suppose a single soldier could not have been spared, even in the cause of justice’ (quoted in David, 2003: 154). Barnard’s column, comprised of 3,200 soldiers, mainly British, plus twenty-­two field guns and twenty-­two siege guns, was due to meet up with Brigadier Wilson’s relief group from Meerut, but the latter was attacked several times as it approached Delhi. The rendezvous was set for 7 June, but across Barnard’s path, between Alipore and Delhi, was a group of 9,000 rebels and superior guns that had begun to decimate the British lines until a cavalry charge sent them all back to Delhi. Fifty-­one of Barnard’s force had been killed and 132 wounded, while the rebel dead was about 400. Barnard, however, resisted the urging of his officers to move straight into Delhi, preferring to wait for support from Wilson. On 11 June, though, Barnard asked a group of younger officers, including Hodson, to evaluate the possibilities of an immediate assault, and when the report was optimistic the assault was timed for the morning of 13 June but cancelled when Brigadier Graves, from the 1st

Mutinies and Ethnicity  241 Bengal Fusiliers, warned Barnard that the troops he had were sufficient to take Delhi but not to hold it from counter-­attack. The delay continued until reinforcements arrived, but by that time half the Bengal Army had mutinied. At Sitapur, forty miles from Lucknow, it became clear to the British residents that the mutineers from Lucknow were heading their way on 1 June, but even before they had arrived the local Indian troops had mutinied and killed a large proportion of the British officers and their families, though some survived hiding out in the jungle and then living off the land as they fled towards Lucknow, arriving on 4 June. Over the next week almost all the Native Infantry in Oudh mutinied so that by the end of the second week in June only the Lucknow residency remained in British hands and Lawrence, now seriously ill, handed over reins to a provisional council led by Martin Gubbins, whose first act was to dismiss all the remaining Native troops except the military police. On hearing this, Lawrence left his sick bed, dismissed the council, resumed control, and called back the previously dispersed sepoys so that some 800 troops now protected the Lucknow residency. The residency itself was then strengthened with earthworks and extra guns, and all the ammunition from the magazine was taken in and stored for the expected attack. In addition, the highest houses which overlooked the residency, and could have provided firing positions for the mutineers, were knocked down as the news filtered through that the attack was planned for 18 and 19 June (David, 2003: 155–81). At Cawnpore the commander was 67-­year-­old Major-­General Wheeler, whose second wife was an Anglo-­Indian, which placed Wheeler closer to his 3,000 Indian troops (1st, 53rd, and 56th Native Infantry, and 2nd Light Cavalry) but further away from his much smaller number of British officers, soldiers (about 170), and their families. Wheeler, though confident in his own sepoys, ordered the British to retire to a couple of barrack blocks and dig a defensive trench around them. With only ten cannon, their chances were already slim, but on 21 May Captain Lowe and fifty-­five reinforcements from Lucknow’s British 32nd Foot arrived, though Lowe was immediately pessimistic of their chances of withstanding an assault: ‘I saw quite enough to convince me that if any insurrection took or takes place, we shall have no one to thank but ourselves, because we have shown to the Natives how very easily we can be frightened, and when frightened utterly helpless’ (quoted in David, 2003: 185). Lowe was right: on 5 June the mutiny began with the 2nd Light Cavalry and spread rapidly to the infantry, though some troops refused to join the mutiny and Wheeler sent them to guard the second barrack building, the artillery hos­ pital. In fact, most of the mutineers set off for Delhi but were persuaded to return and attack the Cawnpore entrenchment by Nana Govind Dhondu Pant. Nana even sent Wheeler a note saying he intended to attack the British at 10.00 on 6 June and, at the designated hour, Indian cannon shot began to pepper the British, with the resultant 250 bodies gradually accumulating in the reserve water well. Despite the overwhelming firepower of the mu­tin­eers, they were hampered by their command structure, which saw a single Indian officer in charge of each of the four regiments but no one in overall command, so their attacks were usually uncoordinated. After three days, the loyalist Indians guarding the artillery hospital were driven out when the building caught fire, but the British refused to take them into their own building, and they dispersed into the local area where Nana’s forces proceeded to kill almost all the Europeans in the vicinity, including about 120 from the British station at Fategargh who were shot at the Nana’s camp (David, 2003: 185–200).

242  Mutiny and Leadership Meanwhile the assault at Cawnpore continued into Saturday 12 June, by when the entire barrack room had been virtually destroyed. At midnight the mutineers attacked and almost overwhelmed the British but withdrew after half an hour, leaving hundreds of dead and wounded from the cannons loaded with grapeshot and the muskets and rifles of the defenders. However, with the building destroyed, the only cover left was in the 18-­inch trench around the perimeter, and food and water were all but finished. Wheeler sent a letter to Lawrence at Lucknow (carried by an Indian servant at great personal risk but considerable monetary reward) begging for assistance, but the response was in the negative. Twice in the siege British officers spiked the large cannons of the mutineers in ­night-­time raids, but they were merely replaced, and the situation grew worse as the 4th and 5th Oudh Infantry joined the mutineers. They attacked on 18 June but failed to breach the defensive lines. Five days later, on 23 June and the anniversary of the Battle of Plassey that had been the critical battle by Clive’s EIC’s army against the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies in 1757 a hundred years before, 4,000 mutineers attacked the remaining 250 British defenders. The first cavalry charge was dispersed with grapeshot and the infantry driven off with musket and rifles, and by midday the attack was called off, leaving Wheeler time to write for reinforcements to Lawrence for the third and final time. By then one third of the defenders were dead and more wounded, and Lt Mowbray Thompson wrote: ‘Tattered in clothes, begrimed with dirt, emaciated in countenance, were all without exception; faces that had been beautiful were now chiselled with deep furrows; haggard despair seated itself where there had been a month before only smiles’ (quoted in David, 2003: 207). Jonah Shepherd, a clerk at the Cawnpore station, was then given permission by Wheeler to take his own family through enemy lines to save them in return for sowing dissension amongst the mutineers with offers of significant bribes for joining the British. Shephard was captured but suggested that the safe delivery of the women and children from Cawnpore to Allahabad might end the siege. That message was then delivered to Wheeler and after a meeting amongst the senior officers it was accepted. A further meeting between the mutineers, representing the Nana, and three British officers agreed that the women, children, and wounded would be allowed safe passage by boat, and the remaining British defender would retain sixty rounds of ammunition and their guns in return for surrendering the rest of the ammunition and treasure. After the consumption of the remaining food and water, the evacuation was to begin on 26 June, but, having inspected the boats in the morning at the Satichaura Ghat, the British were informed that there would be a delay until the following day in order to provide more transport for the sick and wounded to get to the river. However, the Nana insisted that the British must surrender the 120,000 rupees as promised, plus some of their guns; in exchange the Nana sent three of his representatives to spend the night with the British as hostages. On the morning of 27 June sixteen elephants, eighty palanquins, and many bullock carts arrived to carry the sick and wounded, and the long procession slowly moved through the town and down to the river. Most of the journey was uneventful, but the palanquin containing the wounded CO of the 1st Native Infantry, Colonel John Ewart, was stopped and Ewart murdered by sepoys from his own regiment. Eventually they reached the river and boarded the boats but, as soon as they were all on board and began moving off, the local boatmen leapt off the boats, having set them on fire, and mutineers on the riverbank then poured cannon and small arms fire into the boats and attacked them, killing Wheeler. At this point, only one boat escaped the fusillade, with Major Vibart in

Mutinies and Ethnicity  243 command and around twenty British survivors, and the Nana ordered the attacks to stop; the survivors, about 120 of them, were led away to Savada House. No captured soldiers survived the day, but some men, children, and women did, including Amy Horne who was forcibly converted to Islam and spent nine months as the concubine of a cavalry trooper, Ismail Khan, before escaping. Margaret Wheeler, the 18-­year-­old daughter of the CO, allegedly killed herself after being taken by Nizam Ali Khan, another cavalry trooper. Margaret became the hero of many Victorians for her selfless bravery, but in reality she lived freely with Khan for many years in Cawnpore (David, 2003: 221–2). Vibart’s boat was attacked several times as it drifted downstream, and at one point they attacked a boat full of sepoys attempting to finish them, killing all the sepoys and taking all their ammunition. Later the boat ran aground and was attacked by mutineers, and Vibart ordered a group of fifteen, led by Thomson, to counter-­attack the group while the rest tried to free the boat. By the time the counter-­attack had succeeded the boat had disappeared, leaving Thomson and his comrades to be pursued by mutineers downstream; only four, including Thomson, survived to be rescued by the Raja Dirigibijah Singh of Bulrampur, who remained loyal to the British and resisted the Nana’s demands to release the survivors into his hands. When Lawrence heard of the denouement of the British at Cawnpore, he ordered a reconnaissance force to proceed from Lucknow towards a group of mutineers on 30 June, but, when it was attacked by the mutineers at Chinut, their Indian troops fled and the British column slowly retreated back to Cawnpore, harassed every step of the way and losing 365 soldiers, either dead, wounded, or missing. By the time Lawrence’s column returned to the residency at Lucknow it contained 3,000 people, split roughly between 1,000 British soldiers or civilian volunteers, 1,000 loyal Indian troops, and the rest British women and children and their Indian servants. On 2 July Lawrence was mortally wounded by shrapnel from a mortar that had been taken at Chinut by the mutineers; ironically, it had fired into the same room the day before, prompting Lawrence to follow traditional sailor’s advice that the safest place to stay was where the last shell landed. It wasn’t, and he died on 4 July. The day after, 12-­year-­old Birjis Qadr was crowned King of Oudh, and he accepted the King of Delhi as his ultimate authority. The next day the infamous Act XIV was passed by the British, making ‘exciting mutiny or sedition in the army’ a capital offence and giving special commissioners the power to carry out summary executions (David, 2003: 225–9, 233). At Benares, the garrison comprised Col. Gordon’s allegedly loyal Ludhiana Regiment of Sikhs, the 37th Native Infantry—always suspect according to their CO, Lt Col. Arthur Spottiswode—and detachments of the 13th Irregular Cavalry. There were some British artillery and a company of the British 190th Foot and 1st Madras Fusiliers, under Lt Col. Neill. Neill’s regiment had recently arrived at Calcutta where the train destined to transport them refused to wait—until Neill arrested the station master, the train’s engineer, and stoker and threatened to hang them all if the train left without them. He then marched towards Allahabad, lynching anyone who ‘looked like a rebel’ in what came to be known as ‘Colonel Neill’s Hangings’. By the end of the summer of 1857 6,000 Indian men, women, and children had been shot, hanged, or burnt alive in Neill’s ‘pacification’ of the city and surroundings (Llewellyn-­Jones’, 2007: 156–7). On 5 June, the fort at Allahabad was the site chosen by Wheeler to be the site of resistance by the few hundred British civilians against any possible mutiny by the local 6th

244  Mutiny and Leadership Native Infantry, should they attempt to take the huge magazine there. Colonel Simpson, CO of the 6th, remained unconcerned because his troops had given rousing cheers when he’d asked them at evening parade to volunteer against the mutineers at Delhi. Three hours later, after rumours spread that the British were sending troops to disarm the 6th, they also mutinied and attacked the fort, but, failing to take it from the mainly Sikh defenders, they dispersed to Cawnpore and Delhi. Col. Neill’s (British) 1st Madras Fusiliers then arrived to relieve the fort, and a wave of revenge was unleashed upon the captured mu­tin­ eers and anyone else who resisted arrest—the punishment for either was hanging and the burning of their village. Canning responded to the mass executions of Indians by issuing a Resolution on 31 July to guide those engaged in pursuing Act XIV: mutineers captured unarmed or from regiments not involved in the mutiny were to be tried by court martial; summary punishment was restricted to those captured armed or from mutinous regiments. ‘Canning’s Clemency’, as it became known, was too much for most of the British press; the Times called him ‘Clemency Canning’ (Llewellyn-­Jones’, 2007: 162). Neill then tried to organize the relief of the Cawnpore Garrison (not realizing their fate had already been sealed), and a column set out on 1 July led by Major Renaud’s (British) Madras Fusiliers In the words of one his own officers, ‘Renaud was rather inclined to hang all black creation’, leaving a line of hanged Indians along the road (quoted in David, 2003: 240). The relief column itself became known as ‘the army of retribution’ (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 155). Neill was then replaced by Brigadier-­General Henry Havelock in an attempt to prevent the army of retribution making things worse. Havelock was a 62-­year-­old fervent Christian soldier (fluent in Persian and Hindustani) on a crusade to apply his extensive knowledge of war to the mutineers after very successful campaigns in Afghanistan and Persia. His column to relieve Cawnpore included the British 64th Foot and 78th Highlanders, all armed with the new Enfield rifle, whose effective range was, at 800 yards, four times that of the Brown Bess muskets that most of the Native Infantry carried. Havelock also insisted the British troops carried a Bible, and he held regular informal Christian meetings with his soldiers (Pollock, 1996: 26), so it would not have been ir­ration­al for the mutineers to assume he was coming not just to destroy them in battle but to convert them. Pollock suggests that Havelock demonstrated that there was no tension between being a ‘good Christian’ and a good soldier, but the nature of Havelock’s faith was clear even before the 1857 mutiny.17 After a mutiny of sepoys in 1844, Sir Hugh Gough (the Commander-­in-­Chief) decided to execute thirty-­nine mutineers but changed his mind and rescinded the order for all except six. Havelock was appalled: ‘Prompt and decided measures would have killed any incipient mutinous tendencies in the Bengal Army, on which the safety and peaceful developments of millions in India so much depended’ (quoted in Pollock, 1996: 120). Lady Canning wrote of him: ‘he is not in fashion but all the same we believe he will do well. No doubt he is fussy and tiresome, but his little old, stiff figure looks as active and fit for use as if it were made of steel’ (quoted in David, 2003: 241). Havelock was Adjutant-­General in 1855, responsible for the general discipline and efficiency of the army in India, but since there appeared to be little prospect of war, his job 17  Pollock, an avowed Christian and official biographer of Billy Graham, the American Christian evangelist, described the mutiny as ‘a war between light and darkness’ where the ‘scattered bands of Christians were facing hordes of Hindus and Mohammedans’ (1996: 238).

Mutinies and Ethnicity  245 involved maintenance rather than preparation, though he was briefly posted to Persia as part of the Anglo-­Persian War that, luckily for the British, fizzled out before he was engaged in combat, causing him to seek action in the war in China. However, the news of the mutinies at the end of May 1857 caused Havelock to write: It is clear that no regular Native Infantry regiment can now be trusted. All are in heart implicated in the treason, if not in act . . . . Mutineers must be attacked and annihilated; and if they are few in any regiment, and not immediately denounced to be shot or hanged, the whole regiment must be deemed guilty and given up to prompt military execution. (quoted in Pollock, 1996: 173)

While little news now emerged from Cawnpore, notes from Lawrence at Lucknow suggested they could hold out for a further month—until Havelock arrived. On 3 July, while Havelock was awaiting further supplies and reinforcements before setting off for Cawnpore, a note arrived detailing the massacre of the British there and persuading Havelock that his column needed to set off and retake the town to restore order in the area. Thus, on 7 July (when the weather was so hot and wet that campaigning was normally abandoned) Havelock’s ‘movable column’—a force of over 1,000 soldiers and six guns—left Allahabad to quell both the Cawnpore and Lucknow mutinies. His intent at first was on catching up with Renaud’s column but, despite the latter being ordered to stop and wait for Havelock, Renaud pressed on to Fatehpur to put down a mutiny there on his own, not realizing that the Nana’s entire army awaited him there. In fact, Havelock’s forced march managed to prevent a catastrophe befalling Renaud, and on 12 July the two groups met at Fatehpur, then comprising 1,400 British and 500 Indian troops, plus eight guns. The Nana’s army, assuming it was only facing Renaud’s troops armed with muskets (the British Madras Fusiliers and some of the British 64th Foot had Enfield Rifles) attacked, and four hours later the battle was over with the British capturing ten cannon and two mortars and losing just thirteen dead, wounded, or missing. Havelock’s Field Force Order of 13 July ascribed the victory to ‘the blessing of Almighty God’ (quoted in Pollock, 1996: 196) and threatened all those involved in looting with arrest (for officers) and a dozen lashes (for soldiers). Most of the British captives that survived at Cawnpore had lived (fourteen died of cholera) in the building known as the Bibighar until news of Havelock’s victories reached the Nana. It was then decided to kill the hostages on 15 July to prevent them revealing information about the mutineers to the British, and the boys and remaining civilian men were shot, but, when the sepoys refused to shoot the women and children, five of the Nana’s personal bodyguard entered the building where they were held captive and proceed to kill the 73 women and 124 children with swords. The next morning all the bodies were tipped into a well, including the three women and three boys that had survived the attack the previous day. Then most of the mutineers departed from Cawnpore, fearing Havelock’s retribution, and when the latter’s column arrived they found Jonah Shepherd still alive who told them of the events and discovered the bodies in the well. Beyond the clear evidence of mass murder, much of the investigation focused on the possible rape of the women, but no evidence was discovered that this had occurred. Whatever happened, the gruesome murders were covered in great detail by the British press, and the effect of

246  Mutiny and Leadership the massacre upon the relieving British troops was what Mukherjee described as the equivalent of setting ‘Satan loose on earth’ (quoted in Llewellyn-­Jones’, 2007: 78). Havelock pressed on, now with his son Harry as Aide de Camp (ADC), and on 16 July came face to face with the Nana himself, leading his own army from the front at Cawnpore. In a series of desperate infantry charges the British forces prevailed but lost six dead and 137 wounded. The Nana then evacuated Cawnpore, leaving Havelock’s column to discover the fate of the British captives. Havelock then decided to press on to relieve Lucknow, despite the outbreak of cholera in the column, leaving Neill in command at Cawnpore. Neill responded as Havelock might have feared: ‘Whenever a rebel is caught’ wrote Neill, . . . he is immediately tried, and unless he can prove a defence he is sentenced to be hanged at once; but if it’s the chief rebels or ring leaders I first make them clear up a portion of the pool of blood, still two inches deep, in the shed where the fearful murder and mutilation of women and children took place. To touch blood is most abhorrent to high-­caste natives, they think that by doing so they doom their souls to perdition. Let them think so. (quoted in David, 2003: 259)

Neill himself later recalled why he had forced the mutineers to clean a square foot of the dried blood (after it had been moistened) with their tongues and had them flogged (even though flogging had been abandoned in the India Army, but not the British Army, in 1835): My object was to inflict a fearful punishment for a revolting, cowardly and barbarous deed, and to strike terror into the rebels. The first I caught was a subadar (captain) . . . . A high caste Brahmin who tried to resist my order of 25th July 1857, to clean the very blood which he had helped to shed; but I made the provost marshal do his duty, and a few lashes compelled the miscreant to accomplish his work. When done he was taken out and immediately hanged, and buried in a ditch by the roadside.  (quoted in Roy, 2013: 27)

Neill’s military police then forced other members of the Nana’s retinue to eat pork and beef before being hanged; barbarism became the new habit for many on both sides, but in the accounts of the British, as William Ireland, a British Officer involved at the siege of Delhi, put it, ‘Englishmen . . . are always drawn in chalk, if personal friends of the author, with a halo round their heads; Hindustanis in charcoal’ (quoted in Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 21). Havelock’s Movable Column, now barely 1,500 strong (1,200 British and 300 Sikhs) with just ten guns, began the 43-­mile march to Lucknow on 28 July, but after a series of skirmishes on the 29, and the persistence of cholera, the force was reduced to barely 1,000 fit soldiers, and Havelock decided to abandon the march on Lucknow until reinforcements arrived. That decision was overturned on 2 August when the Commander-­in-­Chief ordered Havelock to resume the march on Lucknow, since no significant reinforcements could arrive for another two months. On 4 August he restarted the march to Lucknow and the following day beat off an attack at Busseratgunj that cost the British just two dead and 23 wounded—but a further 100 had contracted cholera, and a quarter of his ammunition had already been used up; Havelock decided to overrule his Commander-­in-­Chief and return to reinforce Neill at Cawnpore who, despite officially complaining about Havelock’s

Mutinies and Ethnicity  247 weakness in not pressing on to Lucknow, now demanded that Havelock returned to save him at Cawnpore (Pollock, 1996: 233–5, 40). Havelock was also informed, much to his dismay, that Major-­General Outram would take over command—though Outram quickly established that Havelock would retain control until the relief of Lucknow, and Outram would play only a subordinate role: ‘I shall join you with the reinforcements, but to you shall be left the glory of relieving Lucknow . . . I shall accompany you only in my civil capacity as Commissioner, placing my military services at your disposal.’ If that seemed too good to be true, it was, because Outram attempted to oversee every detail of the campaign and prompted Harry, Havelock’s son, to try to resign and join the volunteer cavalry. By 19 September Havelock’s relief force of over 3,000 troops, most of them British, moved into Oudh, just as word came from Brigadier Inglis in Lucknow that supplies were running desperately short and that they could hold out until perhaps 25 September but no longer. Assaults upon the British force at Lucknow persisted throughout August gradually reducing the number of defenders and their supplies and simultaneously thinning out the attacking mutineers (on 10 August over 450 mutineers were killed in the assault). Within a week, the numbers of British sick and wounded reached 120, in addition to the 220 women and 230 children who remained. The British defenders numbered about 350, and they were supported by around 300 native infantry, but on 22 September word reached the defenders that Havelock’s relief column was approaching. By that time the rebels had abandoned the village of Mangalwar after a British attack and proceeded to within five miles of Lucknow at Alambagh, just as news arrived from Lucknow that the defenders were ‘down to their last biscuit’ (quoted in Pollock, 1996: 262). After resting, the final assault started on 25 September led by Havelock’s son, Lt Harry Havelock,18 and ­Major-­General Outram (both of whom were wounded), and at great speed the relief force, led by the regiment of Ferozepore and the 78th Highlanders, reached the defenders of the Baillie Guard Gate at the cost of 535 casualties, including 11 officers and 185 soldiers killed. The following morning (26 September) Outram took over command from Havelock, and the relief force then set about reinforcing the defences, given their inability to transport 1,500 sick, wounded, and non-­combatants back to Cawnpore. They also discovered a ­food-­store, hidden by Lawrence, that could have seen the defenders hold out for another month. On 12 November, at the Sikandarbagh in Lucknow, the rebels were attacked by the British and hundreds slaughtered, including women and children. From 16 November British reinforcements began arriving, and by 27 November enough had appeared from the China expedition to take the rest of Lucknow. Major-­General Outram, the Chief Commissioner of the province,19 retaining 4,000 troops, sent Campbell back to Cawnpore with 3,000 troops and 1,500 women, children, and wounded. However, Cawnpore was attacked again by a force of 13,000 rebels in two armies until Campbell routed the Gwalior Contingent, promising his soldiers that they would all share treasure taken from the Nana’s wells in the area—which turned out to be substantial—but the EIC decided that all the treasure was in fact ‘loot’ and therefore the property of the EIC (David, 2003: 330–2). 18  Harry was awarded a Victoria Cross for his action, saw action in the Maori Wars and Canada, entered Parliament in 1873, and eventually died in the Khyber Pass, shot in action against the Afghan tribes in December 1897. 19  Sir Henry Havelock died of dysentery on 24 November, leading to an outburst of national mourning in Britain, not dissimilar to that which greeted news of Nelson’s death; both have a statue to their memorial in Trafalgar Square, London, though Nelson’s is significantly taller.

248  Mutiny and Leadership In the capital (until 1911), Calcutta, British troops were dispersed to the epicentre of the mutiny, reducing the local European population to a state of panic and encouraging many to hide in their barricaded houses or run for the boats on the river. The Native Infantry regiments at nearby Barrackpore were disarmed on 14 June, though that coincided with a rumour that the very same regiments had already mutinied and were marching on Calcutta on what became known as ‘Panic Sunday’. An emissary from the King of Oude was arrested for alleging spreading dissension, leading to the arrest of the King, and prompting Canning’s private secretary to conclude that ‘the rebellion is now pretty well understood to be a Mahomedan one—and the cartridge question to be only a pretext to unite the Hindoos [sic] with them, and the King was a puppet ready at hand for any intrigue’ (quoted in David, 2003: 264). Yet, as the mutiny spread, the British remained perilously lethargic in their response: no external reinforcements reached Bengal until October 1857, mainly because the British government were, as usual, reluctant to spend any money, but also because Canning’s reports were always over-­confident about his ability to crush the mutiny, and he insisted that the new Commander-­in-­Chief should be Lt General Sir Patrick Grant, the man who temporarily took over after Anson died of cholera in May. Vernon Smith, President of the Board of Control that ran the EIC, was unimpressed and appointed Lt General Sir Colin Campbell instead. Campbell had been at the Battle of Balaklava and led the ‘Thin Red Line’ against the Russian cavalry. Moreover, his risk-­averse military approach suited the British government. By the time Campbell arrived in India, in the middle of August, further mutinies and subsequent British defeats had occurred across much of central India, including Agra (4 July), Arrah (late July, with 250 British casualties), and Bihar (29 July), forcing Havelock to abandon an attempt to relieve Lucknow. Meanwhile the siege at Delhi continued, and while the British besiegers doubled to over 6,000 in July with the addition of both British and Indian troops (not all of whom remained loyal), the numbers opposing them (most of whom were mutineers from the army) rose to about 15,000 and then 20,000 by the middle of July. However, the increased numbers generated greater pressure on the resources of both sides and disputes about money, leadership, and resources became commonplace amongst the rebels. The rebel cause was not facilitated by the actions of the local Gujar tribes around Delhi who seemed content to rob whoever crossed their territory, Indian or British, rebel or loyalist (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 29). As the Delhi stalemate continued, the British Movable Column, designed to provide mobile reinforcements wherever they were most needed, had switched from the control of Neville Chamberlain to that of John Nicholson, complete with the latter’s personal bodyguard of 250 Pathan cavalry. Nicholson oversaw the disarming of three of the columns’ regiments of Native Infantry (33rd, 35th, and 59th) on the grounds of potential mutiny and then defeated mutineers from the 52nd Light Infantry at the Trimmu Ghat on Ravi River. Nicholson’s decisiveness clearly impressed Lawrence who ordered the Movable Column to advance on Delhi, which it did in the middle of August. By this time the British had about 9,500 soldiers at Delhi, though only 8,000 were fit, and the mutineers about twice that number, with another 40,000 mutineers elsewhere in the country, mainly from the Bengal Army. But, without a centralized command and control system, many of these headed for Delhi or Cawnpore to join their comrades, leaving the rest of the countryside to the British. Indeed, as British reinforcements from outside the country approached, it became apparent that the mutiny could only succeed if the Madras and Bombay Armies

Mutinies and Ethnicity  249 joined those from Bengal, and generally they did not. David (2003: 282) puts the failure of the mutiny, and it was—or could have been—close to success, down to the strategic blunders of the mutineers in concentrating their numbers and taking the British on in s­ et-­piece battles, where their weapons and experience were always second best, when they should have organized a conventional guerrilla campaign and worn the British down. ‘Yet the aims of most rebels were too localized and disparate; they lacked a George Washington, a leader with a vision to see the wider strategic picture and the military genius to take advantage of it.’ The mutineers also lacked the cutting-­edge technology that the British deployed, including the telegraph which had only just been introduced and enabled the British to communicate much faster than the mutineers. The telegraph was, as one mutineer said on his way to his execution, ‘the cursed string that strangles me’ (quoted in Ferguson, 2017: 160). In fact the mutineers were quick to cut the telegraph lines so it did not play as im­port­ant a role as it did in the American Civil War just after the mutiny (Wheeler, 2008). The British at Delhi seemed to have assumed that Nicholson and his movable column was exactly this—mobile—in spite of the heat (110 degrees Fahrenheit), the monsoon, and the plague of flies that fed off the many corpses scattered around them and stifled any kind of movement. And though supplies were never precarious, because they were the be­siegers, not the besieged, ammunition was always sought after, and cannon balls fired from either side were frequently reused and returned. From Delhi, several British raiding parties led by both Hodson and Nicholson took to the countryside to intercept groups of mutineers who were intent on intercepting the relieving British siege train, packed with thirty-­two howitzers and heavy mortars for the impending attack upon Delhi. But even when this had arrived on 4 September, Brigadier Wilson delayed the decision to attack, though the situations at Cawnpore and Lucknow were common knowledge and no further reinforcements were expected. Wilson, apparently unable to make a decision and more fearful of failure than inaction, was eventually persuaded to mount an assault on 7 September—on condition that the chief engineer (Lt Col. Baird-­Smith), whose plan it was, would take full responsibility should it fail. Wilson then issued a General Order requiring his soldiers to give ‘no quarter’ to mutineers but to spare any women and children. That night Nicholson (now a brigadier-­general at just 35 years old) and Lt Taylor undertook the reconnoitre and began the earthworks necessary for the mortars and howitzers. Five days later, with all the guns in position, and at significant cost to the Indian labourers who had dug the earthworks under Indian fire, the firing breached the defensive walls. The following morning (14 September), five columns of British and Native Infantry (almost all those involved in the siege) attacked the gates and breaches in the walls. Those in the third column attacked the Kashmir Gate and four of the eleven soldiers directed to blow up the gates were subsequently awarded the Victoria Cross for their bravery. Elsewhere, the British assault ran out of steam as the mutineers stood their ground and casualties on both sides mounted rapidly, including Nicholson who was mortally wounded by a sniper near the Kashmir Gate. He was not alone: the British suffered a 22 per cent casualty rate (66 officers and 1,104 soldiers) and Wilson considered ordering a retreat (causing the dying Nicholson to threaten to shoot him). In fact, many of the mutineers fled from the city, and by 20 September 1857 the city was in British hands and the palaces looted, in spite of Wilson’s General Order and indeed Canning’s subsequent demand that all looted material be made the property of the Crown and surrendered as such.

250  Mutiny and Leadership Looting was a common practice amongst many victorious armies, and the British were no different. The EIC’s Prize Agents at Delhi divided the city into sections to issue ‘protection tickets’ (also signed by General Wilson) to those considered loyal, but everything else movable was available: marble statues, paintings, jewels, alcohol, money, religious relics, manuscripts, carpets, everything. And since it was common practice to hide valuables behind secret partitions, many of the troops went armed with crowbars and picks to smash in walls. Elizabeth Muter, the wife of the prize agent Colonel Dunbar Muter, recalled how he had returned from one morning’s plunder with thirteen wagons of spoil, with an estimated value of £80,000 in 1857 prices. The Delhi looting continued for two months, and four years later the average British private received the princely sum of ten rupees (£1). The Lucknow looting, which had allegedly accumulated £1 million, resulted in each British private receiving 17.8 rupees (Indian sepoys received half this); each Major-­General received 1,352 rupees (seventy-­six times the common British private’s sum); the rest was retained by the British Government and the Crown, in part to defray the expense of the mutiny—put at £42 million by the British government (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 139–53, 172). The British also made sure that the palace of the deposed Mughal Emperor was the site of a ritual desacrilization, when British officers ate pork and drank alcohol to denote that the alleged Muslim conspiracy was at an end (Padamsee, 2014: 63). On 21 September, the King of Delhi was discovered and taken prisoner. He was subsequently put on trial for rebellion, treason, and murder, found guilty, and exiled to Rangoon where he died five years later. On 24 September, Hodson went to arrest the King’s two sons and a grandson and on returning to Delhi came across a large group of Indians protesting against Hodson’s actions. Hodson then shot dead all three of his captives, stripping them of their jewels and swords but claiming he had no choice in the circumstances. Wilson supported Hodson’s actions and was himself awarded a knighthood, a baronetcy, and a £1,000 annual pension. The taking of Delhi had cost the British 992 dead and 2,845 wounded. Some regiments— such as the Indian Corps of Guides—lost 55 per cent of their number (303 out of 550). The revenge of the British at Delhi was as brutal as anything the mutineers engaged in, and racial superiority on the part of the British often played a significant role in the justifications for barbarism (Roy, 2013). Major James Brind, whose brother was killed, organized the bayonetting of 200 residents in response and was celebrated for his kindness and bravery in the British media (Wagner, 2019: 5). In the neighbourhood of Kucha Chelan, up to 1,400 civilians were rounded up and shot. In Tharoor’s (2017: 167) words, ‘Mass hangings were the norm. Delhi, the Mugham capital, a rich and bustling city of half a million inhabitants, was left a desolate ruin.’ As far as Wilson was concerned, all that remained to put down the rebellion was for Havelock to relieve the siege at Lucknow (David, 2003: 305–8). After that the British would have to hold an official investigation to explain the mutiny, especially given the ‘modernizing’ impact of the British; clearly it was likely to conclude that the backward nature of the Indians—the other—was largely the reason (Rand, 2013). And if it was not clear that religion played a role on both sides in all this, on 7 October 1857 Queen Victoria issued a Royal Proclamation announcing a ‘a day appointed by proclamation for a solemn fast, humiliation, and prayer before Almighty God: in order to obtain pardon for our sins, and for imploring his blessing and assistance on our arms for the restoration of tranquillity in India’. On the day, churches across Britain were filled with the faithful, and at Crystal Palace in London the popular Reverend  C.H.  Spurgeon reminded his listeners that the

Mutinies and Ethnicity  251 mutineers ‘were our subjects rightly’ and that the mass retributions was ‘what earth demanded and God sanctioned, however dreadful may be the sacrifice of life involved . . . [T]he religions of the Hindoos are nothing more than a mass of the rankest filth that ever imagination could have conceived’ (quoted in Bates and Carter, 2013: 43). As Bates and Carter (2013: 56) conclude, ‘It was easier . . . to believe the enemy were the victims of irrational belief than that they might have any practical cause for their resentment against British rule.’ On the rebel side a similar religious frame was often used to articulate the grievances against the British (Dalrymple, 2007). The remaining territory of Oudh—with around 100,000 armed rebels and mutineers (the latter, of course, being only ex-­soldiers) camped around Lucknow—was the next area that the British sought to pacify. The campaign began at the end of December 1857, with 8,000 Gurkhas led by Prince Jung Bahadur, in addition to Campbell’s 10,000 and Franks’s 4,000 British troops, plus the 1st Bengali Fusiliers and a regiment of Sikhs. As the British forces approached Begum Kothi palace, a group of rebel sepoys held out in a nearby house, and the attacking Sikhs dragged the only surviving defender out, bayoneted him, and roasted him over a fire in revenge for their own losses (Roy, 2013: 27). The final assault on the Begum Kothi on 11 March 1858 cost the lives of 600 rebels but many fewer on the British side, though it did include Hodson who died the following day. Elsewhere the British made significant progress, looting as they went, quite possibly because the EIC had reneged on its promise to redistribute the loot taken at Lucknow. As Arthur Lang noted, after taking the Kaisarbagh palace: ‘A man held up a bag of jewels—a bag as big as his head—and said, ‘ “Take a share, sir. Take this.” Like a fool I came up magnanimous and rejected everything . . . . One officer in the tent next to mine has upwards of 500,000 rupees worth of diamonds, pearls and rubies! I never saw such precious stones as I have here’ (quoted in David, 2003: 340). William Russell, the noted British war correspondent, fresh from covering the Crimea War, was appalled at the indiscipline and behaviour of the British troops, ‘The men are wild with fury and lust for gold – literally drunk with plunder’ (quoted in David, 2003: 341). But the diversion, and Campbell’s (the Commander-­in-­Chief) fear of incurring greater casualties, dissuaded the British from advancing further into the rebel-­defended areas, and the rebels escaped overnight in large numbers, heading north. By the time Lucknow was retaken, the British had incurred 127 dead and 595 wounded, but the escape of the mutineers allowed the mutiny to continue for a further year, at even greater cost to both sides. The pursuit of particular rebels also brought wealth to some bounty hunters, as they caught and decapitated known rebels and packed their heads in baskets of grass to take to the nearest police station and receive their financial reward (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 27). On 14 March Campbell’s ‘Oudh Proclamation’ notified all landholders in the province that the British would confiscate all their land (with the exception of six minor land­owners who had remained loyal to the British) and that if they did not comply then their lives would also be sacrificed. Those who had already been involved in violence would be subject to British justice. Major-­General Outram tried to persuade Campbell to tone down the message to prevent further resistance, but to no avail. In fact Campbell was less interested in mass hangings and more intent on transporting the mutineers to the Andaman prison islands, but his proclamation almost certainly increased rather decreased resistance, the opposite of what he intended—what the German’s call ‘Schlimmbesserung’ (Watters, 2019: 22).

252  Mutiny and Leadership

Figure 6.2  Lakshmibai, the Rani of Maratha-­ruled Jhansi, 1857 (FLHC 20/Alamy)

The Doctrine of Lapse was also responsible for generating the rebellion of Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi (see Figure 6.2). Born in Benares in 1828 to a senior official from the region of Maratha, she married the elderly Maharaja of Jhansi at the age of 14, and fourteen years later, in 1854, the British annexed her estate on the grounds that she had no children and her adopted 5-­year-­old son was not a legitimate heir. Despite her protests, she was removed to a small royal residence and lived off a EIC pension of 5,000 rupees a month (£6,000 a year). David (2003: 350) suggests she was unusually ‘skilled in the martial arts of riding, shooting and fencing’, and this reproduces a common theme amongst descriptions of Indian women leaders during the mutiny: ‘they were usually imagined [by men] according to strongly masculine role models: they are expert at the use of arms and at hunting and second to none when it comes to bravery on the battlefield’ (Daechsel, 2014: xvii–xviii). In public, the Rani appeared to be following a religious but non-­political life, but in private she seems to have been active in the mutiny on 5 and 6 June 1857 of the Jhansi garrison, composed of troops from the 12th Native Infantry and a squadron of the 14th Irregular Cavalry. The local British commander, Captain Skene, moved the fifty-­six British men, women, and children into the local fort for their protection, where they remained until persuaded to leave by the mutineers who promised to protect them as long as they left the fort. The promise to do so was in a letter signed by the Rani, but in fact fifty-­four of the fifty-­six were murdered in an orchard by the city walls (the other two—a pregnant mother and her young son—escaped dressed as Indians). Precisely who carried out the murders remains unclear, and the Rani denied any involvement in a letter on 12 June; David (2003: 352) suggests she was probably not involved but willing to support the

Mutinies and Ethnicity  253 mutiny—if it returned her property. Two days later, after the mutineers had left for Delhi, she wrote to Erskine, the local British Commissioner, insisting that she would maintain British rule in the area if he would send troops and funds to support her. Canning remained suspicious, and the position of the Rani remained unclear as the territory veered between control by the rebels and the threat from the British. Indeed the Rani was at one point involved in conversations with the rebel Raja of Banpur but told the British— again—that she would remain loyal if they returned her land to her, and if they did not then ‘she would fight to the last’ as the local population hoped (quoted in David, 2003: 354). As the British force under General Rose approached Jhansi, the Governor-­General ordered that, should the Rani resist and be captured then she would be put on trial, and at a meeting in early March the Rani decided that the best course of action, and to avoid a problem with her own troops, was to fight. The town, complete with around 10,000 defenders, some of whom were Afghan mercenaries, plus another 1,500 mutineers, was then prepared for the assault of Rose’s 3,000-­strong British force, which began on 21 March 1858. On 25 March the British batteries starting to pound the defences and Rose was clearly impressed by the response: ‘The manner in which the rebels served their guns, repaired their defences, and reopened fire from batteries and Guns repeatedly shot up, was remarkable. . . . Even women could be seen working in the batteries and carrying ammunition’ (quoted in David, 2003: 357). By 29 March the British guns had reduced the defences sufficiently for Rose to plan an assault, but even as he did so the 22,000 relieving army of rebels under Tatya Tope appeared at Betwa behind Rose. Rose then detached a small force of 1,200 troops to attack Tatya, retaining the rest for the continuing siege of Jhansi, and so poor was Tatya Tope’s leadership that his army was routed and lost 1,500 to the British casualty list of less than 100. Now isolated from external support, Jhansi was assaulted on 2 April and the walls were breached, only to be temporarily threatened when the Rani led a body of 1,500 Afghan mercenaries to block the assault before herself being forced to retreat to her fortified palace. Given the ferocity of the defence (over 3,000 defenders died)—in which the British also killed women as well as armed defenders—and the difficulty of assaulting the fort, Rose decided to withdraw his forces from one area in the hope that she would escape. After considering blowing herself up, the Rani then escaped on horseback, complete with breastplate, sword, and revolvers and her eight-­year old adopted son strapped to her waist. They were pursued by the British and almost captured the next morning, but the Rani fought off her attackers, and at midnight of 5 April, after riding 100 miles in twenty-­four hours, arrived at Kalpi, the headquarters of Rao Sahib’s (a nephew of Nana Sahib and overlord to Tatya Tope) rebel force. The Rani was instantly made a general under the control of Tatya Tope’s now much diminished army. Her father, who had escaped with her but was already wounded, was recaptured and hanged by the British on 19 June. When the British retook the Rani’s palace they discovered items from the massacred British civilians and Rose informed the Governor of Bombay that she was obviously complicit in the murder, even if she had not taken part in it. Then, and this is surely a reflection on Rose rather than the Rani, he suggested (having not met her at this stage): ‘Her own people and the Irregulars began the massacre. I’m afraid she is very bad and what makes her inexcusable is that she is very ugly’ (quoted in David, 2003: 361).

254  Mutiny and Leadership A month after the Rani had been made a general, she and Tatya Tope’s 10,000-­strong army approached Kunch to block the advance of Rose’s force, but, despite her insistence that they needed to protect their flanks, Tatya Tope chose to ignore her and occupied the fort at Kunch, which Rose outflanked, causing the rebel army to retreat towards Kelpi, pursued by the British. Once ensconced in Kunch the rebels awaited Rose’s army, which began manoeuvres on 19 May, but three days later Rao Sahib sent a force across to attack Rose—despite warnings from the Rani that it was too difficult a task. It turned out to be precisely that, but as Rao Sahib turned to flee it was the Rani who dissuaded him and it was she that led a groups of rebels to within twenty feet of the British cannon before Rose himself led a counter-­attack that drove off the rebels. The 4,500 remaining rebels then left Kunch and headed to Gopalpur, hoping to persuade the pro-­British Maharaja Scindia (and his 8,000-­strong army) to join them. However, Scindia had other plans and ordered an attack upon the approaching rebels as they crossed the Sind River on 28 May. Once again it was the Rani that rescued the rebels, riding towards the Gwalior cavalry and persuading them to join the rebels. They did so in large numbers and Scindia fled to Agra leaving Gopalpur to the rebels. The Rani then organized the defence of Gopalpur, and on 17 June the area was attacked by cavalry from the British 8th Hussars, one of whom wounded her as she led an attack upon them dressed as a common Indian cavalry trooper. Unhorsed, and slightly later, the British cavalryman who had wounded her came past and she fired at him with her pistol but missed; she, in turn, was shot by the same man. She died later that day and her body was burnt near a Tamarind tree under the Rock of Gwalior. Upwards of 5,000 civilians were murdered by the British in Jhansi according to Tharoor (2017: 166). Now that she was dead, General Rose seemed to have a change of heart about his opponent: ‘The Ranee was remarkable for her beauty, cleverness and perseverance, her generosity to her subordinates was unbounded. These qualities, combined with her rank, rendered her the most dangerous of all the rebel leaders’ (quoted in David, 2003: 367). Without the Rani, the 5,000 surviving rebels, led by Tatya Tope, fled into the countryside and maintained a low-­intensity but decreasingly successful guerrilla campaign against the British until he was captured and hanged by the British on 18 April 1859. Rao Sahib was hanged on 20 August 1862. The Rani’s adopted son had all his adopted mother’s possessions stripped from him, and he survived on a new pension of just 200 rupees a month. Elsewhere the rebellion petered out, aided perhaps by the Government of India Act on 1 August 1858 that transferred power from the EIC directly to the British government—or rather to Queen Victoria, since she was very keen to ensure she had control over the ‘jewel in the Crown’ including oversight over the new Indian Civil Service and new army (Taylor, 1919: 26). Queen Victoria’s ‘Proclamation’, read out across India, promised religious freedom and territorial integrity: ‘We declare it our Royal will and pleasure that none be in anywise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law . . . And it is our further will that, so far as may be, our subjects, of whatever race or creed, be freely and impartially admitted to offices in our service, the duties of which may be qualified, by their education, ability, and integrity, duly to discharge’ (quoted in David, 2003: 370–1). Ironically, despite it being the jewel in the crown, Queen Victoria never went to India— but she was not alone in that even British civil servants who ran the India Office from London rarely visited the place they were responsible for; indeed, very few Britons

Mutinies and Ethnicity  255 ventured there unless they were employed by the EIC or the British Army. The British numbers never exceeded 155,000, and at the time of the mutiny there were no more than 10,000 British civilians in India who had no connection to the EIC or British Army (Gilmour, 2018: 11–12, 17). And just to make sure this switch in control did not in­con­ veni­ence the British taxpayer, the cost of purchasing the EIC were added to India’s public debt, and that was to be redeemed by taxing Indians (Tharoor, 2017: 20), in much the same way that the costs of abandoning slavery in British colonies—by paying the former slave owners—was borne by the British taxpayer (Hall et al., 2014.) Perhaps more importantly in the short run, the Proclamation offered pardons to all those who returned peacefully to their homes, except ‘those that had taken part in the murder of British subjects’, those who knowingly harboured murderers, and those who acted ‘as leaders or instigators in revolt’ (quoted in David, 2003: 371). A series of Descriptive Rolls were then established that listed all the known prominent rebel leaders, along with the reward offered for their capture, dead or alive, and in late June the EIC demanded that all zaminders (land holders) provide the names of all those on their land (Llewellyn-­Jones (2007: 42–4, 163). Some maintained their resistance and were driven into Nepal in early 1859. Later that same year, on 8 July, a ‘State of Peace’ was announced throughout India, and various loyal maharajahs and princes were rewarded with rebel lands and palaces. The despised Doctrine of Lapse was abandoned and the new head of the British Government in India was henceforth known as the Viceroy. And once the British abandoned the idea that entire cities—such as Delhi and Lucknow—should be razed to the ground, universities at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta were started in an attempt to create an English-­speaking middle class, the penal code was reconstructed, and the Indian Railways were built. Only in 1882 was it made clear that the proclamation did not take priority over any legislation of the Indian Executive (Taylor, 2019: 28). The Government of India Act of 1858 not only transferred control from the EIC to the British Government but also transferred all members of the various British forces in British India to the new Her Majesty’s Indian Forces. That transfer, without consultation, generated high levels of anxiety amongst the British troops, and protests occurred across Bengal in particular. On 1 May 1859, 400 soldiers from the Bengal Artillery and the Second Light Cavalry demanded the right to immediate discharge and threatened to mutiny if refused and acquired the nickname ‘European Pandies’ in what became known as the ‘White Mutiny’—or what Lady Caning called a ‘Manchester Strike’, since many of those involved were new recruits, straight from the industrial working class of Britain. The government buckled almost immediately and 6,000 of the 10,000 British Bengal Army left, as did 4,000 from the smaller Bombay and Madras armies (Stanley, 2001: 105). As for the India Army itself, it was reformed to the point where only one of the twenty mutinies that occurred between 1858 and independence in 1947 involved violence, and most were concerned with pay and conditions. That reconstruction involved increasing the ratio of British to Indian troops and ensuring that every India station had some British presence (Rand, 2013). Merit replaced seniority as the basis for promotion, and many se­nior British officers were replaced by their more junior colleagues. Punishment was decentralized to local commanders, pay was increased, uniforms were made less European and more suitable for the Indian climate, and the preference for high-­caste Hindus was abandoned. In contrast, the Indian Civil Service remained virtually closed to Indians, though schools, prisons, and public health were improved.

256  Mutiny and Leadership Not all loyal Indian soldiers could have been relieved by the end of the conflict. Jemadar (junior officer) Sita Ram Pande (Ram, 1873/1988), 63rd BNI, had allegedly been captured by mutineers near Cawnpore but rescued by a group of British cavalry men. He was then transferred back to the 12th, fought in several battles for the British, and ended up at the Nepal border chasing the remaining rebels. But in March 1858, after helping to relieve Lucknow, he was ordered to execute a group of mutineers, only to discover that one was his son, Ananti Ram, whom he had not seen for twenty-­five years. Despite his pleadings he was ordered to do his duty by a British major—who seemed to have assumed Ram was just sympathetic to the mutineers rather than trying to avoid executing his own son—and threatened with a court martial if he refused. After pleading with the major, the latter interrogated his son and eventually acquiesced, relieving Sitaram of the job and giving it to another. Sita Ram was then allowed to bury his son with the traditional funeral rites. He survived in the army until he was 65 years old and allegedly wrote one of a very small number of published accounts of the mutiny by an Indian soldier (Dasgupta, 2013; David, 2003: 238–42), one that explicitly blames the unfair treatment of the sepoys by the British, especially the warrant officers who were now held to be superior in status to the Indian officers (Llewellyn-­Jones, 2007: 6).20 Durgadas Banerjee was another Indian writer, a clerk with the 8th Irregular Cavalry, and what is particularly intriguing about his account is how his (and his brother’s) loyalty shifts from the British to the rebels and back depending on the circumstances they faced. What the account also suggests is the serendipitous nature of the mutiny, for there appeared to be little discontent amongst the Bengal Army right up until the moment of revolt (Dasgupta, 2013: 81). But Llewellyn-­Jones’ (2007: 7) summary of the causes is as succinct and accurate an account as any other: By the beginning of 1857, the East India Company, acting on behalf of the British government, had managed to alienate a number of separate factions and a much larger number of people. Indeed, there was something in the Company’s policy to annoy and alarm nearly everyone. Taken separately, these genuine local grievances might have been worked through, if the Company had been prepared to negotiate or even back down in the face of popular opposition, but it was not. A kind of blinkered arrogance drove it on, so out of touch with reality that warnings by respected officers like Sir Charles Napier, former Commander-­in-­Chief, and Sir Henry Lawrence . . . were simply brushed aside.

Moreover, although the British officers often spoke with disdain of the lack of strategic military skill on the part of the mutineers, the British had no strategic plan for dealing with the revolt. They were used to dealing with isolated and sporadic mutinies, not with a mass civil revolt (Llewellyn-­Jones (2007: 155). The shadow of the 1857 mutiny hung over further mutinies in 1872 and over the tra­ gedy of Amritsar in 1919 (Wagner, 2019). The latter was also a refraction of the 1907 jingoistic ‘celebrations’ by the British which included a play that caused the audience to weep when the British were slaughtered in Cawnpore and to cheer when the mutineers were ‘blown’ from the theatrical guns (Wagner, 2010: xvi). As we shall also see later in this 20  There is some dispute about whether the account is the authentic work of Pandy—see Dasgupta (2013) and Wagner (2017).

Mutinies and Ethnicity  257 chapter, the echoes continued into the mutiny of the Royal Indian Navy in 1946. When the authority of the state hangs by a thread, the anxious spider is cold, calculating, and callous. In contrast, the authority of the rebels was always contested and never coherent: the King of Delhi was too old and incompetent to lead a rebellion, and the military leadership of the sepoys and sowars had been stymied by the policies of the British so that no Indian officer had experience of commanding more than 100 troops. This lack of leadership, and the derivative paucity of strategic and logistical planning, left the rebels exposed to an army that had long trained for putting down colonial insurgencies. The British regiments of the EIC, ably supported by loyal regiments of Native Infantry and Cavalry, did just enough to survive the mutiny by supplying, ironically, enough of the very munitions that had tipped the discontent into mutiny. And in the end it was the very mundane element of money—the cause of so many mutinies across time—that undermined the mutiny. With no way to keep paying the mutineers, the sepoys and sowars leaked away to the countryside, and the mutiny haemorrhaged to its death without them.

The Curragh 1914 If the British had been involved in India as early as 1600, they had been involved in Ireland for significantly longer. Parts of Ireland had been under English, then British, tutelage from the days of the Norman invasion in the twelfth century that ended the Gaelic Kingdoms. In 1542 Henry VIII of England became King of Ireland, and the whole island became effectively controlled from London. With the religious conflict in England, turning into the English Civil Wars, Protestant control over Irish affairs became legitimized through various forms of anti-­Catholic (and anti-­Protestant Dissenters) legislation and discrimination, and most of the land and positions of power were controlled by the ­Anglo-­Irish ruling class. And with famine and violence commonplace, the Catholic and Dissenting population was decimated and dominated. In 1798, the age of revolution in Europe generally, the more radical elements of the Dissenters and Catholics joined forces under the banner of the Society of United Irishman to force an independent Ireland but, on their defeat, the Kingdom of Ireland and the Kingdom of Great Britain (England, Scotland, and Wales) were combined to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland through the 1801 Act of Union, and the Irish Parliament was abolished, to be replaced by Parliament at Westminster. The nineteenth century did little to enhance the position of the Catholic majority, as famines and emigration radically reduced the population, and, although most anti-­Catholics legislation was removed by the nineteenth century, the prospect of a united independent Ireland was always tempered by the hostility of the primarily Protestant population in the north of the island. Into this ‘unhappy land’ was born the Fenian movement in the 1850s: a political movement intent on securing a united and independent state, using violence if necessary. That fed off, and stimulated, the development of a militarized police force, and violence assaults upon the police, and upon the Fenians, became commonplace. The 1885 General Election saw the eighty-­five MPs of the Irish Party now holding the balance of power in Westminster—and that stimulated the rise of Irish Unionism, comprised of Ulster Protestants ‘loyal’ to the British crown and dedicated to resisting Home Rule for Ireland. Indeed, since 1886, ‘Home Rule’ had been represented as ‘Rome Rule’ by Protestants in Ulster (McLean and Lubbock, 2010).

258  Mutiny and Leadership In the early years of the twentieth century, the Irish Parliamentary Party—which sought independence in a united Ireland—held the balance of power between the Conservative and the Liberal Parties in the British House of Commons. But the House of Lords was always resistant to any prospect of resolving the Irish Question in a way satisfactory to the majority of the population in Ireland, fearing independence for Ireland would mean the beginning of the end of the United Kingdom. In exchange for supporting David Lloyd George’s Liberals in 1910, the Irish Party demanded Home Rule, and this was embodied in the Home Rule bill of 1912. This was intended to give Dublin a significant degree of independence, especially around domestic issues, and was rooted in a bicameral parliament with a Senate and a House of Commons that would replace the British administration from Dublin Castle and reduce the number of Irish MPs sitting in Westminster. The 1910 election, itself called because the Lords refused to pass the Liberals’ budget for 1909, had involved a threat by Asquith, first to King Edward VII then to King George V, that, unless the King appointed enough Liberal Peers to pass a Parliament Act which limit­ed the ability of the Lords to defy the Commons, Asquith would refuse to take office. Both kings initially refused to accede to Asquith’s demand but, without making any more Liberal peers, the Lords acquiesced and the Act was passed in August 1911. Nevertheless, when it came to Ireland, the Lords—composed primarily of landed interests, some of it in Ireland—in conjunction with bishops representing the Church of England, and the King, were altogether more belligerent. With the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the Liberals let it be known that Home Rule would be enacted in 1914; the Lords could only offer limited constitutional resistance now, and the monarch’s use of the veto had last been used in 1708, when Queen Anne refused to accept the Scottish Militia Bill on the grounds that such a militia might, in conjunction with an approaching French fleet, be disloyal. However, from the beginning of 1912 the ‘loyalist’ Irish Unionists, led by Sir Edward Carson, mobilized opposition, both political (in 500,000 signatures on the Ulster Covenant, pledging to deny Home Rule, or, as the phrase used noted, ‘to render citizens more efficient for the purpose of maintaining the constitution of the United Kingdom’) and paramilitary (with local militias at first but ending with the 100,000-­strong Ulster Volunteer Force who threatened force to prevent Home Rule). Irish Nationalists recruited an equivalent militia, known as the Irish Volunteers. Despite the clear legality of the Liberals’ approach to Home Rule, it was represented by Andrew Bonar Law, the Presbyterian leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party, in a speech in July 1912 at Blenheim Palace, as ‘a Revolutionary Committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud . . . . I can imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster can go in which I would not be prepared to support them’ (quoted in Blake, 1955: 130). Bonar Law then planned to prevent the renewal of the Army21 (annual) Act and only withdrew the threat on the day of the Curragh ‘incident’. The 1912 bill was passed by the British House of Commons but twice rejected by the House of Lords in 1913. At the third rejection in 1914, the British Government used the 1911 Parliament Act to circumvent the Lords which had passed an amending bill before the original was voted on, and this demanded that the province of ‘Ulster’ (undefined in size and scope at the time) would be excluded from the bill; whether this was temporary 21  The British establishment have had a phobia about standing armies since Cromwell so it had to be reauthorized every year.

Mutinies and Ethnicity  259 or permanent remained undecided by its proponents. Prior to the third reading of the bill, in May 1914, the government, recognizing the growing disquiet in Ulster and the threat to the Home Rule bill, began to plan for resistance. The officer corps of the British Army had long held Ulster tightly to its collective bosom. Almost all those involved in the Curragh incident had served in South Africa and despised the Liberal Party, particularly the pro-­Boer faction of the Liberals. Moreover, although the loyalty of the British Army was to the Crown, its paymaster was the government, and many officers hated politicians, most especially anti-­Unionist ones (McLean and Lubbock, 2010: 6). Sir John French, then Chief of the Imperial General Staff (head of the army), had already warned the King that the army might split if called upon to put down Loyalist resistance to Home Rule, but a committee set up by the Prime Minister Asquith included both J.E.B.  Seely (Secretary of State for War), and Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) who were in favour of using force against loyalist opponents. When it had become clear that the Ulster Volunteers were mobilizing, and rumours emerged that they were about to seize arms and ammunition from Carrickfergus Castle, Lt General Sir Arthur Paget, Commanding Officer of the British Army in Ireland, was ordered to prepare to deploy troops to defend Carrickfergus Castle and any other armoury likely to be attacked (Omagh, Enniskillen, Armagh, and Dundalk). On 19 March, Paget was assured by the government that it intended to pass the Home Rule bill and resistance would not be tolerated, and the armoury defence movements were portrayed by Unionists as the first moves to enforce Home Rule. Paget, without any apparent authorization from the British Government, then began the sequence of events that led to the Curragh mutiny. At this point the conflict had not degenerated into a civil war—but it would. The first move was the attendance by six senior British Army officers from the Curragh Army Camp (see Figure 6.3) to Army HQ in Dublin’s Parkgate Street on 20 March 1914 to see the officer commanding in Ireland, Lt General Sir Arthur Paget. He explained to them that operations were about to start in Ulster to prevent any violent resistance to the Home Rule bill, then expected to become law. The action included army units moving north, as well as a naval fleet in both Belfast and Dublin harbours. Officers domiciled in Ulster would not be expected to take part in the operation and could ‘disappear’ for the time of the operation to return to duty on completion without damage to their reputation or career. Those officers not domiciled in Ulster and unwilling to serve would be dismissed— they would not be allowed to tender their resignations. Those responsible for assessing officers’ claims to be domiciled in Ulster would be held to account and court martialled if it were shown that they were negligent in their duty. As the officers left the OC’s office he told them, ‘Tell your officers to trust me and there will be no bloodshed’ (quoted in O’Brien, 2014: 13). No mention was made about enlisted men, and it is unclear where the statement about allowing officers to ‘disappear’ originated from, nor do we know what would have happened if no offer had been made, nor why, in subsequent discussions, Paget suggested that officers could resign rather than be dismissed—as Seely insisted. On the evening of 20 March, after meetings between officers of the 5th and 16th Lancers, Paget telegrammed the War Office in London to say that the majority of officers would resign (including Brigadier General Gough, one of the officers that had visited Paget that morning), to which Seely replied, saying that they would be dismissed and would not be allowed to resign. Technically, these officers had not mutinied because they

260  Mutiny and Leadership

Figure 6.3  Curragh Camp (Author’s Collection)

had resigned before refusing to accept a direct order; but (1) the government insisted that they would not be allowed to resign so this is actually a more complex issue than appears at first glance, and (2) since dismissal was because they had refused to obey a legitimate direct order, that corresponds to dismissal for mutiny. One of the other officers attending Paget’s meeting on 20 March was Major General Sir Charles Fergusson, commanding 5th Division and the northern half of Ireland—and the only senior officer involved not to have served in South Africa. He told his officers that, while they could hold private political views, they were duty-­bound to comply with le­git­ im­ate orders given by the government of the day. Moreover, mass resignations would merely serve to encourage the enemies of the Empire. It would seem that the 5th Division, unlike the 5th and 16th Lancers, did comply with orders, though Fergusson was roundly condemned by Gough and even by King George V. On 21 March, Wilson, then the Director of Military Operations in the War Office and a prominent supporter of the Unionists, who had encouraged senior officers to resign, informed Bonar Law of events and wrote a draft for Seely of ‘what the Army would agree to’—an astonishing phrase for a ‘loyal’ soldier, but one typical of a man who would later threaten Lloyd George himself. Interestingly Gough subsequently claimed (on 22 March at the War Office) that he would have obeyed a direct order, had he been given one, but instead he was offered alternatives and chose one of them. In this he was supported by French, who insisted that Gough be reinstated or he would resign. In the event, Asquith’s government, under pressure from the King, the army, and the loyalists, suggested that the

Mutinies and Ethnicity  261 whole ‘incident’ had been a ‘misunderstanding’ and it had never been the intention to use the army to suppress resistance to Home Rule. In fact, the ‘mutineers’ acquired from French an assurance that ‘the troops under our command will not be called upon to enforce the present Home Rule bill on Ulster’ (quoted in McLean and Lubbock, 2010: 7). This generated two responses, one from labour radicals in the UK that the army seemed content to put down industrial dissent without quibble but could not be trusted to put their own house in order, and the second from the Irish Nationalists, that the government seemed unable or unwilling to ever push through their promise of Home Rule in the face of Loyalist opposition. The Curragh is often represented as ‘an incident’ but not a mutiny, on the grounds that a mutiny involves military personnel refusing to comply with a direct order; since the officers involved here resigned, rather than refusing to comply, they cannot be guilty of mutiny. Moreover, since the order, though legitimate, involved the potential use of lethal force against their own citizens, it is understandable that the British government allowed the officers to resign, for to do otherwise threatened widespread unrest. But there are several problems with this analysis: 1. The option of resigning was never offered to the other ranks involved, just the of­fi­ cers, so technically the other ranks would have been found guilty of mutiny for enjoining in the same action as their officers. 2. The option to resign rather than comply or refuse was never used before nor since. 3. The choice actually given was to comply or be dismissed; the conflation of dismissal and resignation became a common theme here and was used to good effect by the militant officers in their own defence. 4. The concern about using lethal force against one’s own citizens does not seem to have inhibited the British Army in either putting down revolts in Ireland of Catholic rebels on a continuing basis, or using lethal force against industrial or political militants in Liverpool 1911 (two shot by 18th Hussars) or Tonypandy November 1910 (one killed possibly by 18th Hussars or the police, whom the Hussars were supporting). Ten thousand troops with tanks and artillery were also deployed in Glasgow’s George Square in January 1919 to combat social unrest, though the troops did not contain any Glaswegian units in a refraction of the Curragh incident. 5. The Conservative and Unionist Party, under Bonar Law, conspired with several se­nior British military officers to encourage armed rebellion against the constitutional authority. In effect they were guilty of sedition. In conclusion, we might see the Curragh as an example of an informal fallacy—a method of shifting the goal posts in an argument such that the case can never be proven wrong. This is sometimes located in the original (Flew, 1971) ‘No true Scotsman’ case: No true Scotsman puts sugar on their porridge John is Scottish and he puts sugar on his porridge Then John isn’t a true Scotsman. Note here that the ad hoc nature of the defence implies that no logical reproof to the argument can be made, and it is the kind of argument that would infuriate Karl Popper (1963)

262  Mutiny and Leadership because it undermines the fallibilistic or falsifiable nature of knowledge that Popper understood as the core of scientific progress: science progresses not by proving things to be true but by constantly putting concepts to an empirical test and making the concepts more robust as a consequence. Thus, no number of positive affirmations of an experiment can prove something to be true because one counter-­example can always undermine it. In this case, the Curragh avoids being called a mutiny because what counts as a mutiny—a collective refusal by military personnel to obey an order—is restructured so that the refusal cannot occur. If we were to classify all refusals to comply on this basis then we would not have any mutinies: we would just have mass disobedience of a temporary nature until either the authorities or the ‘rebels’ conceded. Under these circumstances, we no longer have a military organization because one of the defining characteristics is the requirement to comply with orders. In short, we can only argue that the Curragh was not a mutiny if the British Army of the Curragh was not an army but a civilian organization. The original bill—ceding separation for Ulster from the rest of Ireland—was then sent for Royal Assent after it was passed on 25 May, a month after the UVF had landed 25,000 rifles at Larne under cover of darkness. The operation was organized by Sir Edward Carson and James Craig, leaders of the UVF, though the funds were also raised in England, including from Rudyard Kipling who contributed £30,000 (McLean and Lubbock, 2010: 8). The dispute continued until July, when a formal partition of Ireland amending bill was passed, as the Nationalists unloaded 900 rifles just north of Dublin. Eventually General Gough received a written assurance from Seely (who subsequently resigned after his assurance was repudiated by the rest of the British cabinet) that the army would not be used against Ulster. As the summer dragged on, the nationalist Irish Volunteers increased their number from 30,000 to 200,000 and civil war looked inevitable, but, with the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the Act was postponed first for twelve months and then for the duration of hostilities. Following the Easter Rising in 1916 in Dublin, Lloyd George, now Munitions Minister, tried to engineer a compromise, telling the Irish Nationalists that the exclusion of Ulster was temporary while accepting with the Unionists that the exclusion was permanent. The bill was eventually passed in 1920. On 28 June of that same year, a company of the British Army’s Connaught Rangers in Jullundur, in the Punjab, refused to obey orders in protest against British rule in Ireland and began wearing Sinn Fein rosettes in their uniforms and singing rebel songs. Two of the group travelled twenty miles north to Solon, in the foothills of the Himalayas, to persuade a second company to do the same, which they did, and hoisted the rebel tricolour flag to boot. Two days later, on the evening of 1 July, as they tried to secure their weapons from the armoury, two mutineers were shot dead and a third wounded in the melee. The sixty-­one mutineers were then arrested and fourteen of them sentenced to death, but only Private James Daly—considered the ringleader of the assault upon the magazine—had his sentence carried out on 2 November in Dagshai prison. In 1921 the mutineers were returned to Britain to serve out the rest of their sentences, though they were then freed after negotiations between the British authorities and representatives of the Irish Free State and returned to Ireland in 1923. Some of the accounts of the mutiny suggest that many of the mutineers had sympathy for the Indian rebels trying to do the same thing, and Thomas Devine, who joined the IRA on his return to Ireland, certainly articulated this political line, but it seems as likely that the political radicalism came after the mutiny

Mutinies and Ethnicity  263 and as a result of imprisonment, rather than it being a cause of the mutiny. Whatever the truth, the Connaught Rangers became sanctified as legitimate heroes of Irish republicanism by the new Irish government. Daly’s body, along with those of the two soldiers killed at Solon, was returned to Ireland and reinterred in 1970—at the height of ‘the troubles’. At the time of writing (December 2020) the troubles continue.

Singapore 1915 The British are over-­represented in this review of mutinies because their imperial stretch was so wide and lasted so long. A year after the Curragh mutiny, at about 15.00 on 15 February 1915, the second day of celebrations marking the Chinese New Year, a single rifle shot inside Alexandra Barracks in Singapore marked the beginning of a mutiny that shook this British colony to its core. Singapore had associations with the British from 1819 when the East India Company was granted a licence to trade in the island by the then ruler, Temenggong of Johor, but it had been a port for hundreds of years already (Blagden, 1921) and had seen Arab, Chinese, Malay, Thai, Portuguese, Javanese, and Dutch influence, changing its name from Temasek to Singapura (Lion city) in the fourteenth century. When Sir Stamford Raffles raised the East India Company flag in 1819 there were probably about 1,000 people on the island, and by 1824 the EIC had bought the entire island and converted it into part of the company’s Straight’s Settlements two years later. It became a British Colony in 1867 and remained under British domination until 1963, when the country became part of the new Federation of Malaysia. Two years later it separated from Malaysia to become an independent country (Turnbull, 2009: 1–17). In 1915, Singapore was the capital of the Straights Settlements and the seventh-­largest port in the world, when its primary exports were Malayan rubber and tin. Its Indian and Malay populations lived east of the Singapore River, while the Chinese lived near the city, and the Europeans predominated in Tanglin, where the wealthiest lived in large sprawling black and white houses, complete with tennis courts, pony and traps, and motor cars. The ethnic diversity that marked Singapore’s history (and its present situation) is also important in explaining the rise and fall of the 1915 mutiny. Before the First World War, the Singapore Garrison had comprised two regiments: the 1st Battalion of the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and the Indian 5th Light Infantry, which took over all duties when the King’s Own left for the war at the end of 1914 (Bartley, 1919: 408). The 5th Light Infantry comprised two wings—the Rajput wing and the Pathan wing—and the mutiny began when the Rajput wing mutinied against their British officers; it disintegrated when the other half (the Pathan wing) did not rally to the cause. The German naval POWs on the island remained generally uninterested, and the British recruited Chinese and Malay allies from the island as well as soldiers and sailors from the Netherlands, Japan, Russia, and France to help put down the mutiny. The 5th Light Infantry was unusual in being a Muslim-­only regiment from the Indian Army, but the two wings each had double com­ pan­ies of about 200 sepoys, making about 800 troops in total, and both wings had different ethnic origins (Brown and Brown, 2015: 12). Moreover, their common religion failed to unite them against the British in what had become an Indian independence movement called Ghadr (Mutiny). In fact, the British authorities in India had long predicted discontent even before the First World War started, especially after letters confiscated from

264  Mutiny and Leadership sepoys in Bombay talked of rising against the ‘British Vampire’, as they called the British Empire (Singh, 2006: 23). About seven hours before the mutiny started, on the morning of 15 February, the 5th Light Infantry had paraded in Alexandra Barracks, about five miles from the city, and the GOC (General Officer Commanding) Singapore, Brigadier General Ridout (a Royal Engineer for thirty years who had fought in the Boer War and for whom this was the second visit to Singapore), had taken the salute and wished the regiment well for their journey the following day—their ‘call of duty’—without telling the soldiers that they were being posted to Hong Kong. The Commanding Officer (CO) of the regiment, Lt Col. Martin, had translated Ridout’s remarks into Hindustani but seems to have given the impression to the regiment that they were heading for the European theatre, not Hong Kong. As the regiment marched away from the parade ground there were vocal protests amongst the sepoys (James, 1987: 223). In fact, rumours had already begun circulating amongst the sepoys that the real destination was Gallipoli to fight the Turks, another Muslim nation that had called for a Jihad, a holy war, against the British; though not against the Turk’s allies, the Germans, whose Kaiser, allegedly, had already adopted the Muslim faith under the name Haji Mohammed Guilliano (Harper and Miller, 1984: 10).22 Ridout had been sufficiently concerned about this problem that he had placed a secret agent amongst the regiment. Unfortunately, on the eve of the mutiny, the agent had been arrested by the police on his way to alert the Brigadier General and was not released until after the mutiny (Harper and Miller, 1984: 221). Ridout was not alone in his concerns: Major Thompson wrote later that ‘the trouble . . . was a legacy from the former C.O. and was in the nature of a feud between the two most forceful men amongst the Pathan Officers . . . [T]he only thing that would have been “inexplicable” would have been if something had not happened’ (quoted in Shennan, 2000: 89). Martin, the former CO in question, was 50 years old and had spent most of his life in the Indian Army, after a few years in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. In fact he had been with the 5th for over ten years, serving first as major and then as commanding officer since 1913. Internal promotion to CO was an unusual practice, but the First World War had denuded the Indian Army of many British officers, and the worries of Martin’s predecessor about his fitness to command were overlooked. He seems to have been a loner and not popular with his fellow officers, in particular because he had a habit of interfering with their disciplinary decisions and often siding with the sepoys, overruling or diluting the punishments set out by the other officers. It was Martin’s attempts to befriend his troops, rather than his officers, that compounded his disbelief that they would mutiny against him, for the sepoys would always, he believed, be ‘true to their salt’.23 However, at the subsequent Court of Enquiry, the Subedar-­Major,24 Khan Mohamed Khan, suggested that Martin’s approach merely exacerbated the disciplinary problems of the regiment, encouraging soldiers to go straight to him rather than see their own officers. In the end, suggested Khan, ‘the colonel sahib was too merciful, too sweet-­tempered. It is necessary for the CO 22  Indian Muslim troops that did end up in Gallipoli were often used to ferry supplies rather than fight the Turks (Harper and Miller, 1984: 11). 23  ‘True to your salt’ was a phrase with origins in the early days of the EIC when its Indian troops were paid in salt (Harper and Miller, 1984: 4). 24  Subedar-­Major was a rank that was the equivalent of Lieutenant in the British Army and was the highest ranking Indian officer in the regiment, in charge of a company.

Mutinies and Ethnicity  265 to be angry sometimes’ (quoted in Harper and Miller, 1984: 5). Even the regiment’s second in command, Major Cotton, who had only been with the regiment for less than five months, noticed the ‘tremendous dissatisfaction’ between the CO and, with the exception of the medical officer, Lt Morrison, and the Quartermaster, Lt Malone, most of the other British officers (quoted in Harper and Miller, 1984: 23). The adjutant, Lt Strover, remembered that Col. Martin would often intervene in a disciplinary case and reduce or annul the punishment already handed out, saying that ‘Perhaps the man did not know that he was doing anything wrong’ (quoted in Harper and Miller, 1984: 24). Moreover, while the officers were keen to get the regiment to Europe to fight on the Western Front, Col. Martin was equally adamant that the troops were not ready for that and wrote a paper to his commanding officer saying that, if anything, the regiment should perhaps go back to India for some further training before such an event happened. That was enough for Lt Strover and Captain Ball to request to resign from the 5th and transfer to a regiment that was combat ready; they only withdrew their request at the behest of Major Cotton, who insisted they had a duty to the 5th and not to their own careers. However, Ball and Strover then went to see the Governor of Singapore to warn him that the regiment was untrustworthy. The 5th Light Infantry had started life as the 2nd Bengal Native Infantry in 1803, before changing its designation several times and, post-­1861, becoming the 5th Light Infantry. It had battle honours across India, as well as fighting in the Third Burmese War and the Second Afghan War, but had never travelled overseas, until the posting to Singapore in 1914, as British regiments were withdrawn for combat in Europe, the last being the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. The 5th had its own internal divisions beyond the ­British-­Indian divide, with its left (Pathan) and right (Rajput) wings constantly arguing. It was the latter group which mutinied, led on by Subedar (Company Commander) Dunde Khan and Jemedars (Subalterns) Chisti Khan and Abdul Ali Khan. The overall regiment was unhappy because the sepoys had lived primarily on goats and cows’ milk in India but neither were available in Singapore. Worse, with the removal of the Malay States Guides (MSG) back up country, the 5th had taken over a lot more duties, and sick rates had increased markedly in response—something that Martin was sympathetic towards but the other British officers were not. Despite Martin’s claim to be close to his sepoys, his hand­ ling of a promotion to jemedar to fill a vacancy suggests his understanding was always doubtful. It had been the custom and practice to fill all positions by someone from the same ethnic group but, when a Pathan jemedar had died, Martin had offered the existing position to Havildar (sergeant) Imtiaz Ali, a Rajput. However, Martin was forced to withdrew it on the very day Imtiaz Ali was to be promoted. That Rajput wing of the regiment then went on guard duty at the POW camp when fraternization with the Germans became widespread. In Singapore some of the troops had become entangled with two civilians who were subsequently blamed for ‘sowing disaffection’: Nur Alam Shah, the pro-­independence nationalist imam from the Kampong Java Road mosque; and a merchant by the name of Kassim Ali Mansoor, a rich Indian merchant and rubber plantation owner, as well as a coffee shop owner, and also sympathetic to the Indian Nationalists (Turnbull, 2009: 138). The latter group had remained active long after the 1857–8 conflict and had recently organized an assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of India. One of their leading lights was Har Dayal, an Oxford University student who had formed the Hindu Association of the Pacific Coast in San Francisco to promote radical

266  Mutiny and Leadership political debate about India through its publication Ghadr. Dayal had tried to prompt a series of revolutionary attacks upon the British to secure independence and, working with the Germans, had chosen 19 February 1915 as the date for the uprisings across the globe, including the 5th Light Infantry regiment in Singapore. In the event there were no other uprisings anywhere, except the 5th in Singapore (Harper and Miller, 1984: 1–15). What made the mutiny particularly difficult for the British was that the mutineers comprised the only regular infantry unit on the island—so there was no other significant professional unit to call out to put the mutiny down. There were odd groups of Royal Engineers, Medical Corps, and Ordnance and Service Corps, and there was HMS Cadmus, a Royal Navy survey sloop with a crew of about ninety, but not much else. The Malay States Guides (MSG) had acted as internal security for the island since 1896, with a small number of artillery pieces, and, as with the 5th, this was a Muslim unit with British of­fi­ cers. At the outbreak of the First World War, the CO had asked for the unit to be posted to the Western Front to fight, and when the British War Office decided to send them to fight in East Africa the soldiers of the MSG refused to go, insisting that they had signed up to fight in Malaya, not Africa. At this impasse the infantry unit was sent back to Taiping, their home base in Malaya, though the artillery unit was retained in Singapore and attached to the 5th Light Infantry Regiment (Bartley, 1919: 411–12). There was also the Johore Military Forces, the 391 members of the private army of the Sultan of Johore who was an ally of the British, and about 150 of these were available at the time, though only 50 had arrived before the mutiny. Finally there was the Singapore Volunteer Corps (SVC). This was composed of the Singapore Volunteer Infantry (SVI) with a Chinese company and a Malay company, each with 120 officers and soldiers. It had originally been disbanded in 1904, though some members continued as volunteers attached to the Singapore Voluntary Artillery (SVA), which had 60 men and some Maxim guns mounted on gun-­carriages pulled by ponies. Altogether the SVC numbered around 450 men and was much smaller than the 1,400 officers of the Singapore Police which had Chinese, Malay and Indian contingents (Brown and Brown, 2015: 14–16). Moreover, the SVC had no weapons training and had only just started parade ground drill. The most professional unit of the police was the 220 strong Sikh contingent based at Pearls Hill in Chinatown, which provided armed guards in case of civil disturbances. While the Japanese government supported the allies in the First World War and therefore posed no threat to the island, the German Navy had disrupted trade, especially through its cruiser the Emden, until that was sunk by the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney in November 1914. Most of the German ratings and some of the officers and families, about 300 people in all, had then been taken to the newly constructed POW camp within Tanglin Barracks, and the sinking effectively ended any threat to Singapore—at least from the outside (Harper and Miller, 1984: 16–22). On 27 January 1915, Colonel Martin was told by Major General Reade, then GOC Singapore, that the 5th would be posted to Hong Kong to replace the 40th Pathans. No replacement regiment for the 5th was lined up, so it might be that the army had decided to move the 5th out of Singapore because the rumours of its unreliability were widespread, and without the 5th in Singapore the chances of any internal dissent were minimal. In fact, Major Cotton was informed towards the end of January, by the regiment’s religious teacher, that rumours were afoot that the 5th was going to be sent against their fellow Muslims, the Turks, and if that happened then a mutiny was likely and would be led by Chisti Khan.

Mutinies and Ethnicity  267 When Cotton reported the conversation to Martin, the colonel said he would look into the rumour, but only after the regiment had arrived in Hong Kong. A similar story of threatened mutiny was delivered to Cotton and Ball by Ridout’s secret agent, and at the same time Nur Alam Shah, the imam at the Kampong Java Mosque and a known member of the Ghadr, the Indian revolutionary party, was seen receiving money from sepoys from the 5th and overheard telling them that they ‘should fight and seize the city. You should reject being sent to the war. The British Raj will come to an end in March or April. They [the British] will be expelled from Singapore. The German warships will come and help you fight’ (quoted in Harper and Miller, 1984: 33). About the same time, in late January 1915, Kassim Ali Mansoor, the local business man, was arrested and charged with treason, having already been seen in the company of soldiers from the 5th. The secret agent was later picked up by the police for questioning and never got to deliver his message to General Ridout (Harper and Miller, 1984: 30–4, 94). On 5 February, ten days before the mutiny, Major Cotton had explained to all the Indian officers that the regiment was heading for Hong Kong, not the Turkish front, but, despite this, one of them, Subedar Mohamed Yunus Khan, insisted that he wanted to be discharged from the regiment immediately to make his way home and then refused to explain the urgency of his request. On 10 February, Cotton again summoned Mohamed Yunus Khan and begged him to explain the reason behind his request, reminding him that if anything happened—and he had known all along—then Cotton would hold him re­spon­ sible for everything. It was to no avail, though it had become common knowledge amongst the sepoys that Chisti Khan was promulgating the rumour that the Germans had already defeated the French and were on the brink of invading Britain. In this, Chisti had been supported by Oberleutenant Lauterbach, the German POW who had been the Emden’s navigation officer and who had been fomenting dissent for some time amongst his guards from the 5th (Turnbull, 2009: 138). On 13 February, Martin told the regiment it was leaving for Hong Kong in three days and ordered the return of weapons and ammunition for the quartermaster to oversee transfer to the boat. That amounted to 45,000 rounds of ammunition and two machine guns—sufficient to have provided the mutineers with deadly force if it had been available rather than crated up. Yet Chisti Khan insisted that the destination of the ship on 15th February was neither the Turkish Front nor Hong Kong but the bottom of the ocean, because the British wanted to get rid of the regiment and were prepared to sink the ship themselves (Harper and Miller, 1984: 30–8). Two days later, at 14.30 on 15 February, even as the Chinese New Year firecrackers reverberated round the city, Lt Elliott was in charge of a party of twelve sepoys detailed to unload about 33,000 rounds of ammunition from the armoury onto a truck to take to Fort Canning. Elliott left Quartermaster Havildar Mohammed Yar in charge and went to meet Captain Ball at his bungalow. As soon as Elliott had gone, by now about 15.00, Ismail Khan, a Rajput sepoy from the 5th Infantry Regiment, came towards the working party and fired a single shot to mark the beginning of the mutiny. Most British officers present assumed the shot was either a firecracker or the work of a single sepoy who had run amok.25 Even the local police (who were not informed about the mutiny until 16.45) assumed it was the 5th Light Infantry at target practice and did not investigate the noise. 25  ‘Amok’, meaning to go on a killing spree, entered the English language in 1516, from a book The Book of Duarte Barbosa: An account of the countries bordering on the Indian Ocean and their inhabitants.

268  Mutiny and Leadership Khan pointed his rifle at the ammunition team and they all ran off, as did the crew in the ammunition truck. As they fled, so scores of troops from the right wing of the regiment turned up, all waving rifles and calling on their regimental comrades to join them. Meanwhile the Colour Havildar, Jamalludin Khan, who had been in the latrine at the time the first shot was fired, told the subsequent enquiry that he ordered the guard to fall in but was approached by about forty armed sepoys, and that when he ordered the guard to load their weapons they refused, a claim disputed by Sepoy Kandhar who said that he was about to fire at the mutineers until stopped by the Colour Havildar. Whatever the truth, the guard ran for cover, along with Jamalludin Khan, as the mutineers broke open the ammunition boxes and helped themselves. The mutineers broke up into smaller groups, elected their own leaders, and went in search of European men, and specifically British men, to kill. One group, comprised of about 100 mutineers, set off to the POW camp to release the German prisoners and persuade them into joining the mutiny. Another set off for Chinatown, and a third headed for the MSG battery and then onto Labrador Hill. The remainder stayed behind in Alexander Barracks. At this moment Ball and Cotton (both unarmed) met up to ascertain the proximity of the CO and the extent of the danger and were promptly shot at by about fifty sepoys just as Captain Boyce turned up with a revolver. As he returned fire towards the mutineers, they advanced upon the group