Constant Reader Battles Long Ago

HOLiDAYING in north Dorset, I visited Hambledon Hill, between Shaftesbury and Blandford, the scene of a tragic episode of England’s great civil war.

Here two or three thousand peasants from this area and the neighbouring parts of Wiltshire and Somerset, banded together under the name of ‘clubmen’ to keep the war out of their vicinity, clashed with and were bloodily crushed by Cromwell's victorious army.

This was in August 1645, after the decisive defear of the royalists at Naseby; by their militant neutralism the ‘clubmen’ . were objectively helping to cover the royalist retreat.

Also, the lists of those captured at Hambledon Hill leave no doubt that this peasant movement had been well penetrated by royalist agents.

Fire and sword

But the question remains, why did a sudstantial body of the peasantry in this region take up at that time an embittered “plague-on-both-your-houses’ attitude in so historic a conflict?

A Soviet historian of that period, Arkhangelsky, has suggested that the key may be found in what had happened in this self-same corner of England, where Dorset, Wiltshire and Somerset meet, only two years previously.

Many of the local peasants, encouraged by ihe first parliamentary victories, had risen in revolt in the spring of 1643, levelled the enclosures put up by the gentry, and attacked their manor-houses—only to be put down with fire and sword on behalf of the Parliament by Edmund Ludlow, who had taken over as captain of Wardour Castle, one of the local strongholds.

Ringleaders to the number of twenty-eight were sent to London for punishment, and the peasants were taught very thoroughly that the parliamentary cause was not what they had thought it to be.

That experience may well have contributed to creating the mood that led to the sad business at Hambledon Hill.

More broadly, the disappointment of the masses of the people in both town and country with the revolutionary régime of Cromwell, as it dealt with their elementary interests, certainly did much to make possible the restoration of the Stuarts; just as Robespierre and the Jacobins were later, in France, by antagonizing their plebeian supporters, to prepare their own path to the guillotine at Thermidor. P.T.O.

Recruiting ‘Friends of the Soviet Union’

A case has just been argued without success in a Moscow court on behalf of the heir of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who hoped to get at last a cut from the fat profits that Soviet publishers have for years been making from Russian editions of his father’s stories about Sherlock Holmes.

This and the recent to-do about a possible pirated version of ‘My Fair Lady’ being produced in Moscow, have for their background the fact that Russia is not a party to the international copyright convention.

This means that the Soviet authorities are not obliged to pay royalties for foreign books they translate and publish in Russia: also, of course, that foreigners may freely translate and publish abroad any Russian book they choose, without royalties being payable to anyone in Russia.

This situation enables the Soviet authoritiec to single out certain foreign authors for payment of royalties on a ‘grace and favour’ basis, by way of exception.

Lian O'Flaherty, in his book ‘I Went to Russia’ (1931), gives a glimpse of how this method is used to win friends and influence people in the literary world.

The cash nexus When he visited the ‘Bureau of Revolutionary Literature in Moscow he was asked to contribute to a questionnaire on writers’ attitudes in the event of war.

‘“Why pick on me?” I thought. “My teeth are bad and my liver is diseased. But still ....I have only eight roubles and I’m far from home.”

‘So I wrote, God forgive me, having no intention of ever again firing a shot at anybody but my creditors: “Should capitalist Europe declare war on the Soviet Union, Pll make war on capitalist Europe with gvery means in my power.”

‘This warlike statement was received with deafening applause and I grew rather sorry I was not of the stuff with which they make heroes.

‘But in any case, my answer served its immediate purpose. The cashier at once paid me for a story which had been printed in the Bureau’s magazine five years previously. I NOTTINGHAM WORKER (Continued from front page)

doctor’s evidence confirmed that marks on his leg were consistent with his having been bitten by a dog.

He conducted his own case, since he could not afford a lawyer.

P.C. Westwood admitted in court that he struck Barnaby, but said that this was because Barnaby was violent.

Barnaby claims that he had no chance to be violent. He says he was put with his back to a wall with his hands raised, and was guarded by a policeman with a dog while the police van came.

Then, he alleges, his arms were pinned behind his back, he was pushed forward into the van, and the policeman followed with the dog. He adds that when he objected to the presence of the dog in such a confined space, he was struck.

Why was van needed?

All this, of course, is only Barnaby’s story, and the magistrates found for the police. Yet two questions arise.

Since when has it been necessary to use police dogs to run in someone who is drunk and disorderly?

Since this man was picked up in the street where the police station stands, why was a van needed to take him only a hundred yards or so?

Replying to an appeal for costs in favour of P.C. Westwood, the chairman of the magistrates made a statement that some might think revealing:

“We feel that in the circumstances it was proper that the Printed by Plough Press Lid. (T.U.), 1.0. 180 Ch \pham High St., S.W.4 AucGusT 29, 1959 was informed that on the following day the State Publishing House would pay me a thousand roubles on account of royalties due to me.’

BRIAN PEARCE ‘HE IS MISLEADING THE DERBYSHIRF, Bert WYNN, Derbyshire secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers, has been touring our coal-field and giving us his policy on pit closures. ~° On August 20 he came to Kilburn to speak. He said the NUM leaders considered that even if ‘bad times’ came we had only to stop Saturday working, cease opencast and the importation of foreign coal, and all would be well.

All this would provide a ‘cushion’ for us, and so they were not worried—hence the lack of preparation.

When I pointed out that this policy called tor fellow-workers on opencast to be thrown out of work, and that a planned fuel policy is impossible under capitalism, and suggested a recall NUM conference to thrash out a new militant policy, he accused me of wanting a ‘head-on collision with capitalism and workers behind the barricades’.

Three days later he spoke at Ripley. This time he did appeal for socialism. But he still said closing opencast, calling for planned fuel and returning a Labour government were the practical solutions.

I accuse Bro. Wynn of misleading the Derbyshire miners. He says: ‘Close opencast’—as if that will alter the pit closing scheme. He said ‘Slow down the atomic power stations.’ That reminds me of the Luddites.

Miners should beware of this kind of talk. They should demand a recall conference as a start to a struggle for a shorter working day, three weeks’ holiday, a 40-hour week for surfacemen and the nationalization under workers’ control of coal distribution.

Belper, Derbyshire Granville Stone case should be brought. We do not award costs.

I asked Kenneth Barnaby what he thought about the attitude of the police to young people in general.

‘Some policemen are all right,’ he said. ‘They'll talk to you in a reasonable way. But others shove you around and try to get you to be cheeky so they’ve got something on you.”

A bit high-spirited He said a young man might be accosted by the police for being a bit noisy and high-spirited around the town and would be asked for his name.

A day or so later he might be walking quietly througb the town when the same policeman would spot him, go up to him, and ask his name again, obviously trying to provoke him.

“Once they know you,’ said Kenneth, ‘they don't leave you alone, and if you’ve got a record—even if it’s only for some. little thing like climbing the Christmas tree in the Market Square—they won’t believe you can ever reform.

Also,’ he said, ‘if there’s a fellow in his working clothes walking along not quite straight, followed by a bloke with a dicky bow walking the same way, and a policeman sees them both, he only charges the man in working clothes.’

Kenneth Barnaby is not out for publicity. He does not. want to become a public hero. He is not full of big talk or bravado. Neither does he wear his hair long as some sections of the Press implied.

But he does not think the police should have unlimited powers. And he believes that anything which can be done to. expose police brutality should be done.

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