Harper's Round Table, February 9, 1897

A WILD DAY IN '48.

BY WILLIAM BLACK.

There was a vague apprehension in the air; every one appeared conscious that something was about to happen, though no one seemed to know precisely what; and so, as childhood is naturally curious, the writer of these lines, being then of the age of seven, managed to escape from the house unobserved, out into the great murmuring town. Half-frightened glances turned towards the east were a kind of guidance; and in that direction he accordingly wandered, until he came in sight of a crowd--not a beautiful, richly colored, processional crowd such as might have gone through the streets of Florence in mediæval times, with boy choristers chanting, and maidens carrying palms, but a black and grimy and amorphous assemblage of men, silent, in deadly earnest, who at the moment were engaged in tearing down the tall iron railing surrounding Glasgow Green, in order to secure weapons for themselves. And this small person of seven thought that he too must be up and doing. The others were wresting these enormous bars from their soldered sockets; why should not he also be furnished with an implement of destruction? And so he tugged and pulled and struggled; and yet the iron bar, about thrice as high as himself, remained obdurate; and again and again he pulled, and dragged, and vainly shook; in the midst of which determined endeavors a hand was swiftly laid on his arm, and a young Highland lass (her eyes jumping out of her head with terror), who had been wildly running and searching all over the neighborhood, dragged away the young rebel from the now marshalling crowd. Perhaps the alarm in her face impressed him; at all events he meekly yielded. That was not the usual expression of her face--when she was telling marvellous tales of children being carried away by eagles and brought up in a nest on a crag; the heroine of these various adventures, I remember, was called Angel; and whatever else happened to her, in the end her constancy, and virtue, and beauty were invariably rewarded by a happy marriage.

But now the surging mass of rioters came along, each man of them with one of those long spikes over his shoulder; and the trembling Highland lass, still clinging tightly to her charge, shrank hiding into an archway, and tried to conceal the child with her substantial skirts, till the man-eating ogres should go by. "Willst du nicht aufstehn, Wilhelm, zu schauen die Prozession?" some one might have asked--but not this Highland girl, who was doubtless thinking (in Gaelic) that the people who dwelt in cities were capable of dreadful things. Well, when one did peep out, there was not much to see--at least, nothing picturesque to attract the wondering eyes of childhood: there were no flags, no Mænads with flowing hair; nor was there any gesticulation, nor any attempt at oratory; only this great dark multitude moving on into the city, with two or three leaders marching in front, these ominously glancing from right to left, as if to judge where the sacking should begin. For they had come to sack a city, had these men. There was a talk at the time of bread riots; and no doubt there was a great deal of distress prevailing, as there generally is; and presumably there was a considerable proportion of these demonstrators honestly protesting against a social system that did not provide them with work. But it was not loaves the instigators of this movement were after, as events showed; rather it was silver teapots, and diamond brooches, and silk umbrellas--in short, a general partitioning of property; and of course there were plenty of vagabonds and ne'er-do-weels only too ready to fall in with that entrancing idea.

By what secret and devious ways the Highland lass managed to get herself and her captive back to our home in the Trongate--the historic Trongate of the ancient city of Glasgow--I cannot now say; but she must have been clever and smart about it; for when one at length reached the eagerly thronged windows, it was found that the fun in the thoroughfare below was only beginning. The whole thing looked strange. Musgrave the gunsmith (his sign was two gold guns crossed) was the first to put up his shutters. Perhaps the police had warned him that the rioters would make straight for his premises, to seize arms and ammunition, though, to be sure, there was not a policeman anywhere visible. No; what was visible was a great, swarming, tumultuous assemblage of men and lads who, at a signal from their leaders, had become stationary in front of a silversmith's shop. The silversmith, like the rest of his neighbors, had hurriedly shut and locked up his shop on hearing of the approach of the mob; but that did not avail him much. Another signal was given. Volunteers rushed forward, and proceeded with their long iron pikes to batter in the panels of the door. Then a hole was made. Then one man stooped and crawled in and opened the door from the inside. The curious thing was that the crowd did not now rush into the shop. Perhaps some instinct told them that they would instantly block up the place, and would thus escheat themselves of the spoils of victory. There was a cheer, doubtless, when the panel was hammered in--a long, hoarse, raucous cheer; but the mass held back; only the leaders entered; and for a few moments there was a dumb expectancy.

What now followed was one of the most singular scenes that any small boy of seven ever set eyes upon. From the wide-opened door flashing white things came flying out; high above the heads of the crowd they came; but as they descended a forest of straining arms and hands received them; and there was cheer after cheer as the plunder went on. It did not matter what it was: silver fish-knives, coffee-pots, biscuit-boxes, cruet-stands, opera-glasses--out they came flying to fall into this or that one's clutch; and again and again the hoarse roar of exultation went up, even from those who could not get near enough to share. These people with the upstretched arms appeared to have no fear whatever of getting their heads cut open by an electro-plated salver, a drawing-room lamp, or a brass candlestick. Out the missiles came; and the covetous fingers grabbed here and there; and the fierce tumult of applause ebbed and flowed. Where were the police? Well, there did not seem to be any police. It is true, a number of special constables had been hastily sworn in (my eldest brother was one of them, and according to his own account performed prodigies of valor); but they could not be everywhere; and meanwhile the poor silversmith's goods were being catapulted out to those clamorous upstretched hands.

Of a sudden a new feature appeared in this changing panorama. Ten or a dozen men (I think they wore some sash or badge of office, but I am not positive on this point) who seemed to have dropped from the clouds were jamming their way through the dense multitude; and when at length they had reached the pavement in front of the silversmith's shop, they began to lay about them lustily with their staves, each blow falling vertically on several heads at once. In Egypt I have seen an old Arab sheik do precisely the same thing, when his young men had become unruly. And in neither case was there the slightest resistance to constituted authority. This great mass of people could have turned upon the handful of special constables and rent them in pieces; but they did not; they tried in a kind of way to move on, though by this time all the central thoroughfares of the city were blocked, and a man who has a cruet-stand or a silver dish-cover concealed under his coat cannot glide easily between his neighbors. Whether the constables succeeded in arresting any of the ringleaders at this particular spot, I cannot recollect; but all the afternoon came wilder and wilder stories of chases, and captures, and seizures of booty. My brother was personally conducting a party of five of the rioters to the police-station, through a very bad neighborhood, when they turned on him, tripped him, and threw him down. But he was up again in a moment, with the cursory declaration that if any one of them advanced a step towards him, or attempted to escape either, he would forthwith split his, the thief's, skull in two. And what is more, he would have done it; for he was a powerful man; and he had a drawn truncheon; and he was never at any time a slave to punctilio. I forget the number of gold and silver watches found in the possession of these rascals.

But now the great event of the day, to the imagination of childhood, at all events, was approaching; for the bruit was gone abroad that the cavalry had been ordered in from their suburban barracks to ride through the streets and disperse the mob, and put an end to any lingering lawlessness. Plundering in the main thoroughfares had by this time mostly ceased; for the chief ringleaders had been arrested and haled off to the police-stations; while the worst of their followers roamed about in a surreptitious way, seeking what they could devour, rather than daring openly to attack the shuttered shops. The central parts of the city still remained congested, notwithstanding the reading of the Riot Act; for many simple country folk had wandered in, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps anxious about their relatives; and of course they could not well get about, because of the crush. Altogether they formed a restless, half-frightened, elbowing, and struggling crowd; but it was a sombre crowd--especially as the dusk of the afternoon drew on to twilight; so that the delight of one small spectator may be imagined when there appeared in the distance a fringe of color--a splendor of uniforms--the glint of helmet and drawn sabre--the prancing of horses. And now began a wild hurry-and-scurry, the people surging against themselves in their frantic efforts to get free, a chaos and confusion impossible to describe. On came the dragoons, pressing against this nebulous mass of humanity, sparing the women as well as they could, but riding down the men--especially where any disposition was shown to form defiant groups--and striking right and left with the back of their swords. It was all very picturesque and splendid--to one youthful onlooker--here in the gathering gloom: the flash of brass and steel, the clink-clank of bridle and scabbard, the fleeing of fugitives, the pawing and rearing of reined-in chargers where a group of terrified women found themselves incapable of retreat. Why, it was better than the fight with Apollyon in the Pilgrim's Progress; for that was only a picture, in flaming red and yellow colors; whereas this was full of movement and change; and a certain dim fascination of fear. And so the dark came down; and the gases in the house were lit; but out there the dragoons were still riding hither and thither through the night, pursuing and dispersing, with a rattle of horses' hoofs on the stony street.

What happened next was remarkable enough. The fact is, you cannot at a moment's notice drive a welded crowd out of a long and narrow thoroughfare. It is not to be done; and in this case it was not done; for the people, seeing their neighbors here and there knocked over by the horses or slapped on the shoulder by those gleaming blades, forthwith fled pell-mell into the adjacent "closes," lanes, archways, and common stair-cases, which were very speedily choked up. To all outward seeming, the pavements and the causeway, now dimly visible under the yellow light of the street lamps, had been swept clear; but none the less the Trongate held all these innumerable huddled and hiding groups of frightened folk, as we were soon to know. For, through some accident or another, the outer door of our house chanced to be opened for a second, and instantly there burst into the lobby and into the rooms a whole number of women, panting, shaking, haggard-eyed, and speechless.