The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917 - Our History 10 (New Series)

HISTORY

Pamphlet No. 10

New Series

£1.50

The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

Britain’s Road to Socialism The new edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism, the Communist Party’s programme, adopted in July 2011; presents and analysis of capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be bought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like.

The BRS was first published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century. Other previous editions of the BRS have been published in 1952, 1958, 1968, 1977, 1989 and 2000 as well as multiple substantially revised versions.

Published by the Communist Party May 2013.

Copyright © Communist Party 2013.

Editor: Communist Party History Group Series Editor: Graham Stevenson ISBN 978-1-908315-22-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.

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HISTORY 1

Our History No. 10

Pamphlet No. 10

New Series

£1.50

The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

“Keep the flag flying and when we lose our madness we will meet again…”

CONTENTS page

Preface Arrest and Trial Appendices Arthur MacManus Will Wheeldon Willie Paul Publications by Willie Paul Sources

The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

2 6 26 26 28 31 35 36

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Preface Although Alice Wheeldon (pictured left) actually died before the Communist Party was technically formed, Communists have no shame in claiming her for their own Party, simply by virtue of what became of her and those she cared for. There seems little doubt, from the evidence of her family, associates, and her reading material that she would have joined the Communist Party had she lived another year.

Alice Ann Marshall was born in Derby on 27th January 1866. She married Will Wheeldon, (born William Augustus Wheeldon in 1852) at West Derby, near Liverpool, in 1886. A Derby-born man, by 1871 Will was a fitter in a factory and not only named after his father, he followed the same trade.

William Senior was a mechanical engineer born in Belper, a significant role as a senior craftsman who often employed others. The family later lived at Gerard Street, close by St Werbergh’s church.

In later years, young Will was a commercial traveller, suggesting perhaps a need to find informal employment since such work was usually commissiononly at this time. Maybe he had been victimised by employers, perhaps he wanted to ‘better’ himself, or a combination of the two? Either way, he and Alice were still in West Derby in 1891 but had moved back to Derby, living in Stanhope Street, ten years later.

Wheeldon is an important family name in Derbyshire; research continues so it is not yet known for certain what the relationship is, but it is possible that Will was related to the first President of Derby Trades Council, The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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founded in 1891, one James Wheeldon, a stonemason who died in 1898, who was also the first independent labour candidate in a local municipal election in 1895.

Whatever the case, Alice’s husband appears to have later faded from the scene; his death being clouded by poor recording in registration, possibly in 1915, or maybe much, much later. Alice appears to have been single when she became an active revolutionary socialist and also joined the Women's Social and Political Union. Her adult children joined her in the Socialist Labour Party, a Marxist formation most of whose members went into the Communist Party in 1920.

There was Nellie A(nne), born actually with that name in Bootle, Liverpool, in 1889. Hettie Anne followed the following year (she would late marry Arthur MacManus, the first chair of the Communist Party, in Brentford in early 1920). Alice’s husband, Willie, had an older sister called Harriet, a name his mother also held. Thus, their second daughter was registered as Harriet, but she was always known as Hettie (although, oddly her marriage was registered with the spelling Harriette).

Also born in Bootle was Will, their son, registered as William Marshall Wheeldon in Bootle in 1892. Finally, Winnie, born in Blackburn in 1894, was now married as Mrs Mason.

A picture claimed to be of Will Wheeldon, Alice’s husband (Wheeldon family genealogy site)

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Communist Party History Group The siblings—all teachers—and the mother were all active in opposition to World War I, a matter which became significant due to the increasing prominence of Derby as a munitions centre.

In the summer of 1916, as a No-Conscription Fellowship activist, Willie was stopped from trying to impede the movement to prison from Derby of five conscientious objectors (COs); then a week later he was again arrested for obstruction and cumulatively sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.

A 1892 picture claimed to be of Alice, Will, Nellie, and Six months later, in January 1917, Alice Hettie (Wheeldon family Wheeldon was sent four vials of poison. She later genealogy site)

explained that these were to be used to kill guard dogs at a camp for conscientious objectors. When this package was intercepted, she, along with Hettie, Winnie and Winnie's husband, Alfred Mason, were all charged under the Offences Against the Person Act 1862.

The case was a significant turning point in MI5's history. The unit that investigated the Wheeldons, known as the “Parliamentary Military Secretary’s Department, Section 2”, or PMS2, was a highly secret organisation responsible for undermining working class organisations, especially by placing spies in munitions factories with the aim of identifying the leaders of potential strikes. In December 1916, a bitter feud was being fought between MI5 and the police Special Branch over responsibility for spying on industrial unrest.

MI5 set up the Wheeldons in a move to widen its role of combating German influence to the investigation of any group opposed to state policy.

Although the official historian of the MI5 only deigns to mention the case in his book in an obscure single note at the back! Moreover, amazingly, the Home Office papers relating to the Wheeldon trial are still classified. Yet, The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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PMS2 was long thought by Communists to have set up Alice and her family as a device to scare the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and Labour cabinet member, Arthur Henderson, into totally backing secret police work.

Extraordinarily, on the basis of evidence from a PMS2 spy, Alice was found guilty of conspiracy to murder both Lloyd George and Arthur Henderson, Liberal Prime Minister, and Labour Party leader, respectively. Supposedly, she planned to spike the Prime Minister’s boots with poison when he put them out in a hotel hall way for cleaning! Despite the ludicrous nature of all this, she was sentence to ten years' imprisonment; Winnie and Alfred Mason to shorter terms, while Hettie was acquitted for lack of evidence.

The judge, speaking on 10th March 1917, defended the use of MI5’s secret agents, Herbert Booth and Alex Gordon, as without them it would be impossible to detect crimes such as this. However, he admitted that if the jury did not believe the evidence of Booth, then the case would probably have to fail. But the jury swiftly backed the spies and Alice was sentenced to ten years in prison, with lesser sentences for her fellow prisoners. After a hunger strike, Alice was released on licence in December 1918. But she died of Spanish flu on 21st February 1919, her health weakened by prison.

The first serious account of the case was by a Communist author in 1933; after that, until the early 1980s she and her comrades were largely forgotten. This account by Our History is based on an updating and revision of some of that 1933 research, carried out by the Derby Communist Party in 1982 for a projected pamphlet that eventually morphed into part of a chapter of Graham Stevenson’s history of working class movements, ‘Defence or Defiance’, now further revised here for Our

History.

It has taken many books, plays, radio and television stories since then to create a new mood about the Wheeldon case but even quite mainstream contemporary opinion has now finally arrived at a settled view that the trial and subsequent convictions were legally unsound and that the victims The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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were framed by the security services in a move purely designed to discredit the anti-war opposition and position MI5 in a strong position within the state machine.

A picture claimed to be of Will Wheeldon , probably taken in Soviet Russia in the late 1920s

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ARREST AND TRIAL Alice Wheeldon’s house in Pear Tree Road (later rendered as Peartree Road), where she ran a second-hand clothes shop in this period, was always open to anyone against the war.

She and her two daughters, Hettie (pictured) and Winnie were passionately against the war. Alice’s son, Will, and her son-in-law were both COs, the former being actually on the run at the time when she and her family became the target of a serious conspiracy by the state.

In the fervently pro-war atmosphere of the day, Will Wheeldon had lost his job as a teacher in Derby. His claims to be a conscientious objector were rejected and he eventually went into hiding with other anti-war protesters. Being a rejected CO was dangerous; not only could Will be forcibly sent to the front, he could end up in front of a firing Hettie Wheeldon, an educated young squad if he refused to fight. Unlike Marxist, who married Arthur Macreligious pacifists, revolutionary socialists Manus refused to kill fellow workers in the armies of other states than the one they themselves lived in. But this was not a valid argument as far as the British state was concerned.

By late 1916 Will had found his way to an 'underground' network of Quakers, who moved anti-war protesters in secret from house to house to evade arrest. MI5 then took an interest in this network and an overenthusiastic agent, calling himself Alex (sometimes rendered as Alec) The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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Communist Party History Group Gordon, was assigned to penetrate it.

Pretending to be a conscientious objector on the run, Gordon whose real name was William Rickard - met and befriended Alice.

Her son-in-law, Arthur Mason, Derby markets pictured in the early part of the 20th century, where was a chemist at Willie Paul had his drapery stall; revolutionary pamphlets could be Southampton had under the counter! and was considered something of an expert on poisons. He had originally been declared exempt from military service, but now faced the call up. Winnie, his wife, was very active in the Southampton NCF, so much so that she once wrote to her mother that she had helped as many as 23 COs to escape conscription.

Alice Wheeldon had been an active suffragette and the family as a whole were well known locally for being strongly supportive of radical working class movements. Arthur MacManus (see biographical note in the Appendices), a national leader of the newly developing shop stewards’ movement, regularly came to Derby in that connection. He became a welcome visitor to the Wheeldons, eventually marrying Hettie Wheeldon.

MacManus was not on his own. Willie Paul, the Glasgow born nationally known socialist leader, who had been based in Derby since 1911, was a close friend of the family. Paul operated a one-man business, a hosiery and The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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drapery market stall, which gave the necessary independence required to become a semi-professional revolutionary. He also had market stalls in Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Rotherham and Chesterfield. His network of stalls were surreptitiously used as centres for radical literature distribution and fund-raising and Paul was also involved in the Derby Clarion Club.

No doubt, Willie Paul’s base in Manchester facilitated his contesting the 1918 election in Ince for the Socialist Labour Party, which had several members there. A few years later, Willie would stand in Manchester Rusholme as a LabourCommunist!

The SLP was a splitoff from the older established SDF and saw itself as a purer brand of Marxism.

Doctrinaire and dogmatic, it was hostile to the generally accepted reformist politics of the labour movement. While the SLP entirely underestimated the possibilities of winning the movement to a fighting position, MacManus and Paul played an important role in widening the Revolutionary leader, Willie Paul, who was based mainly in outlook of the SLP. Derby Both had important The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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links with the mass organisations of the working class and were especially significant initiators of the shop stewards’ movement. Both would become key figures in winning much of the SLP to the notion of fusing with the BSP and other Marxist groups to form the new Communist Party in 1920 and MacManus would become its first national Chair.

Paul would also play an important role nationally for some time to come.

He was editor of the Communist Review, the Communist Party theoretical journal from 1921-1923 and the editor of the broad left journal, the Sunday Worker, for the short period of its highly popular existence in the late 1920s – it sold as many as 100,000 copies each week. For family reasons only, he then faded from prominence, but for decades more he would remain a sympathetic and knowledgeable expert on the Soviet Union on the local scene; he died in Derby in 1958. (See Appendices for more.)

At this stage, Paul was joint editor of the SLP’s journal, ‘The Socialist’, and had already earned a reputation as a formidable Marxist lecturer and theoretician. His SLP social science classes in Derby were especially well attended throughout 1917-8. A book of his lectures, entitled “The State: its origin and functions”, was published as a result of these classes. The work clearly follows classic Marxist themes, but more interestingly, independently draws the same or similar theoretical conclusions as Lenin was reaching.

Paul was joint editor with Tom Bell, another leader of the SLP of similar thinking to himself, along with John Clarke. The latter spent most of the latter part of the war secretly at a Mr Turner’s farm at Arleston, near Derby, as a labourer. Clarke subsequently was involved in the National Council of Labour Colleges and the Plebs League, being allied to the nonCommunist Party Marxist elements of the labour movement. In later life he was a Labour MP and journalist. Whilst Bell would become a leader of the Communist Party in the 1920s and was certainly close to the sisters (see more on him later).

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With all this around them, the Wheeldons as local people were party to the debates of the leadership of a certain militant body, which in itself more than provided cause for the attention of the Government. Throughout the war, the state resorted to the old practice of using spies and agent provocateurs against opponents in the munitions factories. Not that it made much difference; as Sidney and Beatrice Webb, early historians of trade unions, wrote, “the very ease with which the War Cabinet suppressed the civil liberties of the manual-working wage-earner during the war, and, even continued after the Armistice a machinery of industrial espionage, with agents provocateurs of workshop ‘sedition’, enormously increased the solidarity of the Trade Union Movement.”

It was by use of such an agent that the authorities trapped Alice, her daughters, and her sonin-law. The agent, “Alexander Gordon”, was in the service of the secret branch of the Ministry of Munitions Conscientious Objectors were imprisoned nearby in Long Eaton. Here from The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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September 1916. Other pseudonyms he used were Herbert William Vincent and Albert Richard, but his real name was for a long time believed to be Francis W Vivian.

On December 26th 1916 he was sent to present himself as a CO on the run to Alice Wheeldon. She received him hospitably and, by putting him up for the night, immediately took the risk of prosecution for harbouring an absentee from the army. The original brief of “Gordon” must have almost certainly been to obtain any details he could of CO escape networks, or even attempts at sabotage, which anti-war activists might supposedly have been involved in at Rolls Royce. But, being a man of rather imaginative and theatrical taste, he soon turned the initial conversations with Alice Wheeldon to more bizarre matters.

Implying that he was an especially active CO, “Gordon” won the confidence of Alice Wheeldon and initiated a discussion on the techniques that could be utilised to help others escape from internment camps to Ireland and thence to the USA. In the Liverpool camp, dogs were used to guard the COs. “Gordon” argued that only poison could put them out of action.

Pressed on the matter of how she might help, Alice Wheeldon considered the idea seriously. But “Gordon” informed his superiors that a much more serious conspiracy was afoot.

He claimed that a plot to poison Lloyd George and Arthur Henderson - who of course supported the war - was in progress. “Gordon” sent details of his ‘success’ to his superiors, Booth and Major Lee, by telegram. Booth himself came to Derby on December 29th and was taken by “Gordon” to Alice Wheeldon as “Comrade Bert’, supposedly a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a syndicalist organisation originating in the United States, which was usually affectionately called the ‘Wobblies’.

“Comrade Bert” was supposedly a fugitive from the army.

In the meantime, Major Lee was watching the Wheeldons' mail expectantly.

On January 4th 1917, Alice Wheeldon received from Southampton four The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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phials, labelled A, B, C and D. They contained strychnine hydrochlorate and curare, the former of which was widely used to kill rats. The latter was used by indigenous peoples in South America, dipped on to the head of an arrow. Used by hunters to paralyze prey, it was beginning to be studied in Europe as a muscle relaxant for surgery. In too high a dose, curare stopped the breathing and the victim suffocated.

But in a low dose, both chemicals had milder effects on large animals.

Hence the phials were accompanied by detailed instructions for use.

Injection by a dart or a rusty nail, or an air gun, or soaking in meat or bread was recommended. The letter however was clear that the intended victims were only dogs. “All 4 will probably leave a trace, but if the bloke who owns it does suspect it will be difficult to prove it. As long as you have a chance to get at the dog, I pity it! Dead in 20 seconds.”

It is now clear that the quantity of poison sent was at the most only suitable for putting a few dogs out of action, something that was not mentioned in the trial. “Comrade Bert” picked up the parcel of poisons and instructions from the Wheeldons' house in “Gordon’s” company. As far as Alice Wheeldon was concerned, the poisons were to use against dogs but these men were government agents and the authorities now decided that they had all the evidence that they needed to act.

On January 30th, Alice Wheeldon and her son-in-law, Mason, were the first to be arrested. Hettie was picked up at the Ilkeston school she taught at, while Winnie Mason was arrested in Southampton. A large number of newspapers were found at the second hand clothes shop which Alice Wheeldon ran. These included “The Suffragette, Socialist Worker, Tribunal and ... pamphlets on the social union and various labour matters”. That was how the local paper breathlessly described it but, surely “Socialist Worker” was really the SLP’s ‘The Socialist’? (There was no such UK paper as Socialist Worker until the 1970s!) ‘Tribunal’ was the weekly paper of the NCF, while “The Suffragette” is a puzzling reference. These could have been back issues of the WSPU paper, but the name had been changed The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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to Britannia in 1915, to underline a commitment to the war. It may be a reference to Sylvia Pankhurst’s history of the WSPU, “The Suffragette”, for her views at that time would have strongly coincided with those of Alice Wheeldon. (In 1916 the WSPU, now renamed the Women’s Party, opposed a government offer of full adult suffrage on the grounds that enfranchisement of servicemen was the priority!)

The Wheeldons’ open support for socialism was more damning to the family than anything else. The Attorney General had no hesitation in describing them all as a “gang of desperate persons poisoned by revolutionary doctrines and possessed of complete and unreasonable contempt for their own country”.

The charge was that, between 26th December 1916 and 29th January 1917, they did: “Amongst themselves unlawfully and wickedly conspire, confederate, and agree together, one the Right Honourable David Lloyd George, and one the Right Honourable Arthur Henderson, wilfully of their malice, aforethought to kill and murder, contrary to the Offences Against the Persons Act, 1861 (Section 4) and against the peace of our Lord the King, his Crown and dignity.”

The trial attracted enormous publicity, not just in Derby, for the significance of the first major trial of anti-war conspirators was not lost on the press, the Government and the public. Hostility to the war was rising and a successful prosecution, identifying opposition to the war with violent revolution rather than Christian pacifism, would obviously be of great use to the Government. The London Times did not stint itself in its headlines: Much of the details reported by the press were simply wrong. The Times, as above, had Harriet as 30 years old, whilst the Derby Mercury had her as being 25 years, when she was actually 27. The Times had Winnie as aged 27 but the Mercury had her, correctly, as being 23.

The accused first appeared at the Derby Guildhall on Saturday February The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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How The Times covered the case

3rd and again on the following Monday and Tuesday. The preliminary trial was to last two weeks and aroused enormous public interest. Emiline Pankhurst came to Derby to listen in the public gallery. The case was transferred to the Old Bailey, where the full trial began on March 6th 1917.

The defendants’ Derby based solicitors ceased to act for them on February 27th, the solicitors tersely informing the Treasury’s solicitor that “the necessary funds have not been provided and we had ceased to act”.

One week before the start of the trial, no barrister had been commissioned by the Wheeldons. Perhaps the prosecution deliberately took advantage of their lack of representation to move the trial? The question is begged as to why the change in venue, after all the Derby Assizes were in progress and the case could have been heard there. The Attorney General had insisted on the move to London, “because of the great importance of the case ... it would be expedient in the interests of the prosecution to have the case removed to London”.

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There were tangible reasons for this; the first effective Zeppelin raids on London were now taking place. Utilising aerial bombardment was then a very novel and frightening concept. No wonder that the Crown sought a London jury! Their views on a group of anti-war activists would certainly be hostile. Moreover, the world’s press would see that Britain was cracking down on its dissidents, unlike Imperial Russia, which was in the process of cracking at the seams.

The first revolution of 1917 broke out between March 8th and 12th and

In prison: left to right, Hettie, Winnie, and Alice The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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massive pressure was being put on the new Russian government to call off its involvement in the war. People with political affinities to the Wheeldons were suddenly emerging in Russia as a powerful voice of mass opinion.

High political stakes were involved here and some rather ordinary folk in Derby had found themselves enmeshed in dramatic intrigues of which they knew little.

In prison, awaiting trial, the Wheeldons asked their friends and relatives not to visit them, as “secret agents ... are on the prowl and even walls and key holes have ears”. Despite incarceration, Hettie assured her friends that they were all “quite Al, I’m not kidding”. She continued to keep up this brave face. According to her letters, things were not so bad in prison. She thought that: “if the poor, honest, excluded, submerged tenth only knew that in prison there is rest, quiet, comfort and good food. I don’t think they would toil and sweat, curse life and live in a slum as they do.”

The prosecution made much play during the trial of Alice Wheeldon’s oftdeclared wish that Lloyd George would be dead. There was much bitterness and anger on the part of some who were strongly opposed to the war. For it had reached new heights of human folly, turning into a stupendous tragedy.

A culture that claimed world pre-eminence tolerated mass slaughter on the battlefield. Hundreds of thousands of young men walked to their deaths through machine gun-splattered mud, were impaled on barbed wire, or were transformed into countless drops of lifeless matter by high explosive shells.

Both sides repeated the insane process daily. Thousands and thousands of young lives were extinguished in giant battles for yards of territory. It should not have been surprising that some people expressed themselves vehemently. Yet the prosecution seemed highly offended at Alice Wheeldon’s habit of using “cuss words” or the “language of criminals”, whenever speaking of the armed forces or the Government. The disparity between the one offence to morality and the other hardly seemed to occur to the authorities.

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In a further attempt to further besmirch her name, the extraordinary suggestion was made that some years before Alice Wheeldon had led a suffragette plot to burn down Breadsall church. Both Booth and “Gordon” claimed that she had admitted to the arson. But, there was no other evidence that this was the case and in hindsight it is now generally accepted to be a nonsensical charge. While a great deal was made of the fire at the trial, the Attorney General (later the Earl of Birkenhead) in his memoirs published in 1926, long after the imprisonment and subsequent death of Alice Wheeldon, did even then concede that “it is by no means certain that the church was deliberately set on fire”.

The prosecution, carried away by its own rhetoric, rather suggested that being a suffragette was in itself a greater crime than arson. Indeed, it had been quite normal to ascribe the most ludicrous plots to the suffragettes.

One prosecution witness claimed that Alice Wheeldon had said “we had a plan before when we spent £300 in trying to poison him (i.e. Lloyd George)”. This was supposed to entail killing the Prime Minister with an air gun on Walton Heath golf course, in all respects a most unlikely accusation.

Naturally, all this was intended to be taken in conjunction with the instructions that Mason had given Alice Wheeldon on how to handle the poison he had sent to her. It was intended to prove a murder conspiracy.

How would Alice Wheeldon reply to the charges in the witness box? She emerged proudly defiant and unshakeable in her declaration of innocence of the absurd trumped up charge. She denied that she had said any of the things claimed about poisoned shoe nails and air guns.

Alice Wheeldon attempted to bravely defend her opposition to militarism and above all to de-personalise the issue. But the Attorney General continually and adroitly brought her back to her dislike of war-like politicians. She agreed that she had a strong feeling about those responsible for conscription, especially the Prime Minister and Arthur Henderson.

There was no denying that she saw the latter as a “traitor to the working The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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Our History No. 10 class”. However, none of them were worth doing mischief to personally, she insisted. Although she thought it would be a good thing if their public careers came to an end.

In reply to a theoretical question as to whether the public good would be enhanced if Lloyd George was assassinated by some person, Alice Wheeldon made her position clear.

“No ... He is not worth it.” To which the judge intervened: “is that Lloyd George—Alice thought him a war criminal the only reason? I would not like to have it on my conscience.” It was as if two languages were being spoken. Bear in mind that the Wheeldons were associated with Marxist rather than anarchist groupings and, as such, would not approve of personalised violence and the issue becomes clearer. Even worse for the judge and others was when she admitted that she had said of the King that: “George of Buckingham Palace had sponged on the people.” The Times was beside itself.

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As far as the charge itself was concerned, Alice Wheeldon insisted that it was “Gordon” who had raised the issue of assisting men to escape from camps, pretending that he was especially active in this field. She was very interested in what he had to say, since her own son was a CO in hiding from the police. It was “Gordon” who first referred to the need to obtain poisons to deal with the dogs. Alice had told “Gordon” about her attempt to arrange emigration to the USA for her three sons. Emigration papers were later found on Hettie, who had justified them by saying when arrested that she had been “the organiser of the conscientious objectors of Derby, but she (had) found it too much for her”. She had the papers because she had planned to use them to assist a CO to get away, but had backed off.

It had been “Gordon” who had suggested that it would be easy to arrange emigration, “if they put themselves in his hands”. Alice Wheeldon, used to the notion of a bargain in her shop, agreed with “Gordon” that “if he rendered this assistance (concerning the emigration) she would procure poison for the dogs”. All else, she admitted, but argued that Booth and “Gordon” had duped her; the latter’s identity then still being shrouded in mystery. She did not deny that she had arranged the poison, but never did she plan murder. Mason, in his evidence, backed up Alice Wheeldon. He entirely repudiated the idea that the poison might have been intended for use on humans. Mason’s own written instructions for use of the poison was self-evidently aimed at dogs, he pointed out on the witness stand. Yet Booth had claimed in his evidence that the first he had heard of dogs was when the defence introduced the idea at the trial itself.

The prosecution’s case turned on the phials of poison and their very existence was the one hard piece of sinister evidence that was used with great effect. Apart from that, the only other evidence posed “Comrade Bert”, or Booth, and “Gordon” against Alice Wheeldon and her family. The police spies said that the poison was intended for use against politicians, the defendants said it was for use on dogs. The poison itself gave no clue to its intended use, only Mason’s instructions provided that. At the very worst possible construction put on the wording of the instructions, it could only The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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Our History No. 10 be said that they were ambiguous and that was stretching the point.

The only way for the prosecution to tip the balance of probability on the wording actually intending, or hiding, a more deadly purpose was to introduce, time after time, Alice Wheeldon’s intemperate language concerning Lloyd George and others. Booth related, with blanks suitably replacing the swear words in the record, how she had fulminated against the politicians supporting the war, when on January 1st he had visited her shop to receive the poison:

Arthur Henderson, Labour leader—“a traitor to his

“Lloyd George has been people” the cause of millions of innocent lives being sacrificed. The …… shall be killed to stop it. And as for that other ……. Henderson, he is a traitor to his people. But Asquith is the ……. brains of the business. He (meaning Lloyd George) is neither fit for heaven nor …….. hell.” Alice Wheeldon capped all this for Booth by making an offensive reference to the King, who she said ought to “be done in too”.

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The trial lasted five days and, on March 11th, the jury found Hettie not guilty. There had been no evidence at all that she was involved in the criminal aspects of the affair as seen by the prosecution. The others were however convicted and received very severe punishment. Alice Wheeldon was given ten years penal servitude, Alfred Mason got seven years and his wife, Winnie, five years. Imprisoned in Holloway, Alice engaged in the established tactic of the suffragette movement - a hunger strike. Much public interest in her case was thus aroused and not a little controversy about the course of justice. After a year all three were released on licence, no doubt to avoid the transformation of Alice Wheeldon into a living martyr.

But her health was broken by the strain of the whole affair and the added factor of the hunger strike. Alice was to die some fourteen months after leaving prison on February 21st 1919 at the age of 53 years. Her coffin was draped in a red flag, when it was buried in Nottingham Road cemetery in Derby. Crowds of socialists gathered to honour her memory and the Derby Daily Express described the event as “Sensational Incidents at Graveside: Rhetorical Sneers at Prime Minister�. Alice was buried in the grave of her sister Elizabeth, who is named on the stone, but her own name was never added. There is no memorial to her in her home town.

Winnie and Alfred Mason both contracted pneumonia as a result of their weakened condition and were close to death for weeks. They were also allowed out on licence in early 1919 but their marriage was wrecked by the whole experience. After their divorce, she brought up their son, Peter Mason, who himself married and lived in Welwyn Garden City before his job took him to Australia in the early 1950s. His children Chloe, Paul, whose second name is Marshall, after Alice's maiden name, and Deirdrie still live in Australia; Paul has one son.

Hettie’s luck was little better, despite being found innocent. She lived, back in Derby, first at 278 Normanton Road but was dismissed from her teaching post and, unable to find work, survived from the family's The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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Our History No. 10 allotment. The SLP Derby branch secretary during 1919, she moved to 907 London Road. In 1920 she married Arthur MacManus and they lived at 1 Beddington Terrace, Mithcam Road, Croydon. Unfortunately, she was to die in November 1920 after her and Arthur’s baby died in childbirth, she contracted appendicitis and the complications wore her heart down.

MacManus died in 1927 in Soviet Russia (see

Appendices).

Nellie, who was not involved in the court case, is reputed to have married Tom Bell , the Communist leader, although no official record of this has yet been Tom Bell—Communist leader and possibly Hettie’s lover found. Indeed, Bell was already married—in 1910— and his son, Oliver (an older son died in childhood) reputed to be Nellie’s and Tom’s, was born to a different mother. Oliver was however with his father in Moscow during the 1920s; perhaps Nellie’s relationship was rather more informal that has been assumed. Little trace of her has been subsequently found one way or another, either in the UK or Russia.

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Also a SLP member, Bell was also one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers’ Committee and shop steward’s movement during the First World War. A Communist Party Executive member from 1920-1929, and initially National Organiser, one of two of the Party’s first full-time employed officials, Bell was also the first representative of the British Party at the EC of the Comintern. Perhaps this connection smoothed the way for young Will to emigrate to Soviet Russia in the early 1920s (see Appendices).

Later working in the Party’s Colonial Department, amongst other things aiding the creation of a Communist movement in India, Bell died in 1944.

Looking back on the affair, it is strongly tempting to make comparisons with this provocation and that of Pentrich, also in Derbyshire, in 1817, one hundred years earlier. Like Oliver, the Government’s spy back then, the eccentric and greedy “Gordon” was shipped into hiding in South Africa, where he was later to die in obscurity. The only epitaph for him was a poem in the SLP’s paper, The Socialist. Willie Paul described how even the maggots would not eat “the corpse of filthy Alick ... a brother” to them. There were other strange parallels between Pentrich and the Wheeldon affair that merit comparison. Both were highly suspect legal decisions. Like Oliver, “Gordon” was not called at the trial as a witness. As in the Pentrich case, legal and establishment figures later cast doubt on the decision. Above all, in both cases the political benefits for a government facing social turmoil were obvious.

All in all, the Wheeldon affair was a bizarre case. In an atmosphere of war fever, the defendants had little chance of getting off, despite the sense of unreality permeating the trial. They had been found guilty of conspiring to murder Britain’s Prime Minister by pricking him somehow, with a needlelike instrument dipped in a rare Amazonian poison. If Sherlock Holmes had surfaced at the trial as an expert witness, as an advisor to Agatha Christie, it might not have been out of place! The unjustness of the result of the trial and the prosecution in the first place is evident when the real strategy being followed by anti-war activists is considered.

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The SLP sought a political revolution arising out of mass working class rebellion, informed by a complex process of education, led by a highly trained political elite, well-versed in the science of tactics and strategy.

Individual heroics played little part in this. The possibility that there ever was a real plot to assassinate Lloyd George is an absurd notion. That the Wheeldons were ferociously opposed to the war is absolutely certain.

It took no less than eighty years for the truth to be officially recognised., when secret Home Office records were released only in 1997 but these were not widely reported in substance. These documents now revealed as a fact that “Gordon” was secret service agent “No. 5” in MI5 section PMS2.

Despite the tragedy, Alice Wheeldon had no regrets. She was a woman of great courage. Writing from prison on the eve of her trial, she provides us with her own memorial: “We will keep a-going ... and will break

before we will bend. So long comrade, keep the flag flying and when we lose our madness we will meet again.”

Even in Aylesbury prison, Alice fought for better conditions for prisoners.

A warder complained that this inveterate rebel called her “a damned flaming vampire”! But, the secret papers record: “It was very undesirable that she should die in prison”. After her release, the family and all the participants in the trial fade from the scene, dissatisfaction with the war grew. Out of it would be born the modern shop stewards’ movement, in which Derby would – along with the Clyde, Sheffield, Manchester and Coventry play a pivotal role.

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Appendices Arthur MacManus Arthur MacManus was born in 1886 in Belfast and moved to Glasgow as a young boy in 1891. He was one of the leaders of the Clyde Workers' Committee during the First World War and was deported to Edinburgh in 1916 following the dispute at Beardmore engineering works.

A member of the Socialist Labour Party and a vociferous anti-conscription and anti-war agitator throughout the 19141918 period, he was also a regular visitor to Derby in connection with both shop stewards’ co-ordination and anti-war activity.

Arthur MacManus

MacManus signed the Manifesto on —photographed in 1914.

Communist Unity as the delegate for Derby SLP. This statement came from a conference of SLP members held on Easter Saturday and Sunday, April 3rd and 4th 1920, in Nottingham.

Following this, MacManus was instrumental in the formation of the Communist Party from 1920 and was Chair of the Party at its inception, a role perceived to be more than just chair of the Central Committee. It was a temporary two-year position that was seen as essential to mark the significance of the varying forces that constituted the new Party. Thus Arthur and his wife Hetty (Wheeldon) moved to London and he went on to become a member of the executive committee of the Third International.

On August 9th 1922, when MacManus was cited by the court as being 43 years old (he was probably 36) and living in the Old Kent Road, he was arrested on Walworth Road. Being discovered carrying Party literature, The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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using the pseudonym of James Anderson, and being in possession of a revolver, he was sentenced to five weeks hard labour.

From December 1922 until August 1923, MacManus was away in Moscow, where he was a member of the Praesidium of the Comintern.

He was one of the 12 Communist Party leaders arrested on various charges of sedition and mutiny in 1925, to deprive the movement of clear sighted leadership ahead of the looming general strike. He received six months imprisonment after refusing an offer to walk free if he renounced the Party.

MacManus died in Moscow of a serious illness in 1927, having been, as the Party statement put it, “in harness … up to the last”, attending a conference in Brussels to found the League Against Imperialism a week before he died.

Some of MacManus’s ashes were interred in the wall of the Kremlin in recognition of his role as a pioneer of Communism.

The rest were repatriated and placed in Golders Green crematorium, after a grand ceremony organised by the British Communist Party.

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Will Wheeldon Alice’s son, Will, came out of hiding to lay a red flag over the coffin at her funeral. A few months later an amnesty was declared for conscientious objectors. Will applied for his job back, but was refused because he had been to prison, and moved to Croydon, to be near Hettie, where he worked in a dairy. In November 1920, Hettie died in Croydon after giving birth to her and Arthur’s stillborn child.

In 1921, at the age of 29, Will fled Britain for sanctuary in postrevolutionary Soviet Russia – the USSR had yet to be founded. Tom Bell was certainly in Moscow and the New Economic Policy had just been introduced and experts from abroad were being encouraged to volunteer to work in Russia. Eventually, Will took Russian citizenship and seemed to have planned to spend the rest of his life there. Relatives were for many years under the impression that he died in a typhus epidemic. Will was last heard of by his family in the central Russian city of Samara (now Kuybyshev) in 1928, which would have been a place quite consistent with death by typhoid just at that time, although not so a few years later.

Only in very recent years has the modern Russian security ministry named a man they said was British who had been arrested, sentenced to death and shot who they named as “William Wileden”. It was widely assumed that this was the same person as Will Wheeldon. Much speculation followed in the press about his supposed ‘disillusionment’.

Although a verbal

Picture claimed by a Wheeldon family genealogical site to be of Willie convalescing in Sochi in the mid-1930s.

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Our History No. 10 rendering of Wheeldon in a north Midlands accent could conceivably result in a nonEnglish speaker writing the name as Wiledon, the veracity of this accusation is now in doubt since a claim made at exactly the same time about another British revolutionary has turned out to be quite wrong. This person was also supposed to have been executed at the same time as Wiledon but, in fact, it has been wellestablished that the subject did not die until his old age, A picture claimed to be of Willie Wheeldon’s wedding, which appears to have been in Soviet in recent times.

Russia – from a Wheeldon family genealogical site.

Although Will sometimes did have his name spelt as Wildon, as rendered in transliteration from the Russian alphabet, this is not precisely the same name. Also, although British ‘experts’ in security matters claim that the Russians ‘mis-spelt’ the name Wheeldon as Wileden, the latter is actually a perfectly normal surname widely used in the global English-speaking community. Moreover, there were few political executions in 1928, the purges not taking place until 1936-8, long after Wheeldon’s Australian based family thought he had died since he had been a great letter writer and these ceased abruptly.

So it is in fact quite unclear that Will did die in the purges, although this is possible, since anyone with foreign connections could fall under suspicion in those difficult years just before the world war. It is also perfectly possible that a different person was involved, as equally as it is that Will Wheeldon simply died of an infection.

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Current thinking that he died in the late 1930s, of whatever reason, is buttressed by the releasing to a family genealogical site of pictures claiming to be of Will Wheeldon, Alice’s husband, the family in 1892, when there were just two girls, and several pictures of Will in Soviet Russia.

There is a head and shoulder of him, him getting married, and then pictured in Sochi, convalescing in the early to mid-1930s.

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Willie Paul Willie, or as he was more widely known later in life, Bill, Paul was born in 1884. He joined the Glasgow Socialist Labour Party (SLP) early on and was to become its leading Marxist theorist and tutor and later a founding member of the Communist Party and one of its key figures in the 1920s.

Paul’s SLP social science classes in Derby from 1917-18 were especially well attended and have been compared by the son of a contemporary ‘student’ as having the same degree of repute as the similar approach of the Clydeside, John MacLean, in that highly complicated questions were well understood by gigantic audiences of working class people.

A book of Paul’s lectures entitled “The State: its origin and functions” was published as a result of these classes. The work clearly follows classic Marxist themes, but more interestingly draws the same or similar theoretical conclusions as Lenin was reaching at the same time, without the benefit of Paul being able to read Lenin’s work at this point, since it had not yet been translated.

He stood in the 1918 general election for the SLP in Ince, Manchester, where he took 13% of the vote in a straight fight with an official Labour candidate.

At the time of the foundation of the Communist Party, Willie Paul lived at ‘Pen Bryn’ in what was then the village of Littleover, just on the outskirts of Derby. He was the key figure in the Derby Communist Unity group, which united local SLPers and Derby’s branch of the British Socialist Party. He was made a member of the Communist Party’s Provisional Executive Committee, having been particularly involved in the debates inside the SLP over the unity process and the nature of the new party. He was a major influence in coalescing those in the SLP who favoured joining the Communist Party.

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At the founding conference however, Paul displayed much of the revolutionary zeal, which the SLP had made its hallmark, by speaking against affiliation to the Labour Party in a most scathing and cynical way.

This was of course entirely consistent with the SLP’s view of the matter.

Nevertheless, the anti-affiliationists were beaten in the debate and the Communist Party’s policy was to be for affiliation.

Paul’s Derby Communist Unity Group was one of many smaller, local societies represented at the founding Unity Convention. The national Communist Unity Group was the faction inside the SLP, which had convened a special national conference at Nottingham to win the SLP to the notion of unity of all communist organisations. The majority of the SLP official leadership expelled the CUG activists for this action but most members followed Paul and his (subsequently more famous) Glasgow comrades into the new Party. Whilst the SLP rump carried on as a shell organisation it was a mirage for decades to come and eventually faded away.

Paul played an important role nationally for some time to come in the young Communist Party. He was editor of the ‘Communist Review’, the Communist Party’s theoretical journal from 1921-3.

By this time Paul was well known in Manchester, having had strong local connections there for at least ten years. He had often “rendered songs of the Irish potato famine” at the Openshaw BSP meetings for Harry PoIlitt, later to become the long-standing leader of British Communism. Paul has The Alice Wheeldon affair of 1917

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been described by Pollitt’s ‘official’ biographer as a “powerful and expressive baritone”.

He then became the editor of the ‘Sunday Worker’, which was unarguably a great success. It was launched on the 15th March 1925.

Based at 74 Swinton Street, Grays Inn Road, London, the objective of the paper was spelt out in the editorial in the first edition: “Our policy will be to fight the battle of the working class, and of the working class alone”. But the demise of the Sunday was only occasioned by the birth of the brightest A call in 1917 to support revolution in star of them all. Whilst the Sunday Russia; above. Left, a 1919 pamphlet by Worker closed in November 1929, the Bill Paul Daily Worker began on 1st January 1930 and continues today in the shape of its direct successor, the Morning Star.

Of Willie Paul’s highly original book, “Communism & Society” many staunch things were said. Perhaps the most significant was that, in H J Laski’s own book, “Communism” [1927 Williams & Norgate London], the author stated that “Mr Paul’s book is easily the ablest English exposition of the Communist position”.

Leaving the national stage at the end of the Twenties to marry and bring up a daughter, Paul nonetheless remained on the fringes of Communist politics all his days. In the 1930s and l940s he was closely identified with Soviet friendship activities in Derby. During the second world war, he was much involved in campaigning work in aid of the Soviet allies in Derby and was a prominent supporter of the Derby Peace Council in the l950s.

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He was widely regarded as a man of substance in the local labour Derbyshire movement, even though he was not particularly active in his later years, some have suggested due to family reasons. A veteran Communist Party member in Derby once implied that first his wife and then his daughter were violently opposed to his politics, the latter being embarrassed by the fame that his name still possessed decades after his death. Sadly, all his papers and documents were disposed of by the family when he died on 9th March 1958 in Derby. But Paul did have the foresight to leave his considerable personal library to the Party in his will.

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Publications by Willie Paul: “Debate between G G Coulton and William Paul - compulsory military service” SLP (1912) “Karl Liebknecht: The Man, His Works and Message” SLP (c1914?)

“Hands off Russia ... an analysis of the Economics of Allied Intervention in Russia” SLP (c1917) “Labour and Empire - a study in Imperialism” SLP (1917) “The State - its origins and function” SLP (1917) “Scientific Socialism: its revolutionary aims and methods” SLP (1918) “The State - its origins and function” [enlarged and revised edition] SLP (1919) -also reprinted by Edinburgh Proletarian Publishers (1974) Preface to “The New Communist Manifesto of the Third International” SLP (August 1919) “The Irish Crisis” Communist Party (1921) “Labour Imperialism and the Experts Report” [concerns the Dawes Plan] Rushholme Division LP (1924) “The Path to Power - the Communist Party on Trial” Communist Party (1924) “Communism and Society” Communist Party (1927) [Harold Laski called it “easily the ablest English exposition of the communist position” in his “Communism” Willlams and Norgate (1927)]

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Sources: Derby Daily Express February 21st 1919 Derby Evening Telegraph March 23rd 1983 Derby Mercury February 9th 1917 F E Smith, “Famous Trials of History” Hutchinson (1926) F W Chandler “Political Spies and Provocative Agents” (1933) Graham Stevenson ‘Defence or Defiance’, Chapter 8: ‘Class war or imperialist war? The Derbyshire labour movement and the politics of 19141918’ (1982) grahamstevenson.me.uk Guardian November 28th 1997 History Today – May 2007 John Mahon “Harry Pollitt” Lawrence and Wishart (1976) ‘Report of the Communist Unity Convention’, London (1920) David Doughan ‘Wheeldon, Alice Ann (1866–1919)’ (2004), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Raymond Challinor “The Origins of British Bolshevism” Croom Helm (1977) S & B Webb “History of Trades Unionism” (1950) p645 Sunday Worker 25th October 1925 The Socialist March 1917 The Times February 1st 1917; March 8th 1917 Tom Bell “Pioneering Days” Lawrence and Wishart (1941) p127

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