Today, as of course you know, is the 168th anniversary of the Hyde Park beer riot.
Strictly speaking the Sunday Trading Riots, because there was disorder the previous Sunday, 24 June, and it was in response to a bill on Sabbath opening — but it all came down to beer.
The trouble had started, according to Tim Holt in the Brewery History journal, about a year earlier, with the Sale of Beer Act, which closed pubs on Sundays from 2.30-6 pm and after 10 pm. This left people far from gruntled — and the came the Sunday Trading Bill.
Most people had to buy stuff on Sunday, because they were paid late on Saturday, and they couldn’t preserve food, so had to buy it the day they ate it. The new Bill wouldn’t have had any effect on licensing hours, but a Times editorial on 15 June conflated the two things.
The rich, whose larders and whose cellars are well filled, can, of course, afford to turn up their eyes in pious horror at the enormities of the poor man’s baked shoulder of mutton, and his pint of beer … We have already cut down the poor man’s Sunday at one end by our Public house Bill, and now we are attacking it from the other quarter. There will surely be a revulsion of feeling against all this.
A paper in The Historical Journal in 1965 says:
Posters advertising a meeting in Hyde Park on the afternoon of Sunday, 24 June ‘to see how religiously the aristocracy is observing the Sabbath’ suddenly appeared in the London streets. The police tried to prevent this public meeting on Crown property and interrupted a speech by Bligh the Chartist. But by this time, carriages whose wealthy occupants were enjoying their customary Sunday afternoon drive in the Parks, had begun to arrive. The crowd lined the Serpentine carriageway, and Marx describes how ‘a babel of jeering, taunting, discordant ejaculations, in which no language is as rich as English’ bore down upon the carriage occu- pants who were urged to ‘go to Church’. Several horses were startled, several of their passengers, including Lady Granville, had to get out and walk. ‘The spectacle lasted three hours’, says Marx; ‘only English lungs could perform such a feat.’
Yes, that is the Marx you think it is. Karl, living in London at the time, reported on the event for German newspaper Neue Oder Zeitung, and said at least 200,000 people were there. How this tallies with the police’s estimate of the numbers, I have not been able to ascertain.
This was just a bit of shouting, but Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister, was sufficiently unsettled by it to ‘hint’ that Lord Robert Grosvenor, whose Bill it was, should withdraw it. The evangelical Whig Grosvenor did not agree, and more posters appeared, concerning 1 July…
By 2.30 on 1 July, 150,000 members of the “respectable class” (according to the next day’s Times) had gathered. When the police tried to arrest a speaker, things got heated — at first, in the form of more shouting. Then, it all got a bit odd:
Some of the mob managed to get an enormous eel out of the Serpentine and they commenced throwing it over the heads of the people, and, at last, at the police; two of the constables of the A division at length secured the eel, and carried it to headquarters…
There was also the small matter of the police deciding that — although there weren’t nearly as many carriages about as usual — they should clear the route just in case. By taking their truncheons to the demonstrators, and arresting 72 of them.
At this point, Grosvenor, “a timid and rather pathetic figure … withdrew his measure … [and] retired from the scene to devote the rest of his life to liturgical reform”.
By this point, though, people were angry about police brutality. There was another meeting on 8 July, of only 4,000 people, and with plenty of police — and the army on hand just in case — things were more restrained. Well, apart from the handful who split off, went to Belgravia and broke 749 window panes in 15 minutes.
So, in fact, there were three riots, of varying degrees of magnitude and success. The Brewery History journal says “nothing is known of the subsequent fate of the detained eel”, and one of Karl Marx’s assertions turned out a little optimistic:
A 1908 Licensing Bill aimed to close “a third of all public houses”, reduce Sunday opening hours, and ban women working in pubs. 750,000 people took to Hyde Park on Sunday 27 September that year. The moral of this story is: don’t come between the British and their ale.
