THERE are some riots you just can’t help chuckling at, even if you’re not the sort of person usually given to inappropriate levity. The circumstances which led to the stoning of the Carlton Club, on February 8 1886, would surely be enough to make even the soberest cadre crack a tiny smile.

It began with a pressure group affiliated to the Conservative Party, called the Fair-Trade League, holding a rally in Trafalgar Square to demand “Free Trade within the Empire and Protection against the World.” 

Interpreting this as an attempt to win working-class support for conservatism, the Social Democratic Federation, Britain’s earliest self-styled Marxist party, called its own demonstration — same time, same place. It argued that the unemployment then blighting the nation was caused by capitalism, not by beastly foreigners, and could be ameliorated by government support for new co-operative businesses.

The police did their unimpressive best to keep the two sides apart on the day. The 74-year-old chief superintendent in charge of the operation attended the square in plain clothes and got lost in the crowd, where he had his pockets picked.

The man who’d appointed him, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, couldn’t get near enough to see much because of the large numbers attending, but was nonetheless happy to report, on his return to Scotland Yard, that it was “the quietest meeting he had seen for a long time.” You can almost hear the Benny Hill theme tune in the background.

Some sources say that the police directed the SDF marchers to Pall Mall in order to avoid further trouble in Trafalgar Square. Delicious, if true, but I think it more likely that a militant breakaway of many thousands from the main demonstration set off towards the traditional rallying point of Hyde Park on its own initiative.

By design or chance, the comrades found themselves in “clubland” — that neighbourhood of the West End where most of the capital’s elite gentlemen’s clubs were located.

The Carlton Club, founded in 1832, was for some time the headquarters of the Conservative Party, and is still an important meeting and lobbying site for Tories.

Witness accounts from both sides of the social divide — the poor who couldn’t get a job, and the rich who didn’t want one — largely agree on what happened as the demonstration passed the Carlton. As one newspaper reported, “the members jeered at it in the most insulting manner, and one fat gentleman put his tongue to the window.”

Whether or not the Tory gent’s fatness was significant (certainly, it is mentioned in just about every contemporary news article), the marchers did not turn the other cheek to the provocation being offered.

As members of various exclusive clubs barracked the unemployed — their words carried, it is easy to imagine, on gales of claret breath — and even threw shoes at them from upper windows, the workers were not shy in returning fire.

Some say roadworks were taking place nearby, and that these provided the weaponry with which the high-class clubs and restaurants of St James’s were deprived of their windows. Many posh shops throughout the West End were looted. As is customary after such events, the ruling class reacted with panic.

Rumours of revolution shivered the spines of the bourgeoisie, shops were boarded up in expectation of further attacks, and four leading socialists were arrested on charges of seditious conspiracy. Their trial took place in April at the Old Bailey.

The defendants in what the press called the West End Riots case pleaded not guilty to the accusation that their oratory had been intended to inspire violence.

On the contrary, they said, given the awful suffering of the poor, their words had been if anything excessively mild. Some of the Bertie Wooster types called as witnesses, and even some of the police officers, were considerably more helpful to the defence than the prosecution.

One passerby caught up in the trouble outside the Carlton, said he was pretty sure that the man who had organised his rescue from “the roughs” was, in fact, one of the accused.

The prosecutor’s claim that speakers at Trafalgar Square had declared “We must have bread, or they must have lead” was contradicted by several witnesses. All defendants were found not guilty of all charges.

Repressive states never seem to learn that taking their political opponents to court is frequently more trouble than it’s worth; no doubt Starmer’s franchise government under King Musk will demonstrate this over the next couple of years.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at www.rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.