There have been a lot of Bloody Sundays over the last century or so, in several different countries, but the original bearer of that name was Sunday the 13th November, 1887, when police and soldiers savagely attacked a free-speech demonstration in Trafalgar Square, London. Among the lesser-known results of that day were two Christmas cards depicting the violence. They knew how to celebrate the Yule in olden times.
The 1880s in Britain was sort of the 2020s without Twitter: an increasingly authoritarian state, a ruling class seeing revolutionary conspiracies in every shadow, growing poverty, and ancient liberties daily being suspended or abolished. Right-wing government ministers did their best to stop people from demonstrating, and the fight for freedom of expression and assembly had to be fought afresh week after week.
The 13th November demo had been called by various radical groups, following the imprisonment for political reasons of an Irish nationalist member of parliament. The Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police banned the rally, but around 30,000 protestors turned up anyway – protesting for the right to protest. They were met in Trafalgar Square by several thousand police, mounted police, infantrymen and lifeguards. The democrats had come armed and ready to defend themselves, and street battles continued around the district for hours. There were around 400 arrests, and maybe 200 hospitalisations. The savagery of this first Bloody Sunday shocked the nation, both right and left.
Historians generally agree that the first Christmas card was sent in 1843. During the next few decades, cards with religious themes were rare; they would have risked causing offence to many recipients. Instead, early cards mostly celebrated feasting and charity (along with some motifs which seem very odd to us these days; if you have a spare moment, look up “dead bird Christmas cards”).
Llew Smith’s book on protest cards includes two examples which relate to Bloody Sunday. Neither of them are what we would call festive. One is a drawing captioned “Fight at the bottom of Parliament Street,” showing just that – a battle between demonstrators and cops. The origins and motives of this card are unclear, but in the second case there is no ambiguity: “Ode to the Specials,” illustrated with a picture of a police truncheon, gloatingly celebrates the role of the Special Constables in the fighting. Written in verse, it boasts that the Specials “baton’d The Great Unwashed,” and ends “With Best Wishes for a Specially Jolly Christmas.”
No reindeer, no robins – just street violence. Next time someone tells you that Christmas isn’t what it used to be, you might want to have a word with them.
Another similarity between that decade and this: when something awful happened, the state would use the device of an official inquiry to insist that lessons had been learned, it’ll never happen again, so can we all stop talking about it, please?
However, the main recommendation of the inquiry into Bloody Sunday was unlikely to soothe the feelings of the angry masses. It was that the police should be issued with stronger truncheons.
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Sources:
Glad tidings of struggle and strife by Llew and Pam Smith (Fonthill, 2012)
A people’s history of London by Lindsey German and John Rees (Verso, 2012)
Socialist history 61 (Lawrence & Wishart, 2022)
https://phm.org.uk/collections-display/?irn=41999
https://phm.org.uk/collections-display/?irn=42006
www.bostonirish.com/history/2019/until-late-1880s-christmas-was-hardly-merry-boston%E2%80%99s-irish