I'm grateful to a Mr Karl Marx of Highgate who has kindly written most of this week's column for me.
The Sunday Trading Bill was one of a series of measures designed to force poor people to attend church on Sundays. The rich, of course, didn't need to attend church - their consciences were already pure. Thus, on the sabbath day, many of the well-to-do would be found walking and riding in Hyde Park (a place from which ordinary people were largely excluded) - or, as Marx put it: “a procession of elegant ladies and gentlemen [...] in their high coaches-and-four with liveried lackeys in front and behind, joined, to be sure, by a few mounted venerables slightly under the weather from the effects of wine.”
Under the proposed law, almost every public and commercial activity would be banned in London on Sundays - including shopping. Since almost everyone in those days worked six very long days a week, Sunday was literally their only opportunity to buy food, fuel and whatever else they needed to survive.
At the time of the pro-Sunday trading riot of 1855, Marx was earning a few bob as a correspondent for the German newspaper, Neue Oder Zeitung. A few days after the extraordinary events of 24th June, this is what eyewitness Marx told his readers:
"only small shopkeepers do business on Sundays and the big shops are quite willing to eliminate the Sunday competition of the small traders by parliamentary means. [...] The aristocratic clubs were no more hit by the Beer Bill than the Sunday occupations of fashionable society are by the Sunday Trading Bill. The working class receives its wages late on Saturdays; Sunday trading, therefore, exists solely for them."
" [...]The instigator of the Sunday Trading Bill, Lord Robert Grosvenor, had answered the objection that his bill was directed only against the poor and not against the rich classes by saying that the aristocracy was largely refraining from employing its servants and horses on Sundays. At the end of last week the following poster issued by the Chartists could be seen on all the walls in London announcing in large print:
"New Sunday Bill prohibiting newspapers, shaving, smoking, eating and drinking and all other kinds of recreation and nourishment both corporal and spiritual, which the poor people still enjoy at the present time. An open-air meeting of artisans, workers and 'the lower orders' generally of the capital will take place in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon to see how religiously the aristocracy is observing the Sabbath and how anxious it is not to employ its servants and horses on that day, as Lord Robert Grosvenor said in his speech. Come and bring your wives and children in order that they may profit by the example their 'betters' set them!"
On Sunday afternoon, Karl estimated, there were at least 200,000 protestors assembled. When the police refused them admission to the park, saying that it was royal property and the Queen had not given her permission for them to enter it, the leaders of the demonstration felt they'd made their point and set off to hold their gathering elsewhere. But not everyone followed them, Marx reported:
"People had already begun heaping insults on the carriages and riders. The constables, who were steadily receiving reinforcements, drove the pedestrians back from the road. They thus helped to form a dense avenue of people on either side which extended for more than a quarter of an hour's walk [...] A babel of jeering, taunting and discordant noises - in which no language is so rich as the English - soon closed in upon them from all sides. As the concert was improvised there was a lack of instrumental accompaniment. The chorus, therefore, had to make use of its own organs and to confine itself to vocal music. And what a diabolical concert it was: a cacophony of grunting, hissing, whistling, squawking, snarling, growling, croaking, yelling, groaning, rattling, shrieking, gnashing sounds. Music to drive a man out of his mind, music to move a stone. Added to this came outbursts of genuine Old English humour strangely mixed with boiling and long-constrained anger. 'Go to church!' was the only recognisable articulate sound. In a conciliatory fashion one lady stretched out an orthodoxly bound prayerbook from the coach. 'Give it to your horses to read!' the thunder of a thousand voices echoed back. When the horses shied, reared, bucked and bolted, endangering the lives of their elegant burdens, the mocking cries became louder, more menacing, more implacable. Noble lords and ladies, among them Lady Granville, wife of the President of the Privy Council, were forced to alight and make use of their feet. When elderly gentlemen rode by whose dress - in particular the broad-brimmed hat - envinced a special claim to purity of faith, all the sounds of fury were extinguished, as at a command - by inextinguishable laughter."
"[...] The spectacle lasted for three hours. Only English lungs are capable of such a feat. During the performance opinions such as 'This is only the beginning!' 'This is the first step!' 'We hate them!' etc. could be heard from various groups. While hatred could be read in the faces of the workers we have never seen such smug, self-satisfied smiles as those that covered the faces of the middle classes. Just before the end the demonstration increased in violence. Sticks were shaken at the carriages, and through the endless discordant din the cry could be heard: 'You rascals!'"
Further Sunday demonstrations followed, met with increasingly ferocious police violence, and the posh temporarily abandoned Hyde Park for fear of attack. As the disorder spread through London, the Sunday Trading Bill was withdrawn.
Of course, in the 20th century the park was more likely to host demonstrations against Sunday opening, by shopworkers who wanted one guaranteed day off a week to spend with their families. And Marx's comment on the 24th June demo - "we can state without exaggeration that yesterday in Hyde Park the English revolution began" - seems with hindsight a touch optimistic.
*
Sources:
www.speakerscorner.net/articles/agitationagainstthesundaytradingbill
www.breweryhistory.com/journal/archive/118/bh-118-026.html
A people's history of London by Lindsey German & John Rees (Verso, 2012)