The People's Train (2 page)

It did not take much attendance at Australian Workers Union meetings and general events at Trades Hall for my friend Suvarov to sense there was a strike coming, and that it would grow out of the Queensland Tramways depot. Although the strike would look only to improvements in the always hard-up life of workers who would utter grievances about wages, health and compensation for injury, it was to be welcomed just the same. Every strike was an education and got us closer to the day when the great truth would break on the workers, and they’d no longer ask for crumbs but for the whole table. The more strikes, the more of an education in the futility and pain of wringing from bosses the right to wear a badge, the right to better hours and overtime pay. But this one was to be an education for Suvarov and me too, in how things worked in Queensland.

One of the triggers of this strike was a fellow named Joseph Freeman Bender, manager of the Brisbane Tramways, which belonged in turn to the great General Electric company of the United States. Mr Bender grew up in industrial Pittsburgh and had no time for unions, and had told the
Brisbane Telegraph
so. He was determined to keep union members out of his tramway sheds. Rybakov, who worked on a special project of some kind in Bender’s engineering department, said at dinner at Adler’s one night that he would come out with the strikers and to hell with Bender. That night his coughing woke us like artillery.

Kelly, our hulking, red-headed friend from the Australian Labour Federation, went to talk to Mr Bender about peaceably unionising the sheds, but the chat became bitter, and Bender told Kelly that in Pittsburgh men like him were regularly and properly shot dead by the forces of good order – that trainloads of troopers and Pinkerton men were brought in to do that job. I wish you a happy birthday too, said Kelly.

A nice man, Mr Bender, said Kelly ultimately; a credit to American civilisation and, of course, a good Freemason, but purely for business reasons.

In Russia the intelligentsia used the lodges to plot an end to the tsarist system, but overthrowing monarchs was not on Bender’s slate.

I said to Kelly, He speaks of arms. We should have arms too!

Kelly threw up his hands. You’ve got to be kidding, Tom!

Kelly is a genial man who grew up in poverty, son of a waterside worker. He likes to drink, and he and his executive, called ‘the Reds’ by the respectable papers who have never seen a real Red, do half their organisational work and stumble on their best ideas at the Trades Hall Hotel.

I told him just a little – only a little – about Kharkov back in late 1905, the siege of the engineering workshop. The shelling and so on.

That could never happen here, he said. Though ... some years back the squatters talked of Nordenfeldt guns to be used on shearers ... No, that couldn’t happen now. And anyhow, you didn’t win the fight back there, where you came from. Did you?

Not yet, I told him. But it was a war. The Cossacks had the best of carbines and cannons and their horses to trample people. Are the Queensland police any less in power?

I told him that on the way home each day I passed the barracks in Roma Street where officers harangued the militia boys. One day an officer was caning a boy in front of the others. It looked pretty much like a tsarist situation to me, I said.

Chocos, he said.

I beg your pardon?

Chocolate soldiers, Tom. Chocolate officers like to throw their weight around.

I suggested that at the very least we could post armed workers on the upper floors or roofs of buildings to protect fleeing strikers if the police charged a march.

You’re having me on, said Kelly. Look, we just don’t do that sort of stuff here.

What about this Eureka Stockade of yours?

It was a different situation. That’s sixty years back. Look, we’ll do okay here with moral force. But for God’s sake don’t mention guns. The police will go crazy. Bloody hell!

The second figure of the triangle at one of whose points Mr Bender sat was the premier of the state, Digby Denham, another union-hater who might fall to Thomas Joseph Ryan at the next election, and the third was Police Commissioner Urquhart, who had killed hundreds of natives in the north of the state at a place named Kaldoon and was so proud of it that he left the bones as a public lesson. He would now have liked to make a similar set of marvels with the bones of militants.

At the Trades Hall Hotel, one of Kelly’s men would always say, Thought you bloody Russians could drink, as they held their icy schooners and I stood with my seven-ounce glass of lemonade, which I barely sipped because it was too sugared, in the British manner. Didn’t think you were a bloody wowser, Tom.

They would tell stories about Mr Joseph Freeman Bender, who was admired for extending the tracks out to Toowong. It wasn’t an accident that they ran by his fine house, Endrim, in Woodstock Road. But then he did not deign to travel to his office in ordinary trams with the common people. He possessed his own personal tram, named ‘the Palace’, which picked him up in the mornings on the way through Auchenflower to town, and then collected sundry cronies, business giants, lawyers, Supreme Court judges and even politicians. Even when empty, the Palace ran back and forth to his home every ten to fifteen minutes during the day, and every twenty minutes during the evening. The Pa lace was fitted with a bar and a piano and armchairs and sofas.

One of Kelly’s so-called Reds said, I’d like to see what a plug of dynamite might do to this palace on wheels. Let’s see how that works one bloody morning when Digby Denham’s chatting away on the sofa with Chief Justice bloody Cooper.

Justice Cooper was quick to charge trade unionists with contempt, and Kelly himself had served a month in Boggo Road jail for the sake of the dignity of Mr Cooper’s court.

It was clear from the amount of time given to the subject of Mr Bender and his friends in the saloon bar of the Trades Hall Hotel that Kelly and the Trades Hall apparatus would dearly love to attack capital by way of the managing director of Brisbane Tramways.

Despite the heat in that end-of-year period, we would stage a series of lectures too. I would lecture on Marxist theory, my friend Grisha Suvarov on the strike he organised in Vyborg in 1907, and Professor Klushin on the war of 1905. An American Russian named Beladov would speak on American anarcho-syndicalism – otherwise known as the Wobblies. So when they came to town, an intellectual feast awaited our brothers from the Ipswich railways sheds, the Darling Downs camps, the dairy farms of the coast north of Brisbane, and the cane fields of Rockhampton.

Kelly, in the meantime, proved no respecter of religious festivals. We had affiliated the Russian Emigrants Union with Trades Hall, and now Kelly called a meeting there on the night of western Christmas, the Australians following the Gregorian calendar as in their northern European places of origin. Not that there had been much ceremony in our boarding house, except that organised by our two Polish boarders. Little Mrs Adler was Jewish and the rest of us were saving our celebrations and strong liquors for 7 January. In fact, this sweltering Christmas-night meeting was tactically brilliant of Kelly, for the next day’s newspapers would have room only for cricket and horse races.

That night I arrived early to the Trades Hall, a fine sturdy stone building. Many of my fellow Adler house residents were with me, as was the engineer Rybakov, who had moved by now to his own house in Roma Street. You wouldn’t have guessed my friends and I were refugees from northern winters. Each of us brought his own climate of sodden tropic air in with him, our own musk of very Australian sweat.

I found Kelly at the back of the hall, wearing a dented homburg, and congratulated him on his stratagem.

Yes, he said, and there won’t be one of them here who isn’t a bit fired up. The shortcomings of their Christmas tables, eh? And the threadbare presents they were forced to give to kids. They’ll be ready for a big step, all right. And with any luck, two-thirds of them will be pissed!

Then he told me the Trades Hall pub was letting anyone with a union badge in the back door. He’d squared it with his cousin, who was a cop in the licensing division.

You’ll speak from the floor tonight, won’t you, Tom? he asked me.

In my bad English?

But the idea excited me, and I agreed.

The world over, there is nothing quite like men and women suffused with the same fraternal discontent filling a hall. Fifteen minutes before the meeting was to begin, men furrowed by labour and women aged too early by harsh tasks were looking for spaces around the wall, the men concentrating earnestly on rolling their own reed-thin cigarettes. And yet it was often a false exhilaration that hung over such events, I knew. Besides, the old question remained: did these men and women want a new world, or would an extra ten shillings in their pay packet settle all their discontents? I thought I already knew the answer to that one.

As president of the Russian Emigrants Union, I had a seat in the second row. The women in the room were a minority but I found myself seated next to two of them, an older woman and a younger who might have been her daughter. Looking at their British countenances, I felt a stab of insignificance. How could I influence a meeting with poor English and when allocated a seat in the second row? A man from the Waterside Workers, Billy Foster of the Tramways Union, Burkitt of the Seaman’s Union, Pongrass of the Australian Workers Union with all its shearers and farmhands, and Ryan, the man who desired to become premier – they had the front-row seats and sat secure with their ideas and their control of language.

The two women to my right were engaged in lively conversation with each other. They seemed to think themselves in no way inferior to the executive of the Australian Workers Union or to any other potentates. The older woman, beside me, was grey-haired, quite aged in fact, but she talked with a lot of animation. Her enthusiasm was unblunted by years. The younger woman beyond her was brown-haired beneath her straw bonnet and looked untouched by the heat in white blouse, floral jacket and lemon skirt. The older woman’s hair was tightly bunched, and her little hat was tethered with hatpins, but the younger’s brown hair fell free. She was animated too. Even sitting she looked tall, with a broad, full-lipped face. She could have been a St Petersburg intellectual – she had that look of having been refined by thought. But she also seemed mature, un-maidenly. No coy pretension to her. Such are the glories that lie on the north bank of the Brisbane River, I thought, in Auchenflower or Kelvin Grove!

There was so much chatter in the hall, and they seemed to tolerate that beery, cheap-tobacco air so well, that I felt confident enough to speak to these women, and, when there was a lull in their conversation, turned to the older one.

Excuse me, madam, I said. May I introduce myself? I am Artem– Tom – Samsurov of the Russian Emigrants Union.

She said in a reedy voice that she was very pleased to meet me. Her name was Mrs Amelia something or other – it was only later that I learned her surname was spelled
Pethick.
I am present here, said this small elderly lady, as president of the Typists and Secretarial Services Union.

I had not heard of such an entity.

I believed, she went on to explain, that young women were not properly protected by the Clerks’ Union. We are a group who have special problems of working conditions and dignity. I hope you are more understanding than some of our Australian brothers, Mr Samsurov.

I said I hoped I was too. Perhaps I said it a little loudly, in the silly hope that the woman on the other side of Mrs Pethick would hear.

And the young lady here, I said. She is your lieutenant?

Amelia Pethick laughed very pleasantly.

Oh no! This young woman is nobody’s lieutenant, Mr Samsurov.

For the first time the brown-haired one took notice of me. She half-smiled in a puzzled way, not having heard the beginning of my conversation with Mrs Pethick.

Mrs Mockridge, said the little old woman, would you care to meet Mr Tom or Artem Samsurov of the Russians? Mr Samsurov, this is Mrs Hope Mockridge.

The long-faced, brown-haired young woman smiled broadly. She was very beautiful in a classic way.

How interesting, she said. What brought you Russians here? The tsar I know about, and his cruel secret police. And Cossacks and all the rest of it.

I grinned back. Cossacks and gendarmes and the Okhrana had something to do with it, I admitted.

Okhrana?

The tsar’s secret police, I explained.

You obviously escaped Stolypin’s necktie, Mr Samsurov? Hope Mockridge observed, waving a large straw hat she held on her knee.

I wished to tell them the reason I had not worn that infamous tsarist minister’s noose or necktie was because I had been in prison when Stolypin was at his work. But how could I say so to people I had just met, in a crowded hall a world away? What did they know of the Nikolayevski, and what did they know of Siberia? So I chose to laugh.

Hope Mockridge said, That was a mad question, wasn’t it? None of my business. But how interesting that there are Russians in Brisbane! And in the cane fields too, I hear.

Yes, I told her. There are nearly five hundred of us.

One question I can ask without seeming stupid, she said. Did you come to us by way of Western Europe or the East?

By Shanghai, I told her.

That is amazing, she said seriously. I’ve never been to Shanghai, I’m sad to say. Really fascinating.

An eager girl with a pinched face appeared at the end of our row and called to Hope Mockridge, who got up and went to embrace her. The old woman, Amelia Pethick, told me, Hope is fascinated by the Russians. Can’t speak a word of the language, of course. Neither can I. But ... well, I think the whole world pities you for your tsar.

But may I ask you, what is Mrs Mockridge’s reason for being here?

She needs no reason, Mr Tom. She is a lawyer and works with the attorney-general’s department, but sometimes represents us all by special leave. She is a good friend to many of us and gives her advice to Trades Hall for free.

Mrs Hope Mockridge finished her discussion with the pinchedface girl at the end of the row and returned to us. In the word of the priests: Alleluia! She took up our conversation by asking me whether I thought the foreign concessions in Shanghai should be got rid of. I told her I hoped the concessions wouldn’t vanish just yet, because there were good boarding houses for émigrés in Little Vienna, among the Austrian Jews, and in some parts of the French quarter – havens for fleeing enemies of the tsar. The Chinese would throw off the imperial powers in the end, I said.

Most union people in Australia don’t have much time for the Chinese, she confided. They fear them for their cheap labour – likely to undercut wages, you see. And their opium, of course.

Now the speeches started. Kelly called on various union leaders to speak, and plump T.J. Ryan, in a good suit and with the chicken fat of Christmas on his handsome jowls, spoke as a Labor Party man, promising the normal improvements. For a start, his favourite promise about meat. The working man cannot afford to feed his children meat! he said. This in Australia, where meat is abundant! But the pastoralists (the big landowners were always referred to by this term,
pastoralists
) kept the price of meat artificially high. Not only would a Labor government support unionism in the workplace, but the new state meat shops...

An overwhelming number in the hall were enthusiastic about this promise.

The local Wobblies man – in the English-speaking world they called the Industrial Workers of the World
Wobblies
– spoke now. He was thin and sour, and hoped that the Australian workers as a whole could embrace the benefit of the one great union yet unformed. The problem – the bosses’ rejection and punishment of unionism from the tramways to the waterfront to the cane fields of the north to the furthest railway siding of the west – could be solved by solidarity, fraternity and the experience of all unions not only acting as one but becoming one. Then, there would be no need of any government. Mr Ryan made us offers, said the Wobbly, and bid on the health of our children, as if we have a stake in the society and as if governments could deliver us the paradise. But we don’t need him, we can take what is ours. Ryan, he said, reminded him of the old ditty:

The Wobblies in the audience took up the refrain, singing:

They finished with hoots, followed by cheers and a great deal of clapping, and Mrs Amelia Pethick and Mrs Hope Mockridge laughed indulgently.

I had no idea the Wobblies were so strong up here, said Mrs Pethick.

Billy Foster of the Tramways addressed a more practical issue when he got up. Would the big guns, he asked – the Australian Workers Union, the Australian Labour Federation – would they support his men if they wore their union badges to work at Bender’s depots?

The crowd was willing to speak for all. There were lusty cries of Yes, yes!

The brush-headed Irish leader of the Railways Union spoke. As an old railway man myself, I paid attention. He was willing to close down the railways from Ingham in the north to Toowoomba in the west. The Waterside Workers man spoke and promised he would close down the wharves, and Pongrass of the Australian Workers Union promised everything from closing down shearing to leaving the bourgeoisie without beer and bread.

Soon after, Kelly got up and held out his hands to quiet the audience. We have here tonight, he told them, a man who has had experience of general strikes more recent than the last one here. He has been involved in leading them in Russia against the barbarous tsarist regime. Tom Samsurov of the Waterside Workers and the Russian Emigrants Union is here in the hall. Tom, come up here and advise us on the practicalities.

I admit I do not flee a rostrum – even one from which I need to speak in a foreign tongue – from the vanity of believing I have something to tell people. My experience was first of all of a populace that had armed itself against Cossacks, as the workers in Kharkov did in the early winter of 1905, when the Japanese were finishing off humiliating our army and navy. The populace armed themselves? Not quite. There was a particular party financer, a skilful party bullion raider and bank robber, who made it possible for us to buy rifles from corrupt sergeants in weapons depots and so arm our people.

As I stood up I could feel the keen attention of Mrs Hope Mockridge – Mrs Pethick had said Russia fascinated her, but I had a suspicion her interest came more from Russian novels than from Marx, that to her I was a Russian gentleman out of a Turgenev novel, instead of the literate Gorki-style peasant I was. Yet as Kelly continued to gesture me to the platform, my thoughts about Mrs Mockridge’s interest remained unworthy and stupid but powerful. I faced the steamy, smoky air, and the furrowed but fresh faces of hope.

Facing a foreign crowd you get a sense of how shaky your grasp of their language is. I had had that experience trying to speak in French in the Russian School in Paris. You could persuade a mirror you were eloquent. A crowd was a different matter. I said, I ask your pardon for my English so bad. They laughed, and some whistled. If your leadership find, I continued, that you wish to support a general strike, then we must all be solid, like one hand.

I made a fist.

We must look for and after each other like brothers and sisters. And how is that done? We must have a strike committee over all. Our strike committee must be our government for the time being. We must look to it for everything we expect – it must deliver us bread, medicine, arms and money-support.

I deliberately mentioned arms but quickly glossed over it. I don’t think most of them heard me. It had also occurred to me that, in spite of what I’d said to Kelly in the pub, if we marched, the Queensland police, heavy-handed as they might be, probably did not have quite the same habit of charging into marchers with carbines and sabres as the Cossacks did, and certainly didn’t have artillery.

And we must have a strike newspaper, I went on, to inform our members which businesses are with us, and which will supply the strikers with food and other goods. The unions must also spend money on helping the strikers and their families. Now, not all such strikes work in the near future. Some do, but they have not worked fully yet for my native country. But over a long run they have a powerful effect and bring closer the day when the workers will decide their own wages, in justice, and not as a favour from capital. Then we would have more justice than ‘a few bob rise’, ‘a few more bob in the kick’.

At least that was what I intended to say, and I hope it came out more or less accurately. My talk about
the day when the workers will decide their own wages
wasn’t quite in accord with Kelly’s ideas, but in a room so full of goodwill and yearning, people will cheer anything that sounds approximately right to them.

I descended to sit beside Mrs Pethick. She took my wrist with her lace-gloved little hand.