The Dumpling

by Coulson Kernahan

In Queen Victoria Street, at least, the victory of the rebels was complete, and what happened to the troops in Queen Victoria Street, happened upon a smaller scale to the police and to the military who attempted to disperse the mob by making charges by way of Cheapside, Lombard Street, and the other narrower approaches. Recognising the hopelessness of the position, and anxious to husband their strength for the final struggle, the officers in command of the police and of the military gave the word for withdrawal. In this withdrawal the mob saw a tacit admission of defeat, and became more reckless, more eager for destruction, more difficult of organisation. Freed from the restraining and controlling influence of the Dumpling, it swept along Cheapside to St. Paul's and down Ludgate Hill, no longer an organised rising with a definite end in view, but a rabble of reckless ruffians, ready and greedy to rob, to rape, to wreck, and to destroy.

At Ludgate Circus it divided, part going westward by way of Fleet Street and the Strand, another part by way of St. Bride Street, and yet another by the Embankment.

Then it was that the police and the soldiery showed how prepared they were for the outbreak, how admirable was their organisation. Suddenly down St. Bride Street, and moving by some inside and unseen motor-power, there appeared a procession of engines of war, the like of which none of the rioters had ever seen. These engines had been constructed secretly and in sections so as to be ready to put together and run out at a moment's notice, and had been concealed at the various fire stations till such time as they should be required.

Imagine, if you can, that a square-built fort had suddenly detached itself at the corners, so as to break up into four armed sections, each of which presented on either side an iron-plated front, almost as steep and almost as high as the side of a house, with gun-mouths grinning out at regular intervals. Armoured trains the rioters had heard of, but armoured sides of an iron-built house, moving, each complete in itself, upon unseen wheels in a long procession down St. Bride Street, was something entirely new. For an instant the mob surged back, awed and wondering. Then, like an angry sea leaping against a breakwater, it flung itself forward upon the first of these new and advancing engines of war.

But for the tragic loss of life, the impotency of the rush would have been ludicrous. It was as if a child, by the throwing of a handful of sand, had tried to stop a motor-car going at the top of its speed. The huge instrument of war not only did not swerve an inch from its course, but, so great was its weight, that it passed, without so much as a bump, over the bodies of those who fell beneath it, scrunching bone and limb into shapeless and quivering pulp.

Then from either side belched sheets of flame, and, for the first time since the rising, the mob fell back and away, leaving the monsters of war-mechanism to accomplish their manœuvres unhindered.

On the four moving walls filed, like a troop of ambling elephants. The foremost wheeled heavily round the obelisk in the centre of Ludgate Circus till it blocked London southwards by barricading off New Bridge Street and Blackfriars Bridge. The second steered round the obelisk westward, till it faced and closed Fleet Street. The third stretched itself eastward across the foot of Ludgate Hill; and the fourth, by spanning the road where St. Bride Street and Farringdon Street bifurcate, thus closed those roads to all comers.

The four walls now formed a huge square, and as soldiers "dress" the line and close up in a drill yard, so at a given signal—a shrill whistle twice repeated—the four sides edged closer and closer together, till, if I may use such a term, they touched elbows. Then came a second signal—the same whistle three times repeated—and now there were the clink and rattle of bolts and chains. The four walls were locked impregnably together, thus forming a fort, facing London on every side. No sooner was the locking accomplished than, upon the walls of the fort, hundreds of policemen swarmed to complete the closing up of the streets. At a word of command from above, iron barriers shot out to the required lengths from the four corners of the fort below, and when it was impossible to adjust these barriers with sufficient nicety, absolutely to close every opening, huge sacks of sand were hurled from the walls, so that in less than five minutes the army of rioters was divided up into four separate wings, each for the moment effectually cut off from holding any communication with any of the others.

The great body of the rebel army and the riflemen were, however, now west of Ludgate Circus, and passing up Fleet Street and the Strand; so that the closing of the ways seemed for a few minutes to have come too late.

But the authorities who had anticipated this outbreak, and prepared for it by constructing these street-barricading forts, knew what they were about. From mouth to mouth of the rebels, passing up Fleet Street, Strandwards, the word was repeated that similar forts now blocked advance at Charing Cross.