Adventures in Journalism

by Philip Gibbs

She spoke English perfectly, and in the presence of half a dozen men who crowded in to listen, we had an argument lasting at least an hour, on the subject of anarchy. She began by disclaiming, for the anarchists in London, all knowledge of and responsibility for the affair of Peter the Painter and his associates. They were merely common thieves. But it was laughable, she thought, what a panic fear had been caused in middle-class London by the killing of a policeman or two. It filled columns of the newspapers, with enormous headlines. It seemed to startle them as something too horrible and monstrous for imagination. Why all that agitation over the deaths of two guardians of property, when there was no agitation at all, no public outcry, no fierce clamor for vengeance, because every night men and women of the toiling classes were being killed by the inhuman conditions of their lives, in foul slums, in overcrowded bedrooms, in poisonous trades, in sweated industries, as the helpless slaves of that capitalistic system which protected itself by armies of police. The English people were the world’s worst hypocrites. They hid a putrid mass of suffering, corruption, and disease, caused by modern industrialism, and pretended that it did not exist.

“What is your philosophy?” I asked. “How do you propose to remedy our present state?”

“I am an intellectual Nihilist,” said the lady very calmly. “I believe in the ultimate abolition of all law, all government, all police, and in a free society with perfect liberty to the individual, educated in self-discipline, love for others, and moral purpose.”

I need not here repeat her arguments, nor their fantastic disregard of human nature and the stark realities of life. She was well read, and quoted all manner of writers from Plato to Bernard Shaw, and I marveled that such a woman should be living in the squalor of Whitechapel as a preacher of the destructive gospel. We had a vehement argument, in which Eddy joined, and though we waxed hot, and disagreed with each other on all issues, we maintained the courtesies of debate, in which, beyond any mock modesty, I was hopelessly out-argued by this brilliant, extraordinary, and dangerous woman.

It was from acquaintances made in that club that we were led into other byways of Whitechapel and heard strange and terrible tales of Russian revolutionaries, who showed me the sores of fetters and chains about their wrists and legs, and swore eternal hatred of the Russian Czardom, which crushed the souls of men and women and tortured their bodies. They were, doubtless, true tales, and it was with the remembrance of those horrors that the Russian Revolution was made, in all its cruelty and terror, until the autocracy of the Czars was replaced by the tyranny of Lenin and the Soviet State, when the dream of Russian liberty was killed, for a generation at least, in the ruin and famine and pestilence of the people.

Eddy and I dined in the kosher restaurants of the East End, went to the Jewish theater, and explored the haunts of the Russian and Oriental Jews of London.

In our wanderings we discovered the most Oriental place this side of Constantinople. It was Hessell Street Market, in a deep sunken road, reached by flights of steep steps through blocks of buildings in the Commercial Road, and quite unknown to most Londoners. On each side of the sunken street were wooden booths which looked as though they had been there since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and at night, when we went, they were lit, luridly, by naptha flares. In these booths sat, cross-legged, old bearded men with hooked noses, who looked as though they were contemporaries of Moses and the Prophets. They were selling cheap Oriental rugs, colored cottons and silks, sham jewelery, rabbit skins, kosher meat, skinny fowls, and embroidered slippers. The crowd marketing in this place, chaffering, quarreling, picking over the wares, with the noise of a Turkish bazaar, were mostly of Oriental types. Some of the men wore fur caps, or astrakhan caps, like the Persians who cross the Galata bridge at Constantinople. Others wore fur coats reaching to their heels, and top hats of ancient architecture. It was the market of the London Ghetto, and thronged with flashy young Jews and Jewesses, starved-looking men of Slav aspect, and shifty-eyed boys who were professional pickpockets and sold the harvest of their day’s toil to the old villains in the booths.

It was a young thief who acted as our guide to some of these places, and he performed a delicate operation in the way of housebreaking for our benefit. We were eager to get a photograph of Peter the Painter, and he told us that he knew of the only one in existence. It belonged to a “young lady” who had been Peter’s friend, and naturally wished to keep secret her association with this bandit. It stood on her bedroom mantelpiece, and if we would give him half an hour, he would “pinch” it for us. But he would have to replace it after we had made use of it. At the end of an hour he returned with the photograph of a good-looking young Russian, and told us that it had been an “easy job.” This photograph was reproduced as the only authentic portrait of Peter the Painter, but I have grave doubts about it.

With this lad, who was an intelligent fellow and vowed that henceforth he was going to lead an honest life, as burglary was a mug’s game, he went into the cellars below a certain restaurant which were used as a library of anarchist literature. Doubtless there was more high explosive here, in the way of destructive philosophy, than one might find in Woolwich Arsenal, but we did not examine those dangerous little pamphlets and books which preached the gospel of revolution. At that time, before the advent of Bolshevism in the history of the world, that propaganda seemed to have no bearing upon the ordinary facts of life, and did not interest us. It was at a later period that the international anarchist in London translated his textbooks and touted them outside the gates of English factories, and slipped them into the hands of unemployed men.