The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  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.

  Wonderful. You spoke about total overthrow as my late husband used to. None of these Kellys and Ryans do that.

  Billy Foster then renewed his question. If Bender sacked men for wearing Tramways Union badges, were we sure we would stick with these men and support them in spirit and with any resources of cash and food we could get together? Again, a fury of yelling from the hall.

  And let us not forget, he said, the wise advice of our Russian brother. We must be like one fist.

  Again there seemed to be universal support for this, from the Wobblies, who liked the word one – one big union that ruled the earth from pole to pole – and from the sculpted smile of Mrs Hope Mockridge. But Brisbane had not had a general strike for twenty years. It was one thing to sign on to occupy foreign ground, but being on it was another thing again. As always on hearing these proposals of action, men and women thought they were listening to glad tidings of the achievement of earthly paradise.

  I could have told them of Kharkov and the railway and textile and engineering workers I talked to in those days, six years back. All remembered the great drought and famine of their childhoods, and their mothers baking the bitter famine bread of rye husks and bark, nettles and moss. Some of them even mentioned it in speeches from the floor. The joined fervour they felt, hearing what had begun happening that summer in Moscow and St Petersburg, and therefore what could yet happen in Kharkov, redeemed those bitter half-toxic crumbs they’d eaten in childhood and made them meaningful or even holy. But what they were hearing from our committee were proposals not only of justice but of woe and weeping. For in the meantime, rabbles of Black Hundreds, mobs armed by the gendarmes (as – with our love for all things French – we called the police), went around the streets looking to murder unionists like them, along with Jews, students and anyone with ideas like ours.

  Ah well, back to Brisbane. After I had said good evening to Mrs Pethick and Mrs Mockridge, I joined the members of our soyuz outside and, not being a drinking man, walked home with Suvarov, who was occasionally a drinker but had gin and vodka waiting for him at Adler’s.

  Well, Artem, he said to me, twisting his long reddish features in that peculiar long-lipped smile of his, one does what one can in a distant place.

  4

  In early January, as planned on Christmas night, Billy Foster’s Tramways members turned up for work at the depots wearing their union badges and, on the orders of Joseph Freeman Bender, they were immediately dismissed. The sacked men then marched to Brisbane Trades Hall, the House of Kelly as some called it. The word went round the meatworks and wharves, where I was lugging carcases from the meatworks to the refrigerated holds of ships. We immediately stopped work and walked into town. A tremendous number of men and women had turned up to be addressed by Kelly in his sweat-stained homburg.

  Kelly suggested that the meeting pass a motion to empower the leadership of unions to attend the city offices of Joseph Freeman Bender and protest the dismissals face to face. The motion was pushed into the heavens by a roar of affirmation. If you think that in talking like that I retain a certain cynicism, it was out of the suspicion that I needed to save some of my breath for the ultimate, coming porridge, the true overthrow which would occur in some indefinite future.

  When Kelly read out the forty-three names of the delegation to confront Mr Bender, mine was among the others. So, I noticed, was Hope Mockridge’s, and towards the bottom of the list, close to where my own name lay, was that of the ancient, sturdy Amelia Pethick.

  It had been announced in the press, in a notice paid for by Mrs Hope Mockridge, that this union delegation intended to seek a meeting with Mr Bender, and so he could now hardly back out, with the half of the city he usually spoke to telling him to put the delegation in its place, and the half he never spoke to telling him to give way.

  The next afternoon there were press photographers ready to take pictures as we assembled in front of the marble gates of the offices of Brisbane Tramways in Adelaide Street. On the pavement with Kelly was a well-dressed couple, the man wiry-haired and studious-looking, the woman pale and slightly freckled under a large straw hat and a parasol, her long neck extended as if she was sniffing peril. She had a pencil in her hand and a notebook, which she kept writing in.

  Kelly introduced me. Warwick O’Sullivan, president of the Australian Socialist Party, and his frowning wife, Olive.

  Tom is what they call a Bolshevik. You ought to listen to these Russians. They’ve got more brands of socialism than a lolly shop.

  Would you mind spelling your name, sir? asked Olive O’Sullivan.

  I did so, and she wrote it in her notebook.

  No, she said, apart from Tom Samsurov, could you spell your Russian

  name?

  I did so. A-r-t-e-m – but pronounced Artyom, I explained. She made a note of it.

  They reckon in Melbourne, said O’Sullivan, that Brisbane is the Zurich of the Southern Hemisphere. All the best socialists are here because the state is so backward. Vide Russia!

  The O’Sullivans had come up from Melbourne to observe the corroboree, Kelly said. Warwick O’Sullivan wrung my hand with a warmth that remained in my memory of him. He said something very few Australians ever said.

  I’ve read about you fellows. So which faction do you belong to?

  Bolsheviki, I told him. A group inside the Social Democratic Party. Since 1903, that is.

  Yes, said O’Sullivan. I was reading the great Julius Martov though. The Lesson of the Events in Russia. He doesn’t like your group, does he?

  A man from Melbourne who read Martov? This was something.

  He belongs to the other faction, I explained. In their way, the differences are very wide.

  Well you know, I think they’re right, those people, O’Sullivan confessed. Being a social improver won’t bring the socialist state in the end. I mean, as Olive says, we can work through the unions, but only to bring about the solidar
ity that will bring the whole rotten edifice down.

  And it must come down, Olive murmured, making a note. Her accent was less raw than O’Sullivan’s, and I thought theirs might be the sort of alliance often seen among radicals the world over, between a self-educated worker and some lawyer’s or doctor’s carefully reared daughter.

  At Kelly’s signal we moved inside the Brisbane Tramways building. It had a lift, but we took the stairs to the third floor so that our solidarity wasn’t broken up into little groups. As a creaky gentleman, I stayed behind to help Amelia of the Typists and Secretarial Services Union.

  Are you sure you don’t want to take the lift? I asked her.

  Not at all, said Amelia, with a tight smile. I am my association militant, and so I must take the stairs like the others!

  On the third floor the leaders of our brethren found the main office door locked. It was a deliberate humiliation, to keep us there, the sweat from our stair-climbing going dry on us. Kelly knocked a number of times and called to whoever was inside that we had an appointment with Mr Bender.

  That brought no response. We’re not going away, Mr Bender, cried Kelly, and don’t forget the gentlemen of the press are observing this.

  Still nothing happened. Hope Mockridge in a brown jacket and a hat with flowers stepped up and began hammering on the door.

  This is Hope, Freeman, you idiotic man! If you don’t open this door at once, we’ll begin singing and we won’t go away and you’ll look like a coward.

  She listened for movement. Then she turned to the rest of us.

  Very well, she said. Now, like a churchwoman leading a hymn, she began with ‘Workers of the World, Awaken!’ She sang in a fine contralto, joined more roughly by the rest of us. It was an Industrial Workers of the World song, a song of the Wobblies. But I wasn’t going to argue the difference between the sentiments of syndicalists like them and Marxists like me that afternoon.

  Workers of the world, awaken!

  Break your chains, demand your rights.

  All the wealth you make is taken

  By exploiting parasites.

  Shall you kneel in deep submission

  From your cradles to your graves?

  We were really belting it out. Kelly the Irish tenor, O’Sullivan the baritone, Hope Mockridge the contralto, and many of the others stuck creakily between registers.

  Is the height of your ambition

  To be good and willing slaves?

  Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

  Fight for your emancipation;

  Arise, ye slaves of every nation.

  In one union grand!

  Our little ones for bread are crying...

  And now the door opened. There was a woman of about thirty-five standing there, flushed in the face.

  I’m sorry, miss, said Hope Mockridge. They always send the workers out against the workers.

  The delegation on the stairs laughed.

  The woman said, Could you all come into the waiting room, please? Mr Bender will be with you in a second.

  We crowded in, and the flushed woman returned to her seat behind a desk and buried her head in a journal. Beyond frosted glass beside her desk we could hear the chatter of typewriters. A door from the inner office opened and there, without intermediaries or lieutenants, was Mr Bender. He was a tall man, and he did not look happy. Immediately Hope Mockridge spoke to him.

  What game are you up to, Freeman? This won’t do you any good.

  I wouldn’t have expected to see you here, Mrs Mockridge. With the rabble.

  No one could laugh as quickly as Mrs Mockridge if she wanted to.

  With the rabble? she asked. Oh, you were always a master of the language.

  Why are you a traitor to your kind? asked Bender, angry and stupid enough to concentrate his chagrin on this one vocal woman. What does your husband think of this?

  I didn’t ask him. But you’re quite right – class traitor I am! But, Freeman, surely you are here to deal with our forty-three union representatives. Shall we leave my chastising to private moments?

  And who should I speak to? asked Mr Bender.

  Kelly said, I’m here. Charlie Kelly. The Trades and Labour Council.

  Bender turned his gaze on Kelly as if he had not known of his existence until now. Clearly he saw Kelly not as the spokesman for the desires and aspirations of workers, but as some sort of accidental opportunist who had found himself a niche. Both readings were correct in a sense, but Bender faced nothing but defeat playing according to the second of these versions.

  Kelly exhorted him to accept unionism and union representation within his depots and workshops. A unionised worker was a happier worker, he said. A happy worker was a productive worker. The entire unionised workforce of Queensland, said Kelly, wanted the tramway unionised as well and brought into the twentieth century, and the unions of Queensland would bring on a general strike if Mr Bender did not permit it. Mr Bender’s own business associates would not be happy at such a prospect.

  It was gratifying to me as a jumped-up peasant and railway worker to discover that management are as uniformly foolish as we would like to depict them – just as owned by their narrow interest as the poor are by their hunger.

  Mr Bender said, I am on record as being opposed to unionism on principle. And on principle, I will not let it operate within my workshops and depots.

  Without unionism, Kelly asked, how are your men to ask for better conditions?

  Man to man, said Mr Bender. Face to face.

  You mean slave to master, Mr Bender?

  You paint the picture any way you like.

  Some men groaned. Amelia Pethick had recovered her breath and found her voice. She called in a fluting manner, Your relationship to your workers is too unequal, Mr Bender. It’s a machine against flesh. You know that.

  More slumming ladies, Mrs Pethick, said Bender.

  It was a further mistake of his to attack an old favourite of the crowd’s.

  Shame, Freeman, shame! said the tigress Hope Mockridge.

  Kelly remained sturdy amid all this. Despised by Bender but not taking a backward step.

  So you are sure you want this, Mr Bender? he asked.

  You will find, said Bender, that the premier of this splendid state is already swearing in special constables to deal with your scum. Do you know why I oppose unions? Do you really want to know? I’ll tell you. Because they strangle new creation, that’s why. I have in my employ an engineer who has devised a wonder of the age, a single-line train he calls a monorail. This is happening here, in Brisbane – yes, in dreamy old Brisbane. This tram or train or whatever you call it runs on a single rail!

  I thought, That engineer is Rybakov.

  How am I, asked Bender, full of just rage, to find the funds to build such a system, the first in the world, if I am to be bled white by unions? I won’t find them, and the world will be the poorer. You will be the poorer. I ask you to desist and back off and respect the spirit of invention.

  You can have both, you bastard, one of our delegates called. Pull something out of your own bloody pocket to build your own fucking railway.

  Please, leave my office, Bender cried out, or I shall call the police.

  Then, said Kelly, it’s on for young and old.

  Let it be, said Bender.

  We filed out again, my role among the revolutionaries of Queensland being to help Mrs Pethick back down the steps. I felt I had known that strong old woman a long time. But forthright Mrs Mockridge seemed a more remote figure than that.

  5

  We all marched back to Trades Hall and were put to work on the same huge floor. Hope Mockridge worked frantically, speaking to businesses on the telephone, persuading them to give discounts to union members, and calling journalists she knew on the Brisbane Telegraph, all of them secretly sympathetic but wary for the sake of their jobs. Mrs Pethick clattered out letters of great length with an ease that spoke well of her ageing knuckles. She had brought some of her union girls in
to do work for us.

  Suvarov and I took a job no one else seemed to want. From the crowd of strikers milling outside, Rybakov, Suvarov and I recruited three hundred solid men to supervise the marches and keep order when the strike began. I called on men I knew from the railway workshops, from the meatworks, and men from the tramways who were friends of Rybakov – who seemed, for an ailing man, to know every muscular fellow in the state of Queensland. These marshals were to keep order – Kelly was big on that – but also to be a vanguard, and if necessary to protect their fellows from police batons and from arrest.

  My and Suvarov’s three hundred constables, once I’d got them together, were suddenly not really mine or Suvarov’s to command – I worked hand in hand with a compact, wiry, and apparently nervous fellow named Riley, an official of the Clerks’ Union who had previously been a sergeant of the Queensland police. Kelly gave the final control to him because Australians did not like to take orders from anyone too foreign. I did not mind so much, since Riley consulted me on everything. Riley was emphatic that our constables were to prevent looting and disorder, because that’s what the press and the government would like to see. But he and I were still arguing the m atter of what they should do if directly attacked by mounted police. It was difficult to form a phalanx against horses and swinging clubs.

  Should we put our marshals on horseback? I asked.

  Where would we get that many mounts from? asked Riley, making the point that if we gathered the sort of back paddock horse some workers had for the kids to ride to school, in a crush and a panic they could do as much harm to the strikers as the police might.

  As I gathered the list of marshals together the idea came to me of asking my two comrades, Pethick and Mockridge, to join me at the Samarkand Café in Merrivale Street for Russian tea. They were curious about Russia, and I had a warm regard for both of them. (I admit I found Hope Mockridge enchanting in a way normal to a man, a way it was best to own up to rather than permit to turn morbid.)