Pubs, police spies & the left
The current closure of pubs across the UK is bad news for a lot of people, those employed in them, those who avoided social isolation by paying a visit and those who just like a drink. It is particularly bad news though for a small group of people who, recent evidence has revealed, found their most effective working environment to be the pub.
At the recent public hearings of the SpyCops inquiries it was revealed both in oral evidence and written statements that it was not so much infiltrating left-wing meetings that gave these individuals the information they craved, but the informal chat in the pub afterwards.
No doubt nowdays they can join replacement Zoom meetings but they wont be able to access the private discussions behind them
The pub has been a traditional meeting place for radicals and the left (although some sections of the movement that disavowed drink met in a range of other locations).
The 200th anniversary of the Cato St Conspiracy (a plot to kill the Cabinet in the wake of Peterloo) was marked in February. Police evidence at the trial of the conspirators noted a number of central London pubs where radicals were known to meet and both police and conspirators mingled in the Horse and Groom in Cato St itself.
In 1848 Government spies attended meetings of London Chartists planning an insurrectionary event in the August of that year held in pubs and coffee houses and were able to foil it.
Of course radicals were far from unaware that their meetings could have informants present. The Chartists in the 1840s took to holding outdoor meetings well away from town centres that made it much harder for Government spies to go about their work
Notwithstanding the exceptional of this year, 200 years on not much has changed.
The evidence and tabled reports from undercover police officers in the first days of public hearings of the SpyCops Inquiry covered the late 1960s and early 1970s. Frequent reference is made to police spies having a drink with people they were watching in pubs after meetings.
Unfortunately no reference is made to what was being drunk, although at Cato St 200 years ago it would have been London porter.
We do have some details of the actual pubs police spies operated in during the late 1960s. Journalist Tom Foot in the Camden New Journal has listed a number of North London boozers where left-wing meetings were held and police reports made. These included one that is now Camden Town Brewdog and the well known music pub the Dublin Castle.
A new volume on the German SPD before 1914 also underlines the point about the links between police surveillance and pubs. Andrew Bonnell in Red Banners, Books and Beer Mugs, the Mental World of German Social Democrats 1863-1914. Bonnell notes that: ‘A particularly valuable source of working-class opinion is the collection of police surveillance reports of workers’ pubs in the Hamburg State Archives’.
Perhaps this ultimately is the main lasting value of police spying on left-wingers in pubs. As the SpyCops Inquiry has underlined most of this activity fell under the heading of ‘wasting police time’. The detail recorded, giving a snapshot of left-wing life and activism 50 years ago is a fascinating if partial resource for historians.
Finally the Spycops sessions contained only one reference to an officer getting drunk on a surveillance mission in a pub but we might recall the Alex Glasgow and Henry Livings song from Close the Coalhouse Door: A Soon As This Pub Closes (The Revolution Starts)
This post appeared in the Morning Star, 2nd December
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/pubs-police-spies-and-left
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