Booing as a form of protest: an historic tradition
Booing Republican politicians at meetings in Trump’s America is clearly controversial enough to warrant official intervention on occasion
In fact booing has a long and complicated part in the history of protest.
Historically, certainly dating back to the time the crowd becomes an actor on the stage of history in the mid eighteenth century, booing has been a way of showing collective protest at the rich and powerful.
But it hasn’t been just booing.
What the American historical sociologist Charles Tilly called the ‘repertoire’ of the crowd went far beyond booing. It extended to hissing, groaning, hooting and pelting with missiles, often rotten vegetables or fruit but sometimes stones as well.
The London crowd in particular was well known from the start of the modern era for robust reactions to those it didn’t like. When John Wilkes, who went on to become Mayor of London, announced his intention to stand for Parliament at Middlesex in the late 1760s one of his opponents on appearing at a Brentford hustings found himself ‘jeered and hissed’
At the State opening of Parliament on 29th October 1795, EP Thompson notes in the Making of the English Working Class, the King was ‘hissed, hooted and his carriage pelted.. the King’s carriage window was fractured probably by a pebble’
Parson Woodforde recorded that George 111 was ‘hissed, hooted and groaned at by vast crowds’.
After the formation of the Metropolitan Police the authorities began to attempt to control unregulated street noises and two Acts of 1839 and 1841 aimed to ban all ‘uncommon noises’ from horn blowing to street cries.
The Acts were robustly enforced and their main provisions remain in force little amended today as anyone who has ever tried to organise or do anything on the street without telling the police will testify.
As E P Thompson himself noted there is no guarantee that the crowd will be progressive in intent. The Gordon Riots started with a crowd or mob attacking religious minorities but after a successful attempt to free prisoners at Newgate Prison, ended with an attempt to storm the Bank of England.
The historical point is that crowds can change their minds. Perhaps cheering Marcus Rashford rather than booing taking the knee is what needs to be socialised and encouraged
In August 1842 the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards were mobilised from their barracks at Charing Cross to march to Euston Station and then by train to the north-west to be used against strikers involved in the 1842 General Strike, sometimes called the Plug Plot.
Large crowds of protesters gathered as the troops marched through central London and what the historian of London Chartism David Goodway describes as ‘murmurs of groans and hisses’ began. These grew so loud that the troops fixed bayonets in an attempt to silence the crowd. They failed.
In more recent times such crowd reactions have sometimes been stage managed- as at a pantomime and sometimes at sporting events, but the point about their use at a live event or on the street is that they are essentially spontaneous and unpredictable indicators of popular feeling.
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