The Sydney Twelve – World War One Police Conspiracy

Following the raids, twelve men – Charles Reeve, Thomas Glynn, Peter Larkin, John Hamilton, Bernard Bob Besant, Thomas Moore, Donald McPherson, Donald Grant, William Teen, William Beatty, Morris Joseph Fagin and John Benjamin King – were charged with conspiracy to commit arson, conspiracy to prevent the course of justice (through the campaign to release Barker), and conspiracy to cause sedition. 

The men, who would become known to historians as the ‘Sydney twelve’, were all found guilty of at least one offence, with some being found guilty of multiple charges. Seven men were sentenced to 15 years’ jail, four to ten years and one to five years. In 1920 an inquiry into the trial and sentencing found that six of the men had not been ‘justly or rightly’ convicted of sedition. Four others were found to have been involved in conspiracy of a seditious nature but were recommended for release. These ten were released in August 1920. The remaining two were released slightly later, although one was judged to have been rightly convicted of sedition and the other found rightly convicted of arson.



Prosecutions under the Unlawful Associations Act were combined with deportations of non-Australian-born members of the IWW. Together these operations succeeded in effectively suppressing the organisation in Australia.

On the release of ten of the twelve IWW prisoners in Sydney in August 1920, the Sydney Morning Herald, reported the release under the heading “IWW MEN CHEERING CROWDS AT TOWN HALL”. The report begins:

The Town Hall was packed last night, when the Sydney Labour Council gave a reception to the ten I.W.W. men—Hamilton, Besant, Moore, McPherson, Teen, Fagin, Glynn, Larkin, Beatty, and Grant—who were recently released from gaol. Many hundreds were unable to obtain admission. Before Mr. Howie (president of the Labour Council) took the chair the city organist (Mr. Ernest Truman) rendered selections on the grand organ. When the I.W.W. men came onto the platform there was a storm of cheering, which lasted several minutes. Then the whole audience rose and sang the "Red Flag," a lady accompanying on the piano. Suspended from one of the galleries was a bannerette inscribed "Welcome to the martyrs." 

Mary Gilmore and Brookfield

Brookfield’s untimely death had enormous impact. He had been critical in securing the release of the IWW prisoners through his parliamentary insistence of an independent second Royal Commission into the IWW trials and the heavy sentences imposed. Collins was not alone in understanding this significance. Mary Gilmore, writer, labour movement activist and poet also wrote about Brookfield’s demise in ‘How Brookfield Died’ He account of his murder describes the scene and resulting loss for future generations:

Tell it abroad, tell it abroad,

Tell it by chapel and steeple,

How in the height of his manly prime

Brookfield died for the people!

Here was the station, there was the train,

And women and children crying;

And thick as a gallop of fiery rain

The madman's bullets came flying.

And there, in his own old quiet way,

Brookfield stepped to the breach–

And a man might wait for a thousand years

For a lesson like this to teach.

… 

Blood for blood, says the law; and blood

For blood on the earth was spilled,

As the rattling shots died, thud by thud,

And hell for a moment stilled!–

Was it for this that the Lord God made,

And gave to his heart its bent?

Only we know, at call, unafraid,

Brookfield answering went.

But where the Barrier women wept,

And its men thought tears no shame,

The child shall ask, ere it turns to sleep,

The story of Brookfield’s fame.

And on, through the years, forever he stands

A man among men, my brothers,

Who gave to the full of his kind, strong hands,

And died, as he lived, for others!

So tell it abroad, tell it abroad,

Tell it by chapel and steeple,

How, in the height of his manly prime,

Brookfield died for the people!

In 2016 Dr Barry York Revisted the conspiracy 

The ‘Sydney Twelve’ were members of an organisation known as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who were arrested in Sydney on 23 September 1916 and charged with ‘treason felony’. The charge was later changed to conspiracies relating to arson, perverting the course of justice and sedition.

The timing of the arrests, during the campaign over the conscription plebiscite scheduled for 28 October, led many in the labour movement to view the charges with suspicion. The Hughes Labor government wanted a ‘Yes’ vote for conscription, and the IWW activists were proving effective in raising the question of opposition to the war as well as conscription.

This pitted the ‘Wobblies’, as they were known, against the Labor government and the mainstream labour movement. The latter opposed conscription but not the war.

The Twelve were formally charged at Sydney Central Court on 3 October. The trial took place on 20 November. All were convicted. Seven received sentences of fifteen years’ gaol with hard labour, four were sentenced to ten years and one to five years.

The government and the media tried to link the Twelve to the murder of a policeman in the mining town of Tottenham, in central west NSW. The three men arrested for the murder were IWW supporters. Two were executed for the crime.

Influenced by socialism, anarchism and Marxism, the IWW was established in Chicago, USA, in 1906 . Perhaps its most famous member was Helen Keller, celebrated as the first deaf-blind woman to obtain a university degree. The IWW believed in ‘One Big Union’ rather than trade-based unions, and a General Strike as a way of overthrowing the capitalist class and replacing it with workers’ control of the means of production.

The IWW’s ideas soon took root in Australia. The defeat of the great strikes of the 1890s had led to faith in a parliamentary road to socialism. With the formation of a Labor Party and its election to government, that faith gave way to disenchantment and an extra-parliamentary militancy among a hard core of workers. In the years leading to war, wages were pegged and prices and unemployment rose. IWW membership was small, peaking at about 2000 in 1916, but its influence within the labour movement was greater. Its weekly paper Direct Action sold at least 15,000 copies and was read by many more. The Wobblies’ opposition to the war saw its influence grow among the small minority of Australians who opposed it.

The Labor government of Andrew Fisher declared that it would support Britain’s war effort ‘to our last man and shilling’ and brought in the War Precautions Act in October 1914, allowing for imprisonment of ‘disaffected and disloyal’ subjects.

A ‘recruitment’ poster produced by IWW leader Tom Barker in 1915 expressed the Wobblies’ position very well. It declared:

TO ARMS!

Capitalists, Parsons, Politicians

Landlords, Newspaper Editors, and

Other Stay-at-home Patriots

YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU IN THE TRENCHES

WORKERS

FOLLOW YOUR MASTERS

For expressing such a sentiment, Barker was arrested under the War Precautions Act but, on appeal, acquitted on a technicality. A repeat offence in March 1916, for ‘prejudicing recruitment’ in the IWW newspaper, Direct Action, led to a sentence of 12 months’ gaol with hard labour.

Following Barker’s gaoling, there were arson attacks on factories, warehouses, and business premises, including the Grace Brothers store in Sydney. One of the Twelve had declared publicly that "For every day that Tom Barker is in gaol it will cost the capitalist class £10,000".

The late historian, Ian Turner, in his book Sydney’s burning (1969) says that some of the Twelve ‘were incendiarists or would-be incendiarists’. Nonetheless, he concluded that they were framed up on the charges brought against them. He argues that it was the work of senior police and paid informers, including chief witness Harry Scully, who concocted evidence.

The Counter Espionage Bureau, the Chief Censor’s Office and the police were out to destroy the Wobblies, and toward the end of 1916 Hughes relied on the Liberals to secure passage of the Unlawful Associations Act. The Act resulted in scores of gaolings of IWW members for periods of up to six months, and deportations.

None of the Twelve served their full sentences. A campaign was mounted in their defence, with the support of some Labor parliamentarians. In 1918 the Labor Council of New South Wales commissioned a report, and a judicial enquiry into the case was conducted by Judge Street. Both revealed problems with the case, though Street found no new evidence warranting the men’s release or a retrial.

After the Storey Labor government was elected in New South Wales in 1920, Judge Ewing was appointed to inquire into the trial and sentencing. The judge rejected any suggestion that the men had been framed but recommended their release, finding that six were not ‘justly or rightly’ convicted of sedition. All were released later that year.