Back to index of Nerve 18 - Summer 2011

Sutcliffe & Prendergast

By Jeremy Hawthorn

In all the commemorations of 1911 this year, little has been said of the two men who lost their lives in the dispute.

It was Tuesday 15 August, two days after the big demonstration had been so brutally attacked by the police. The strike had not been halted. The seamen and dockers were now locked out and shops and factories were starting to run out of coal.

It had been a busy day before the city magistrate, however. In the late afternoon five police vans set out to take 100 prisoners to Walton jail. They were escorted by a magistrate, 32 soldiers and 13 mounted police.

The convoy would normally go up Scotland Road but a last-minute change of plan took it up Vauxhall Road. Was it provocative to go through the 'strike area'? It was later claimed that crowds had made Scotland Road impassable and this was the only real alternative.

On this route too, however, there were people on the streets. Troops opened fire on more than one occasion. John Sutcliffe, a carter, was shot twice in the head at the corner of Hopwood Street (photo above, now Gem Street). His sisters told the press he was putting up shutters at the house he was about to move into. Michael Prendergast, a docker, was shot in the chest at the corner of Lamb Street. Both men died. Twelve others were injured.

Shooting by the military was accepted practice at the time. Once a magistrate had 'read the Riot Act' (a short proclamation) a crowd had a short time to disperse and then soldiers would open fire. They would shoot deliberately at the nearest people and not over their heads, to ensure they didn't hit anyone else by accident. Of course people might not hear the warning. On 17 August 1911 the War Office issued a rule that there must first be the sounding of a bugle. This came too late to save these two men, who in any case were shot before the Riot Act was read at all.
Contrary to many a popular myth, both dead men were Catholics and were buried in Ford cemetery. Their funerals were held on 20 and 21 August, the weekend when the national rail dispute was settled (though Liverpool was to remain on strike for another week). The Sunday burial of Prendergast was believed to be the largest-ever funeral gathering in Liverpool: 800 made the long walk to Netherton to be present at the graveside. Tellingly, these included 250 members of the Netherfield Road Protestant Reformers Crusade.

The Prendergast gravestone still stands today and rather neutrally records him as 'a victim of the Liverpool riots'. Sutcliffe was buried in a public plot, which is now a patch of grass. Their deaths were at least recognised at an East London rally in September 1911 which saluted them (and seven others killed in Llanelli) as 'killed in the interests of capitalism'.

A commemoration of the shootings will be held in Vauxhall Road on Monday 15th August.

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