London Evening Advertiser
- Guerilla Warfare Breaks Out
- Political Waters Undisturbed By Decision of Lord Asquith
- STATE WITNESS SAYS HER ANIMALS KILLED
This page of the London, Ontario evening paper ran wire news from Britain and the United States. A New York Herald dispatch from London described a pitched battle at the Glyncymmer colliery near Port Talbot, South Wales, where 700 strikers tried to stop a few men from working and police charged them back up a mountainside; a dozen policemen, 30 miners and three women were seriously hurt, and women joined the resistance. A headline judged that Lord Asquith's decision had left British political waters calm, though the legible text beneath it concerns a bootleggers' war and a hotel fire at Kincardine. From Somerville, New Jersey, Jane Gibson, the 'pig woman' and state witness in the Hall-Mills murder case, complained that 73 of her pigs and half her chickens had been poisoned and that banks would no longer lend to her.
This reading covers three excerpts taken from heavily corrupted OCR text. The passage printed under the Asquith headline belongs to neighbouring stories about a bootleggers' war and a hotel fire at Kincardine, and the body of the Asquith report itself is not legible. The Port Talbot report begins mid-word and the Gibson report breaks off mid-sentence. Other stories on the page, including a jewel theft, a riot in the Mexican chamber, a London daily and a deportation case, are cut off at the edges of the image and are not translated.
Translation
Guerilla Warfare Breaks Out
…ualties—Dozen Policemen Are Hurt. New York Herald Special. London, Oct. 16. — A dozen policemen, 30 miners, and three women were seriously injured in a fight growing out of an attack yesterday upon the Glyncymmer colliery, near Port Talbot, South Wales, by 700 strikers. The strikers were attempting to prevent a few non-strikers from continuing work. The men only gave way when the constables made a determined charge against them and drove them back up the mountain during which the strikers made a stubborn resistance in which women took part.
Political Waters Undisturbed By Decision of Lord Asquith
…intensive campaign to end competition in the city. Police are not interested in the bootleggers' private feuds, and it has the appearance of being a battle in which the fit will survive and exercise once more a monopoly in the bootlegging business. GUESTS DISTURBED BY BLAZE IN HOTEL Outbreak at Queen's in Kincardine Occurs at…
STATE WITNESS SAYS HER ANIMALS KILLED
Prosecution's Aid in Hall-Mills Case Complains She Is Persecuted. Somerville, N.J., Oct. 16. — Mrs. Jane Gibson, state witness for the prosecution in the Hall-Mills murder case, has complained to police that 73 of her pigs and half of her chickens have been poisoned. She also declared the banks refuse to lend her money, presumably because of her accusations against some of the four defendants now awaiting trial. As a result of the bank's hostility, the "pig woman" said, she had to sell…
Context
Where the Port Talbot clash stood in the 1926 coal lockout
The fight at the Glyncymmer colliery came about six months into the coal dispute that began with the lockout of miners on 1 May 1926, the lockout that led to the declaration of the General Strike. The miners fought on alone after that. On 5 July the coalowners posted new terms of employment based on an eight-hour day, and when the two sides met on 19 August the owners made clear they would accept only unconditional surrender. By October miners in Wales were beginning to return to work in large numbers. The report describes exactly that tension: 700 strikers trying to stop "a few non-strikers" from carrying on. Police and miners clashed eighteen times in the South Wales coalfield during the year's disputes. Women were part of such confrontations elsewhere too: that same October Edith Cartwright was imprisoned for allegedly throwing a stone at Hatfield colliery in Yorkshire. The resistance did not change the outcome. Between 27 and 30 November the miners went back to work on lower pay and longer hours. The casualty figures in the article come from the New York Herald's special dispatch, and these sources do not confirm them.
Why Asquith gave up the Liberal leadership
The "Lord Asquith" of the headline was Herbert Henry Asquith, by then Earl of Oxford and Asquith, whose resignation as Liberal leader the Journal of Liberal History dates to 15 October 1926. The events leading to it were painful and protracted. The General Strike in May produced a public falling-out between Asquith and Lloyd George. A stroke then kept Asquith out of action for three months, and in his absence Lloyd George attended the National Liberal Federation meeting and received a rapturous reception. Writing to his wife, Asquith saw only two choices. He could lead a "squalid faction fight" against a rival who would have "all the sinews of war", or he could accept Lloyd George's money in a "hollow and humiliating alliance". He resolved to do neither, and announced his resignation in a short letter to the leaders of the English and Scottish Liberal federations. Lloyd George, who became the first Welshman to lead the party, took over the leadership; a Welsh chronology dates this to 14 October. The headline's judgment that political waters were "undisturbed" was the paper's own assessment. The historical record shows that the resignation came at the end of a long and bitter split inside the party.
Jane Gibson, the prosecution's 'pig woman'
Jane Gibson was the prosecution's key witness in the Hall-Mills case, a pig farmer on whose property the bodies of the two murder victims had been found in 1922; the press called her the "pig woman" because she raised hogs. Her complaint was reported more than two weeks before the trial opened at the Somerset County Courthouse in Somerville on 3 November 1926. The "four defendants" the article mentions were the widow Frances Stevens Hall, her brothers Willie and Henry Stevens, and their cousin Henry Carpender, who later won a bid to be tried separately and was never tried. The defence portrayed her as uneducated and "crazy" and attacked her credibility, helped by an account that varied between what she told the police, the newspapers and the court. Dying of cancer, she was carried into the courtroom on a stretcher to testify. The jury believed Mrs. Hall over Gibson, and all three defendants on trial were acquitted on 3 December 1926. The poisoned animals and the banks' refusal of credit are Gibson's own allegations as the paper reported them.
How a tabloid revived a four-year-old murder case
The Hall-Mills murders had gone unsolved for four years, since the original 1922 investigation produced no indictments. In 1926 the New York Daily Mirror, William Randolph Hearst's fledgling tabloid, set out to boost its circulation by bringing forward new evidence, and its strident calls for action forced the governor of New Jersey to reopen the case. Mrs. Hall and her brothers were then arrested for the murders. That press campaign explains why a farmwoman's complaint about poisoned pigs travelled by wire to a Canadian evening paper. Once the trial began, hundreds of reporters crammed into the Somerville courthouse and filed more than twelve million words. This short dispatch belongs to the build-up to that coverage, in which the prosecution's chief witness had herself become a news story.
Original
Guerilla Warfare Breaks Out
ualties-Dozen Policemen Are Hurt. New York Herald Special. London, Oct. 16. - A dozen policemen, 30 miners, and three women were seriously injured in a fight growing out of an attack yesterday upon the Glyncymmer collier, near Port Talbot, South Wales, by 700 strikers. The srikers were attempting to prevent a few non-strikers from continuing work. The men oniy gave way when the constables made a determined charge against them and drove them back up the mountain during which the strikers made a stubborn resistance in which women took part.
Political Waters Undisturbed By Decision of Lord Asquith
intensive campaign to end competition in the city. Police are not interested in the bootleggers ' private feuds, and it has the appearance of being a battle in which the fit will survive and exercise once more a monopoly in the bootlegging business. GUESTS DISTURBED BY BLAZE IN HOTEL Outbreak at Queen's in Kincardine Occurs at
STATE WITNESS SAYS HER ANIMALS KILLED
Prosecution's Aid in Hall-Mills Case Complains She Is Persecuted. Somerville, N. J., Oct. 16. - Mrs. Jane Gibson, state witness for the prosecution in the Hall-Mills murder case, has complained to police that 73 of her pigs and half of her chickens have been poisoned. She also declared the banks refuse to lend her money, presumably because of her accusations against some of the four defendants now awaiting trial. As a result of the bank's hostility, the " pig woman " said, she had to sell
Source: Holding institution