Featherstone

Featherstone Memorial Arch (1993)

I was trying to find out some details about the mass killing of Japanese prisoners at the Featherston internment camp in 1943. I've now discovered that this is referred to as the "Featherston incident." What came up instead was a huge amount of information about the (so-called) "Featherstone massacre" of 1893 - exactly fifty years before, in the UK.

Here's some of what I found online:

In 1893 the small pit town of Featherstone was the scene of a tragic confrontation between the local mine owner, supported by troops, and a crowd of ‘locked-out’ miners. Featherstone had two working mines at the time ... Over 1000 men, and their families, depended on the pits for their livelihood.

Although the pits were successful, a downturn in the price of coal caused some mine owners across the country to take drastic action. In July 1893 they decided to stockpile their coal and to ‘lock-out’ their workers.
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On the 7th September at Ackton Hall there were rumours about coal being loaded onto wagons at the pit and being sent to the owner’s mill in Bradford. The crowd felt this was a betrayal by the pit manager and their mood began to change. Mr Holiday, the pit manager, Mr Jaques, the foreman, and the work gang loading the wagons were confronted, with the result that the work gang fled and some wagons were overturned.
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By late afternoon 3 officers and 26 men from the 1st Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment arrived at Featherstone and marched to the pit ... While the troops kept out of the way, Holiday and the town’s policeman, Sergeant Sparrow, tried to calm the crowd who wanted the troops to leave and were threatening to force them out if they didn’t go.

The crowd around the pit gates had swelled to several thousand as people from surrounding towns heard that something was happening in Featherstone and came to watch. During the evening the situation became more tense. Eventually the decision was taken to call in a local magistrate, Bernard Hartley JP, who, failing to get the crowd to disperse, read the Riot Act.

Reading the Riot Act was a significant action. Once read people had to disperse within one hour or suffer the consequences (potentially life imprisonment). However, it seems Hartley didn’t wait for a full hour and fearing that the situation was getting out of control ordered the troops to fire warning shots.

After an initial volley, the crowd didn’t move and jeered saying that the troops were firing blanks. This was not true, the troops had the most up-to-date Lee Enfield rifles and were using live ammunition.

The second volley caused injury to 8 people. Two men, James Gibbs (22) and James Duggan (25) were to die of their injuries. Neither man (it seems) had been involved in creating a disturbance, Gibbs had walked across the fields from nearby Loscoe to see what was going on.
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The inquest on Duggan took place in Wakefield because he had died at Clayton Hospital in the city. The verdict returned was ‘justifiable homicide’. However, Gibbs’ inquest in Featherstone would not return a similar verdict and the jury issued a statement which pointed the finger at the lack of police in the area and Holiday’s over reaction to the situation causing the death of an innocent man.

These different verdicts into the deaths were to create ripples that spread all the way to Parliament. Questions were asked in the Commons and the Home Secretary, H.H. Asquith was forced to set up a Parliamentary Commission.
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The report was presented to Parliament and a Commons debate followed. Keir Hardie spoke in favour of the miners and a Commons motion called for compensation to be paid to the bereaved families. Although £100 was paid to the families of Gibbs and Duggan, it was done begrudgingly by the Government. Asquith said that the compensation did not imply the Government accepted any responsibility for the deaths.

None of the injured were compensated.

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The centenary of the ‘massacre’ came at a time when the town (and much of Yorkshire) was still raw from the pit strikes and confrontation with the Thatcher government during the 1980s ... The culmination of the town’s remembrance was a march. Hundreds of people, with pit banners, walked from the North Featherstone cemetery, where the two victims are buried, to the town precinct for the unveiling of a striking sculpture that was movingly dedicated by Arthur Scargill.
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The plate at the base of the sculpture reads:-

This memorial records the centenary of an incident on September 7 1893 when, following a disturbance in Featherstone, the Riot Act was read and in the ensuing military action troops opened fire on the demonstrators, killing James Gibbs and James Arthur Duggan and wounding several others. This was just another chapter in the struggle by miners for better pay and working conditions.

- The Featherstone Massacre

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Don't you think that's rather interesting? Two people are shot dead, and six others wounded, at a lock-out in Yorkshire, and it's called a "massacre." Forty-eight are shot dead, and sixty-three more wounded, at a prison camp riot in New Zealand, and it's called an "incident" ... (Oh, I was forgetting the one guard killed in the disturbance).

The official NZ History online website has an original take on the event:

It was noted [by "those who defended the actions of the guards that day"] that the Japanese were in no position to complain about one isolated event for many Allied prisoners fared much worse in Japanese POW camps.
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The Japanese prisoners had been generally well fed and housed and this incident was an exception to the rule.

So let's get this straight. Shooting large numbers of prisoners was "an exception to the rule" - therefore there's no reason to complain about it. Worse things happened in the Japanese camps, so they'd be best just to think of it as payback. How hypocritical for them to complain about unarmed prisoners being shot down in cold blood! They were asking for it, in any case - refusing to work, we're told.

The "unofficial version", as I heard it from my father, was that there was one particular guard who had a grudge against the prisoners (I believe he had a brother who'd been killed by the Japanese - how, I'm not sure). He was also known to be a bit of a sadist, and contrived to set up the whole thing: first encouraging them to strike, then opening up with his rifle when they gathered in a "mutinous assembly."

Who knows? That doesn't sound very much like the official account, but then everybody still seems very reluctant to talk about what really happened there. Even the website I quote from above admits that it was fifty years before the Government confirmed that this "incident" had actually taken place. It all sounds a bit too much like General Dyer's 1919 Amritsar massacre for comfort, really. And you can still find apologists for that - especially among the new breed of "pro-Empire" British historians. ...

Featherston Military Camp (1943)

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Featherston

"It's just a little thing called the Constitution ..."

"It's just a little thing called - the Constitution! Just a little thing a lot of people died for."

Mr Smith Goes to Washington is - or, rather, used to be - one of my favourite films. So it came as a bit of a surprise to me the other day, when, watching it again for the umpteenth time, I found the quote above, intoned by Jimmy Stewart in the middle of his filibustering attempt to stop the passage of a fellow-senator's crooked land-appropriation bill, had entirely disappeared.

There's a lot of talk about lost causes ("the only kind worth fighting for," as Jefferson Smith murmurs before lapsing into unconsciousness); there's even a section where Smith picks up a copy of the United States Constitution and starts to read it aloud - but no line resembling "it's just a little thing called the Constitution" can be heard from beginning to end of the movie.

And yet I remember it. I can even hear Stewart saying it, in his inimitable bumbling drawl. Where did it go? Are there two versions of the film? Did it disappear on the cutting-room floor, or during the transition from one medium (film) to another (DVD)? I have no explanation to offer. I've had to stop quoting the lines to people as they appear to have no external reference point beyond my own mind ...

Mr Smith Goes to Washington, dir. Frank Capra (1939)


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A couple of years ago my (then) girlfriend and I went for a drive north of Wellington, over the Rimutaka ranges and through the small towns beyond. Greytown, Carterton, Masterton ... between them, they contain a lot of antique and second-hand shops. We looked in what seemed like all of them. On the way back, in the late afternoon, we stopped briefly in Featherston.

I knew little of Featherston except the name. Afterwards I realised that it was the site of Shuriken, Vincent O'Sullivan's 1985 play about the infamous Japanese 1943 prison camp massacre, but that didn't even occur to me at the time.

There was a little bookshop on one side of the square, with a sign on the front mentioning opening times, but the door was locked. Peering in through the dusty window, we could dimly make out a huge stack of books on top of a table in the centre of the room. Everything else was bare and deserted. The shop looked not only shut, but as if it had been flooded out, or stripped in preparation for the movers. The sign continued to maintain blithely that it was open for business, though.

Moving on further around the square, we found a combination second-hand / junk shop. There was a light on inside, and the door opened when we pushed on it, but there were no other signs of occupation. Certainly there was no-one at the glass counter in the middle of the room.

Perhaps "warehouse" might be a better description than "shop". The place was vast! It included racks of books, videos, fabrics, plates, furniture - you name it, it was there. We started to wander around and look at things in a desultory manner. It all looked very old and dusty and untouched.

It took some time for us to realise that there was something wrong with it - or at any rate something very odd. It started for me when I glanced at the rack of videotapes. None of them looked particularly pristine, but the point is that all of the titles were entirely unfamiliar to me. Not the genres, mind you: there were plenty of screwball comedies, kung fu movies, self-help tapes. Just not the same ones I'd seen before. Nor did any of the actor's names ring a bell.

Can this really be? I wondered. How could there not be a single familiar film among so many tapes and titles? My curiosity aroused, I began to rummage through the cheap paperbacks and romances. Same thing. They looked familiar enough superficially: slim candy-coloured spines like Mills & Boons, great fat bodice-rippers like Angelique or Wilbur Smith, but not any of those authors or series - just the same sorts of books.

Most disturbing of all were the records, though. I don't usually make a habit of leafing through boxes of LPs - who has a record player nowadays? - but these record sleeves were weird. There were old New Zealand bands from the 70s sitting on logs around campfires, with titles like "Banjo got my Soul" or "Ti-tree Anthems". I don't know much about pop music, but I felt that I might have noticed some of these shaggy characters if they'd ever been on television back in the day. Not a one of them was familiar to me at all.

It was as if the shop had come out of a completely different space-time continuum - one very close to our own, close enough for the same kinds of drivel to be peddled in bookshops and record shops, but just different enough for there to be a complete discontinuity in specifics. Similar in genus, completely different in type.

At this point I realised we were being watched. There was a man standing behind the glass case of the counter. Where he'd come from is unclear to me to this day. Could he really have walked out from the back, through all those ranks of shelves and aisles, completely unobserved by either of us? I guess he must have, since the only other alternative was that he had simply materialised there. Unless there was a hidden staircase down there behind the shelves of dusty glassware.

He was the stillest man I think I've ever encountered. He hardly seemed to breathe, and I'm not sure that I saw his eyes blink even once during our brief conversation.

"Can I help you?" he said.

"Oh, no, just browsing," I replied. Cathy just stood there, as if transfixed with terror (she told me afterwards that all the cloth samples she'd bought in the shop were ruined somehow when she got them home. They'd looked all right in situ, but when you unrolled or unpicked them, stained or creased beyond the point of repair).

"You're not wanting to close, are you?" I continued.

He didn't move. Or answer. So we kept on poking around. Not for long, though. The creepy vibe of the place had begun to get to both of us. We had visions of being ushered out the back and getting one sight of Bluebeard's bloody chamber before the axes started to descend. Worse, of a stainless steel umbilicus leading up to a waiting space ship ...

Nothing happened, though. Cathy bought her few rolls of fabric: rather more pricey than one might have expected for so sorry a specimen of the genus "Op Shop", but still costing only a few dollars in all. I was tempted to buy a few books or records, but something in me seemed to say no. This was their rightful place, and they should not be taken from it.

We went out into the street, leaving the lighted windows of the shop the sole illumination over Featherston's whole town centre. Nothing had happened, exactly, but it felt as if we'd had a narrow escape.

To this day I've never been back there. I doubt I could retrace my steps even if I wanted to. I seriously question if the shop we entered that day was of this world ...

There are universes all around us, say the Physicists: dark matter and superstrings and instantaneously disappearing-and-materialising quanta. What wonder, then, if from time to time we take a wrong turning in the midst of our seemingly stable world?

"Featherston incident" plaque

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