On the following day, the Crown Solicitor drew a warrant for the arrest of Hamilton (the only one against whom there was any strong evidence -- but Davis Goldstein had not yet agreed to become a witness), Glynn (accused by Goldstein of confessing IWW responsibility), Moore (framed by McAlister), Larkin, Reeve and Grant (included presumably because they were prominent members of the organisation; the police evidence of demonstrations of fire-setting by Larkin and Reeve was concocted, and there was no other serious evidence against them); Morgan (no-one had ever named him as an arsonist; he was presumably in as a bail-jumper); and -- for good measure -- the fictitious Androvitch and Mahony (although not “Andrew”). The IWW rooms were raided the next day, and Glynn, Reeve, Larkin and Hamilton were arrested. Among the papers seized were the membership lists and the incriminating letters which Reeve had written to Morgan in 1915. McPherson was arrested on an entirely different charge, and Besant because there was some cotton waste about in the print-shop where he was working.
Moore and Grant were picked up some days later. The cotton waste allegedly found in Moore's box is of doubtful validity; it may well have been planted. Grant was arrested in Broken Hill; the indictment suggests that the police hoped to tax him with the burning of some wheat stacks.
On the same day that this warrant was issued, Davis Goldstein provided the police with their second strong piece of evidence: Fagin's admission that he was involved in the fires, and that Scully had been supplying the chemicals.
Davis and Louis both reported admissions by Teen; Davis' evidence may have been in part true, but there is grave doubt about Louis.
With Scully on the hook, the frame was almost complete. Scully was vulnerable because he was an accomplice in arson. He learned from his employer, Cole, that he was under observation, and he decided to turn King's evidence. At the same time he warned Fagin of the danger they were in and tried to recover the phosphorus he had supplied to Fagin. The police picked him up on the morning of September 30, and he made a statement implicating Hamilton, Fagin, Teen and Beatty. (The police were already getting ready to move against Fagin and Teen: now they had a warrant issued for these two, and added Beatty.) But the case still needed expanding. An unidentified person was instructed to plant some fire-dope on Teen and Davis Goldstein was instructed to lead Teen to a spot where he could be arrested. And someone was instructed to plant some dope in Fagin's gladstone bag. The dope was planted, the arrests were made, and the case was complete.
The conscription campaign was moving towards its climax, and it was important to get the case into court so as to secure the maximum propaganda effect. McAlister and Scully had already agreed to give evidence, but the Goldsteins were holding out. Louis Goldstein had been discharged on the forgery charge at the preliminary hearing, but Davis was still in jeopardy. Louis was demanding that the Crown should withdraw the proceedings against Davis, too, but the Crown wanted their evidence first. Finally Goldstein gave in several days after the preliminary hearing opened. The Crown rewarded him with a nolle prosequi.
In gaol, while the trial was on, Jack Hamilton blamed himself for the plight of his fellow workers. He offered to confess and take the whole responsibility. But solidarity triumphed, and the other men refused.
It was a good frame. The conscriptionists got their propaganda triumph (but they did not win their referendum). The Crown got its conviction. The prisoners got their five to fifteen years.
It was a good frame -- too good for the defence to crack -- and it would have stuck but for the consciences of Scully and Davis Goldstein. Neither was happy about his part in the affair. Scully had a grievance over the distribution of the reward. Goldstein had a grievance over Morgan's bail and his failure in the Wyong pub.
Ernie Judd had been appointed by the New South Wales Labor Council to investigate the whole affair; when be approached Scully, Scully opened up. The case had been framed, and six at least of the Twelve were innocent. From there, Judd went to Davis Goldstein, who said that eight of the Twelve were innocent and provided more details of the frame.
Scully had also told Judd that his friend Detective Surridge was prepared to talk, and Judd actually interviewed Surridge (though without result). It may have been from Surridge that the police learned what was afoot, or they may have had Judd under observation.
They did a deal with Scully, and smuggled him out of the country. But Judd got wind of this, and spilled the story through Brookfield, in the New South Wales Parliament. The Government was caught flat-footed, and agreed to the Opposition demand for an inquiry, but limited its terms to the allegations against the police. They arranged for Scully to be brought back from San Francisco to Sydney.
Meanwhile, the police commissioned Louis Goldstein to find out what his brother was up to. Louis reported that Davis, too, had “sung” to Judd. So Detective Pauling went to work on Davis and, at the last minute, convinced him that he would have to recant. The impression one gets of Davis Goldstein is that he was afraid of the police, and it is likely that he was threatened with a charge of perjury if he did not repudiate his confession. However this may have been, the police pressure was successful. Before the Street Commission, Davis Goldstein repudiated every part of his confession, and swore that he had concocted it out of malice against the detectives and a desire for revenge. Similarly with Scully -- just how and when the detectives prevailed upon him on his return from San Francisco is unknown, but they succeeded. He did not repudiate his confession completely but he qualified it almost out of existence.
Mr Justice Street found himself quite unable to believe that the police would frame a case -- or even that they would embroider a good case to make it better. He ruled out completely the confessions of Scully and Davis Goldstein, and side-stepped all the other evidence of police corruption that the defence had so painstakingly amassed. The frame stood. Of the Twelve, three, perhaps four, had been involved in arson or preparations for arson (although the Crown case against the Twelve was largely faked and bore little resemblance to anything that these three or four had done); the other eight or nine had certainly not been involved and probably had no knowledge of what their fellow-workers had been planning and doing. But all twelve remained in gaol.
There is little more to tell. Davis Goldstein had left Australia before the Ewing Commission; after it, Louis Goldstein dropped quietly (and one imagines gratefully) out of sight. Harry Scully resisted further police pressure to leave the country, and finally succeeded in finding another job as a chemist; he died of meningitis two months before Charlie Reeve was freed. Henry Boote lived a long and honourable life as poet, labour journalist and radical propagandist; he died some years after the Second World War.
The dogmas which had hobbled Ernie Judd as a leader of the Socialist Labor Party, in the days before he was swept up in the great mass campaigns for the One Big Union and the Release of the Twelve, returned in even greater strength; he ended his days as a cantankerous stump orator, preaching the truths of De Leonism to a dwindling handful of the converted. Tom Mutch late in life became interested in history and genealogy; unfortunately, his papers in the Mitchell Library contain few reminders of the days when his world was wide. Jock Garden became a leading propagandist for Jack Lang in the hectic years of the depression and the "Lang Plan"; later, he was discreditably involved (when acting as secretary to a Federal Labor Minister) in a scandal involving timber leases in New Guinea. Tom Barker worked for some time for various Soviet agencies; eventually he settled in London. After World War II he became a Labour councillor in the borough of St Pancras (and, aged 77, still was at the time of writing). He was the only Lord Mayor to refuse to wear the mayoral robes, and on one occasion scandalised the Labor Party by flying the Red Flag over the St Pancras Town Hall. On the morning of March 22, 1921, while King and Reeve were still in gaol, Jack Brookfield stepped off the Broken Hill express at Riverton, where the train had stopped for breakfast. A Russian named Tomayev ran amok on the platform and fired off forty-one shots from a revolver, scattering the crowd. Brookfield and a police constable rushed Tomayev; Brookfield got two bullets in the stomach, and died that evening in Adelaide hospital. Tomayev later said -- probably falsely -- that he had been paid Ј100 to kill Brookfield. The poet Mary Gilmore wrote:
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.
Of the Twelve, most had had their fill of notoriety, and were happy to abandon public life. They once more became workers, and probably active unionists, but they left no further mark on the history of Australian labour. There were three exceptions. A Communist Party was formed in Australia in October 1920, three months after the first ten of the IWW men were freed. Jock Garden was a leading member. The Communist International at the time was seeking to draw the syndicalist revolutionaries of the IWW into its ranks. Tom Glynn and J.B. King became Communists, and Glynn the first editor of the party's paper. But the ideological differences were too great; a year later, Glynn and King broke with the Communists, formed the Industrial Union Propaganda League, and began to republish Direct Action. A temporary rapprochement followed a “unity conference” at which the Communists agreed to recognise the IUPL as the Australian section of the Red International of Labor Unions, a Comintern affiliate. But this did not last either, and Glynn and King finally broke with the Communist Party in March 1922. Their syndicalist venture did not prosper. King worked for a time in Russia, but returned disillusioned with the failure of the Bolsheviks to realise their earlier slogan of "industry to the toilers who work therein".
Donald Grant, too, threw himself into revolutionary politics. Three weeks after his release from gaol, he was back on the Sydney Domain, preaching with all his old fire that he "hoped before long to establish a big organisation of rebels in the country, an organisation that would revolutionise the present social system”. He said Mr Justice Pring, Mr Lamb and others were true to their class but the workers were not. ... “A class war would have to be fought the world over, and it would have to be fought to the bitter end, even if the streets of the cities of the world were drenched with the blood of the workers".
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