"the mob were riot mad...the police were hopelessly outnumbered"
14 April 1932 - Queen Street Riot
The largest and most violent of the riots occurred in Auckland’s Queen Street on the 14th April 1932, when large numbers of unemployed expressed their anger towards the Government for the hardships they faced during the Depression Era. As Paul Moon describes it, “tension had been mounting all week as growing numbers o the hungry, the fearful and the ruined had begun to congregate in the city centre to hear the firebrand unionist Jim Edwards condemn the government’s latest short-sighted response to the financial crisis: a 10% cut in workers’ salaries.” The people were tired of the government taking actions to worsen their already dire situations and the conditions of the work camps, and having no policies issued in their favour. Edwards, who had spend the earlier months on a speaking tour around the North Island, became the leader of the Auckland Riots.
In early April, there had been small demonstrations involving groups of protesters outside the Auckland Central Post Office in which some of the militant participants hurled bricks at the police. Then, on Wednesday 13th April, after one of Edward’s “rabble-rousing speeches,” as Moon put it, there was a conflict between protesters and police outside the Bycroft’s biscuit factory in Shortland Street. |
This photograph shows the crowd in Queen Street, Auckland, during a riot on 14 April 1932. There are smashed windows to the right as people broke into stores and looted goods.
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The mob had begun to close in on the detachment of constables who had come to bring about order and the situation was controlled by Edwards who stepped in. There was a tense atmosphere throughout the city as “everyone had been doing his or her British best to bring the thing on by anticipating it” as New Zealand poet Robin Hyde put it in her 1934 publication Journalese which featured a collection of Parliamentary records. Another meeting of disaffected employees was planned for the next day and this was an assembly of the relatively moderate Post and Telegraph Association. Thousands of relief workers and onlookers joined a massive crowd of unemployed workers as the union members filed into the town hall.
Central Auckland was soon filled with relief workers, unemployed and other supporters on the afternoon of the 14th of April. In the early stages, it could not be described as a mob, but as a group of above 15,000 frustrated and desperate people, looking for answers. They crammed into Queen Street with anxiety and anticipation.
Central Auckland was soon filled with relief workers, unemployed and other supporters on the afternoon of the 14th of April. In the early stages, it could not be described as a mob, but as a group of above 15,000 frustrated and desperate people, looking for answers. They crammed into Queen Street with anxiety and anticipation.
As RJ Noonan puts it in his MA thesis The Riots of 1932:
A Study of Social Unrest in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, the exact course
of the events which followed, who started it and who was to blame as such,
became a very controversial and greatly disputed topic. The official stance of
the police was the Edwards had attempted to provoke the crowd. Thinking about
his involvement in previous disputes, namely the one from the previous day, the
police had reason to believe that his actions might be of immediate threat to
public order. Therefore, when Edwards tried to get onto a low concrete ledge in
order to address the crowd and maintain peace by calming them when they became
increasingly frustrated at being locked out of the full town hall in which John
A. Lee was speaking, a police officer, struck him down with a baton to his
head, in an apparent attempt at ‘pacifying’ him. Edwards pointed out in his own
defence that he had maintained order in the Shortland Street demonstration the
previous day but as Hyde says, the previous, rather militating speeches he gave
to large crows did not do him much favours: “The
police may have owed him some regard for his intervention in Shortland Street a
day before. On the other hand, no speech of Mr. Edwards' made at the London
Theatre or open air meetings could have been described as pacifistic.” In
an account given by the unemployed and their sympathisers to the Auckland Star
on the 15th of April, they say “Edwards
was appealing to the demonstrators not to use violence – to crow the police,
but not to fight. While he was speaking, he was hauled off he balustrade and
struck his head on the pavement.” Regardless of Edwards’ stance, mob
mentality soon took over and the cordon of police officers barring the entrance
to the town hall became the target of the enraged protestors.
The article to the right explains that the exact cause of the riots was never quite understood. The riot began suddenly and it grew to absolute mayhem in a few moments. "The mob were riot mad," and the police were unable to control them when they came out in full force. The police still maintained that it was Edwards who started the scene and rushed at the police.
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As said in the article above, there was nothing much the police could do at first when the mob took over rioting. They were unprepared and outnumbered and the people were too angry to see sense at this time. They had years of built up anger to blow off and some did not even realize what they were doing, even as they did it.
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Some rioters ripped off fence pickets and rushed at the police, while others fought with their boots and fists. There were clearly not enough police to contain the angry crowd, and certainly not enough experienced ones. They crowded around the area near the town fall and then the riots burst out into Queen Street.
Over the next three hours, it was complete mayhem as the people, armed with pickets and stones started smashing shops windows and looting anything they could find. They mainly targeted food, clothing and anything of value such as jewellery and another popular choice was liquor (which almost no-one could afford during that time). Protesters carried banners with slogans such as “Close the Slave Camps” and “Give us this Day our Daily Bread” and the marchers sung: “Hallelujah I’m a bum, Hallelujah bum again, Hallelujah give us a handout, To revive us again.”Police reinforcements came in with mounted police and Specials, some of whom were quickly sworn in on the spot. As well as this, sailors from HMNZS Philomel, which been docked at the Devonport Naval Base across the harbour, were also called in to help. In Man Alone, Mulgan gave a primary impression of the riots: “Johnson saw the police go back or down; tow that were near him were driven back and one fell against a shop wall, hit with a stone that drew blood. Men were left where they fell and stopped fighting. Violence was new to these people so that they wanted results and not mob murder, but Johnson saw a woman kick someone as he fell, screaming in her anger all the time, and a man near him, his face all running with blood, shouting: ‘Get them – get them.’ He saw one of the police, red faced and angry, driving in at a man who had collapsed in front of him, while somebody else tried to catch the policeman’s arm. After that the shop-windows began to go, first with stones and then with a long rake of the fence palings.” |
From this account of the event, it is clear to see that the situation would not have been as violent as it was, if the government had been doing more to help the people and relieve some of their hopelessness. Because they had had a feeling of uncertainty for so long, it was easy for their anger to erupt into something this destructive. They had been tired of being put on hold for so long and wanted to feel what it was like to be in control of something, regardless of for how long or what the consequences was.
Much more police reinforcement was needed that Auckland could provide alone and so two squadrons of the Waikato Mounted Rifles who were at Cambridge for inspections were also brought in to bring about order in Queen Street. The police who arrived on the scene first and those who were already there were poorly unprepared for such action and the mob was able to quickly supersede them.
This cartoonist is portraying that the mob involved in the Queen Street riots were not acting as genuine unemployed workers. They had turned into a savage animal like group who was out for vengeance, and had seemed to forget their actual intent. In a sense, this is an accurate representation of exactly what had happened - the group may have started as a group frustrated at being unemployed, but as the mob mentality took over, they were simply acting immorally forgetting their cause or thinking of the effect. They looted anything and everything of value, it was not simply taking the necessities such as food or essential clothing. They took expensive jewellery, contraception etc which was not what had been immediately sought after during the Depression Era. They also did not consider the further effects this would have on the already broken society, including the financial destruction this would implore on the shopkeepers, and took the event simply as a way to immediately get rid of some anger.