ABSTRACT
Ten days before ‘Bloody Sunday’ in St Petersburg, Dr Robert Spence Watson drew up an appeal in his capacity as president of Britain’s ‘Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’. Writing at his home in Bensham, a district of Gateshead on the south side of the River Tyne in north-east England, he declared: ‘There has never been a time . . . when it was more necessary, in the direct interests of our work, that we should be furnished with funds sufficient to carry it on with the greatest vigour.’1 Four days after ‘Bloody Sunday’, on the opposite side of the River Tyne, in a western district of the city of Newcastle, ‘A meeting of Elswick workmen was held during the dinner hour at the Water Street entrance to the works . . . to protest against the massacre in St Petersburg. There was only one speaker, Mr Flynn, who, in vigorous language, denounced the sham Russian Government which had committed those unspeakable atrocities upon workmen and peaceable citizens.’2 Thus, both sides of the Tyne, and representatives of both the privileged and the unprivileged parts of the Tyneside population, seemed to agree on the need to further the Russian Revolution of 1905. North-east England looked as if it was about to provide one more instance of that enthusiasm for foreign liberation movements which the British had evinced during the Greeks’ struggle for independence in the 1820s, the Hungarians’ battles with Vienna in 1848 and 1849, the Italians’ quest for unity in the 1850s and 1860s and the Serb and Bulgarian conflict with the Turks in the mid-1870s.
