The Salvation Army Riots and the Making of Eastbourne’s Police

Before respectability: a coast that policed itself

To understand what happened in 1891, it helps to know what law enforcement on this coast had been like within living memory.

For most of the previous two centuries, the interesting question here was never what the law said. It was whether local authority chose to enforce it. Contraband came ashore at Pevensey Bay, Crowlink and Birling Gap on a scale that involved a substantial share of the working population — in 1744 the Collector of Customs at Eastbourne reported five to six hundred horses assembled for a single landing — and it worked because the gentry, clergy and magistracy largely declined to act against their own neighbours. One contemporary summed up the revenue service’s problem perfectly: it could not be made effective unless half the inhabitants were hired to watch the other half.

It ended only when national machinery was imposed from outside, in the form of the Coastal Blockade from 1817 and the Coastguard from 1822. Our separate guide covers that era in full: smuggling on the Eastbourne coast and the free traders.

Hold on to the pattern, though, because it returns. A local establishment deciding which laws applied, and to whom, is exactly what happened again in 1891 — only pointed the other way.

One constable, stationed at Jevington

Before Eastbourne had its own police, it was covered by the East Sussex Constabulary, formed in 1840. In the early arrangements Hailsham and Eastbourne were combined for policing purposes, and for a period the two of them shared a single constable.

He was stationed at Jevington.

Which is to say that the one police officer responsible for Eastbourne was based in the village that had produced the smuggler known as Jevington Jigg. It is hard to think of a more economical illustration of how thin law enforcement was on this coast, and how recently.

April 1891: Eastbourne gets its own force

Eastbourne had been incorporated as a borough in 1883, and in 1891 it exercised the right to run its own police.

On 6 February 1891 the Watch Committee met to consider the twenty-two East Sussex Constabulary men then stationed in Eastbourne as candidates for the new borough force. Thirteen were selected. Eastbourne Borough Police was established in April 1891 under its first chief constable, J. Fraser — a former Metropolitan Police inspector who had been chief constable of High Wycombe.

The timing matters enormously, and it is the part of this story that usually gets missed. Eastbourne created its own police force, answerable to its own Watch Committee, in the same season that the town’s conflict with the Salvation Army was escalating towards open rioting. A force barely weeks old, drawn from thirteen men and led by an outsider, was about to be handed the worst public order crisis of its kind in the country — and told to enforce a local by-law against unarmed people singing hymns.

That same force would still be policing the town twenty-one years later, when Inspector Arthur Walls was shot dead in South Cliff Avenue. It survived until 1968, when it was absorbed into the modern Sussex force.

The Salvation Army arrives

The Salvation Army opened its Eastbourne corps on 9 January 1890.

It arrived into a legal trap that had been set five years earlier. In 1885 both Eastbourne and Hastings had brought private Bills before Parliament, and Eastbourne’s Improvement Act of that year included a clause prohibiting processions with bands of music on Sundays.

The manner in which that clause got onto the statute book was itself contentious. When Parliament came to consider repealing it in 1892, MPs stated that it had been passed against the recommendation of the Home Office, and that Parliament had never been asked by special report to sanction a provision going beyond the general law. One member put it bluntly: the clause had been passed behind Parliament’s back.

The town’s objection was not really theological. It was commercial. Eastbourne had spent thirty years selling itself as the quietest and most genteel resort on the south coast — the Victorian health resort where the delicate came to be restored — and a brass band coming down the street on a Sunday morning was, in the view of the council and a great many ratepayers, an attack on the product.

Complaints reached the authorities that the meetings would be injurious to the comfort of visitors. Prosecutions began.

Prison, and escalation

In September 1890 Captain Emily Goss and other Salvationists appeared before the magistrates charged with singing in the street. The case was dismissed — the council’s first attempt failed.

The bandmaster of the Household Troops Band, Staff Captain Appleby, was charged in August 1890 over a procession with a band, convicted in October and fined a pound on each count with costs, or seven days in prison.

By May 1891 the corps had formed its own band, and offered the mayor a compromise: it would play in procession on Sundays only in certain streets. On 11 May the council rejected the proposal outright.

In June 1891 magistrates fined Captain Bob Bell and four others £5 each or a month’s imprisonment. They chose prison. A week later thirty Salvationists appeared in court, refused to give the undertakings demanded of them, and were jailed.

Commissioner Eva Booth came down from London between 25 and 28 June, held three meetings on the Sunday, and went to see the mayor and the council to try to settle it. Every approach was rejected.

Supporters began travelling from London by excursion train to march in Eastbourne. The town was now in a straight confrontation with a national organisation, and losing control of the situation.

The Skeleton Army

Across England in the 1880s, Salvation Army marches had been met by organised counter-mobs calling themselves the Skeleton Army, marching under a skull and crossbones, often funded or encouraged by publicans with an obvious commercial interest in opposing a temperance movement.

Academic study of the phenomenon has reached a conclusion that Eastbourne does not advertise: the worst of the Skeleton Army riots anywhere in the country happened here, in 1891 and 1892.

Two things made Eastbourne exceptional, and neither reflects well on the town’s leadership.

The first is that the authorities declined to prosecute the people attacking the Salvationists, while continuing to prosecute the Salvationists themselves. The Salvation Army’s own historical account is that violence against its members became common while their attackers went unpunished.

The second is what the mayor was prepared to say out loud. He is recorded as declaring he would put down the Salvation Army business, with the Skeleton Army’s help if necessary. The council attempted to introduce by-laws to prevent open-air meetings altogether; the Home Secretary refused to approve them. The mayor went further still and asked the Home Secretary for permission to leave the Salvationists to the mob. Permission was refused.

By 24 July 1891 the matter was in the Commons. A question was put on behalf of Admiral Field, the member for the Eastbourne division, describing serious disturbances caused by Salvationists defying the local Act, noting that people had been sent from London for the purpose, and that nine Salvationists had been committed for trial for unlawful assembly and conspiracy to infringe the Act. The Home Secretary’s reply confirmed that eight of the nine had come from London, that the Watch Committee expected further trouble the following Sunday — and declined to send the Metropolitan Police, taking the view that no emergency justifying it had arisen.

The town also tested opinion. Voting papers were circulated asking ratepayers whether they favoured any compromise on Sunday processions. In the district the Salvationists wanted to use, 47 were in favour and 224 against. A public meeting then instructed the council, by a large majority, to spend the town’s money fighting the repeal Bill.

Eastbourne, in short, was not a town whose leaders got out ahead of their electorate. The electorate was with them.

Parliament intervenes, 1892

The Eastbourne Improvement Act (1885) Amendment Bill came before the Commons for its second reading on 10 March 1892. Its purpose was narrow: to repeal a single clause of the 1885 Act.

The debate was not a comfortable one for the town. Supporters of the Bill argued that granting local authorities powers beyond the ordinary law ran against the whole intention of Parliament. They cited the Lord Chief Justice’s position on Salvation Army bands — that every Englishman had the right to go about a lawful act under the protection of the law, that walking in procession through the streets even with music was perfectly lawful, and that a man doing so was entitled to protection.

The Lords debated it on 31 May 1892, and the exchanges there were sharp in both directions. One peer condemned the conduct of the Eastbourne authorities and inhabitants as discreditable, while reserving harsher words for General Booth for deliberately setting out to break a law he disliked. Nobody came out of it well.

The clause was repealed. Parliament had looked at what a seaside town had done with a special power, and taken the power away.

The legal legacy

The wider Skeleton Army conflict produced a decision that remains part of English public order law.

In Beatty v Gillbanks (1882) 9 QBD 308, arising from a ban on processions elsewhere, the court held that the Salvation Army was acting lawfully in marching even though its members knew a riot might follow. Their intentions were peaceful, and it was the conduct of the antagonists that produced the disorder. Knowing that your lawful act may provoke others into violence does not make your act unlawful.

That principle — that the law should restrain the people committing the violence rather than the people whose lawful conduct provoked it — is still argued over in protest cases today.

And it is the exact inverse of what Eastbourne tried to do. The town’s approach was to license the mob by inaction and criminalise the marchers by local statute. Parliament and the courts, from outside, said no.

Which brings the story round to where it started. For two hundred years the law on this coast was whatever local authority felt like enforcing. Smuggling flourished because the magistracy declined to act against its neighbours. The Salvation Army was driven into prison because the same instinct was pointed the other way, at outsiders who threatened the trade. In both cases it took the state, arriving from London, to settle it — a Coastal Blockade in one century and an Act of Parliament in the next.

What you can still see

Eastbourne’s Town Hall, opened in 1886, housed the borough’s courtroom and police station through the years that matter here — the building where the prosecutions were heard and the Watch Committee met.

More local history in our guide to the most historic places in Eastbourne, and in Lost Eastbourne.

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