The crowd, aware of its identity, sends signals to itself. During a bad reverse for British troops during the Crimean War, “we all stood about the streets-regardless of all appearances, reading the telegrams (in the newspaper) with breathless anxiety … There was a perfect sea of newspapers and curious faces behind, intense gravity prevailed … People walked along speaking in whispers and muttering.” The citizens of London then become one body with a corporate feeling of dismay; the crowd is alive and alert, responding in unison. The cry of “Mafeking is relieved,” on 17 May 1900 at nine thirty in the evening, had an equally instantaneous effect upon this corporate body. “Instantly the cry was taken up on the omnibuses and the people came clambering down in hot haste to hear the news repeated over and over again … Others rushed off into the byways, carrying the tidings further and further away, and all the time the streets became thicker with people cheering, shouting and singing.” This mass excitement is almost as disturbing as the “intense gravity” of the crowd recorded four months earlier; both show symptoms of that excess and over-reaction, close to hysteria, by which city life is characterised.
There is something childish about the mob in action, as if it had been bru-talised, or infantilised, by the condition of living in the city. In the fourteenth century the London mob greeted one supposed enemy with a “savage yell,” and five centuries later at a Chartist meeting in Coldbath Fields “a most fearful shout burst from the lips of the crowd.” It is the same terrifying and implacable voice. In 1810 the crowds during the Burdett riots “stopped all vehicles and compelled the occupants to signify their adherence to the cause.” In the same period a mob around a pillory “resembled beasts dipped in a stagnant pool.” The “vast and tumultuous crowds” which gathered to watch the battle of Sidney Street in 1911 provoked similar reactions, when a reporter for the
Yet the city itself is curiously unmoved by its crowds. One of the reasons for civic peace in London, as opposed to other capitals, lies directly in its size. Its very scale determines its quietness. It is at once too large and too complex to react to any local outbreaks of passionate feeling, and in the twentieth century the most marked characteristic of riots and demonstrations was their failure to make any real impression upon the stony-hearted and unyielding city. The disappointment of the Chartist uprising in 1848, preceded by a large meeting on Kennington Common, anticipated the inability in 1936 of Oswald Mosley to proceed down Cable Street with thousands of fascist sympathisers. It was as if the city itself rebuked them and held them back. The poll tax riots of the late 1980s, around Whitehall and Trafalgar Square, were another instance of a violent local disturbance which did not affect the relative composure of the rest of the city. No movement could sweep through the entire capital, and no mob could ever control it. The city is so large, too, that it renders the average citizen powerless in its presence. In the early decades of the twentieth century there was something curiously compliant and complacent, not to say conservative, about the Cockneys; unlike the Parisians they did not want to fight the conditions of the city and were happy to live with them unchanged. That happy equilibrium could not last.
