The People's Train Read Online Free PDF

the tigress Hope Mockridge.
    Kelly remained sturdy amid all this. Despised by Bender but not taking a backward step.
    So you are sure you want this, Mr Bender? he asked.
    You will find, said Bender, that the premier of this splendid state is already swearing in special constables to deal with your scum. Do you know why I oppose unions? Do you really want to know? I’ll tell you. Because they strangle new creation, that’s why. I have in my employ an engineer who has devised a wonder of the age, a single-line train he calls a monorail. This is happening here, in Brisbane – yes, in dreamy old Brisbane. This tram or train or whatever you call it runs on a single rail!
    I thought, That engineer is Rybakov.
    How am I, asked Bender, full of just rage, to find the funds to build such a system, the first in the world, if I am to be bled white by unions? I won’t find them, and the world will be the poorer. You will be the poorer. I ask you to desist and back off and respect the spirit of invention.
    You can have both, you bastard, one of our delegates called. Pull something out of your own bloody pocket to build your own fucking railway.
    Please, leave my office, Bender cried out, or I shall call the police.
    Then, said Kelly, it’s on for young and old.
    Let it be, said Bender.
    We filed out again, my role among the revolutionaries of Queensland being to help Mrs Pethick back down the steps. I felt I had known that strong old woman a long time. But forthright Mrs Mockridge seemed a more remote figure than that.

5
    We all marched back to Trades Hall and were put to work on the same huge floor. Hope Mockridge worked frantically, speaking to businesses on the telephone, persuading them to give discounts to union members, and calling journalists she knew on the Brisbane Telegraph, all of them secretly sympathetic but wary for the sake of their jobs. Mrs Pethick clattered out letters of great length with an ease that spoke well of her ageing knuckles. She had brought some of her union girls in to do work for us.
    Suvarov and I took a job no one else seemed to want. From the crowd of strikers milling outside, Rybakov, Suvarov and I recruited three hundred solid men to supervise the marches and keep order when the strike began. I called on men I knew from the railway workshops, from the meatworks, and men from the tramways who were friends of Rybakov – who seemed, for an ailing man, to know every muscular fellow in the state of Queensland. These marshals were to keep order – Kelly was big on that – but also to be a vanguard, and if necessary to protect their fellows from police batons and from arrest.
    My and Suvarov’s three hundred constables, once I’d got them together, were suddenly not really mine or Suvarov’s to command – I worked hand in hand with a compact, wiry, and apparently nervous fellow named Riley, an official of the Clerks’ Union who had previously been a sergeant of the Queensland police. Kelly gave the final control to him because Australians did not like to take orders from anyone too foreign. I did not mind so much, since Riley consulted me on everything. Riley was emphatic that our constables were to prevent looting and disorder, because that’s what the press and the government would like to see. But he and I were still arguing the m atter of what they should do if directly attacked by mounted police. It was difficult to form a phalanx against horses and swinging clubs.
    Should we put our marshals on horseback? I asked.
    Where would we get that many mounts from? asked Riley, making the point that if we gathered the sort of back paddock horse some workers had for the kids to ride to school, in a crush and a panic they could do as much harm to the strikers as the police might.
    As I gathered the list of marshals together the idea came to me of asking my two comrades, Pethick and Mockridge, to join me at the Samarkand Café in Merrivale Street for Russian tea. They were curious about Russia, and I