Welsh Journals

(5) Prosecutions followed hard on the heels of disturbances and continued in the follow- ing months. At Cardiff a total of 28 people were brought before the courts, 10 coloured men and 18 white people, sentences passed ranged from 20 months hard labour to fines, cautions and discharges. The first cases to come before the Magistrates revealed in- equality in the face of the law. The Stipendary Magistrate gave Mahomed Abouki 6 months hard labour for striking a policeman on the arm with a walking stick, the reporter in court noted that Abouki had received a blow on the leg which made it difficult for him to walk. By contrast John Flynn Marden who was convicted by lay Magistrates of kicking a policeman in the stomach and threatening him with a knife received one month's hard labour, and this despite 61 previous convictions, including 11 for assaulting the police.49 The sentence on Marden looked especially light when compared with two months hard labour sentences which other white men received the next day for breaking windows and furniture. Soldiers or ex-soldiers were given lighter sentences. At the subsequent Assizes 10 white men convicted of riotous assembly received sentences ranging from 3 months in the second division to 20 months and 18 months hard labour. Of 5 Arabs brought before the court for shooting offences, 3 were discharged because they were in danger of their lives (one of these receiving 4 days for a further charge of assaulting the police), 1 was sentenced to 3 months hard labour for shooting at a policeman who entered his house when it was besieged by a crowd, and another for shooting at a policeman during a disturbance, but when not being pursued by a crowd received 15 months hard labour. At Barry coloured men were arrested with weapons, but apparently no white men were. One coloured man was bound over for a year for wounding a white man with a table knife when fleeing from a crowd; and Charles Emmanuel, as previously noted, received five years hard labour for manslaughter. The disturbances at Newport led to 9 white people and 22 coloured men being brought before the Usk Assizes. Some of the cases against the whites were dropped and others received sentences for riotous assembly ranging from 3 months hard labour to being bound over. The blacks were also tried for riotous assembly despite the fact that it was they who were attacked; 7 were discharged as there was no positive evidence of identification, 16 were bound over, one had not surrendered to bail and 1 received a month's hard labour for assaulting the police. 50 James Walvin's study of the 1919 riots has concluded that coloured men received "scandalously biased treatment" from the law in both arrest and detention and that English Law once again proved itself unequal to the task of safeguarding the rights of negroes in a white society". The policy of the police in arrests in Newport and Barry shows discrimination with a great imbalance in the numbers arrested. The courts were more equitable. At Cardiff the legal processes started with flagrantly unequal sentences imposed on black and white men for similar offences but eventually the decisions of the courts seem to have reflected the nature of the offences. To write this is not to offer a blanket defence of the law and those who enforced it. Clearly the first reaction of the police and of the first magistrates involved was to assume that black men were the insti- gators of troubles. As the riots broke out it was often assumed that blackmen were the instigators of violence and that their unemployment had caused them to run amok. In a report of the first night of the riots in Cardiff the Western Mail correspondent said that a shot had been fired presumably by the coloured men. This kind of presumption arose