Welsh Journals

THE KINMEL PARK CAMP RIOTS, 1919 By JULIAN PUTKOWSKI The Kimnel [sic] outbreak was widely discussed and everywhere regretted. Definite opinions were expressed that an exhaustive enquiry should be held and those responsible should be properly and firmly dealt with Col. S. H. Pedley, Western Command, Barrow. 17 March 1919. Sometime, sometime we will understand inscription on the gravestone of Corporal (438680) Joseph Young, killed 5 March 1919. The Kinmel Park mutiny, like most similar events that convulsed Britain's Armed Forces during the soggy spring of 1919, was a serious, complicated and con- troversial business. The veneer of passing years does not assist the presentation of a completely coherent and definitive account, but published and unpublished reports, supplemented by direct testimony from survivors, indicate that the authorities viewed the mutiny more seriously than the murders which accompanied the end of the confrontation. The factors that lay behind the Kinmel Park outbreak had a great deal to do with Canada's pre-war economic depression; conscription; flawed military demobilisation plans; xenophobia and anti-Bolshevism. It was not the first, nor the only mutiny which occurred in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and many aspects of what happened at Kinmel Park were paralleled in previous examples of rank and file 'collective bargaining'. On the eve of the Great War the Canadian economy was in crisis. Whilst many men who volunteered for service with the first contingents of the Canadian Expeditionary Force were motivated by the call of King and Empire, others were driven by social pressure and hunger.2 The attraction of a small but dependable soldier's wage and an exciting war 'over by Christmas' was an irresistible lure to 'young eager boys who have just reached the age of adolescence, or other fellows, chiefly out of work or otherwise "broke", to whom$1 10c a day represents the last source of salvation'.3 Even allowing for ex-regular soldiers and militiamen who also joined up, the CEF was overwhelmingly a 'civilian', 1 W. L. Marr and D. G. Paterson, Canada An Economic History (Toronto: Gage, 1980), pp. 200-1, 340-1. 2 1. Abella, The Canadian Labour Movement 1902-60 (Canadian Historical Association: Ottawa, 1975), pp. 2-3. 3T. Dineson, Merry Hell! A Dane with the Canadians (London: Jarrolds, 1930), p. 20.