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Communist Party History Group
defensive. They had not realised the price of the Irwin-Gandhi Agreement.” Active campaigning in Britain for the release of the Meerut prisoners was not to fade away. The trial itself ended – bar verdicts and sentences – in August 1932. On 19 November the Daily Worker headlined the issue and highlighted meetings organised by the League Against Imperialism and International Labour Defence on 20 November at six venues, including Latchmere Baths, Battersea. A further meeting was on 9 December at Farringdon Street’s Memorial Hall, with Saklatvala and Pollitt listed as speakers. On 21 January, Bridgeman, interviewed by the Daily Worker, disclosed that about £750 had been laboriously collected in Britain and sent to the Meerut prisoners for defence purposes, since March 1929. (It was a small enough sum enough in comparison with that spent on the prosecution.) Amongst the prisoners sentenced in India in January 1933 for anti-imperial agitation were Philip Spratt, who was condemned to 12 years transportation, and Ben Bradley, whose sentence was ten years. Lester Hutchinson’s sentence was shorter (four years), but all were released early. Of the Indians sentenced, one was given transportation for life, four others for 12 years, two more (one was Shaukat Usmani, former Spen Valley Parliamentary candidate) for 10 years. Almost as soon as the sentences were passed, in January 1933, a new committee for the Meerut prisoners’ release was set up, followed by release of a pamphlet. Contributions to an appeal fund were to be sent to 39 Doughty Street WC1. However, owing to a resignation, the secretaryship of this committee passed to Alex Gossip of NAFTA at familiar 58 Theobalds Road. Special Branch records are the source for this information as it is for the fact that £105 had been raised by the beginning of March, enough to cover the filing of an appeal by the Meerut prisoners. Ben Bradley was back in Britain early in 1934, not long after Hutchinson, and was soon to be British Section secretary in succession to Bridgeman, The League Against Imperialism:The Hidden History of the British section