Tarring and feathering is a form of social justice associated more with 19th century America than with the birthplace of George Eliot, but there is clear evidence of its being used in Nuneaton in 1912 against a missionary Elder Albert Smith.
Smith was described by a local newspaper as
‘a man past middle age. He wears a beard and has merry grey eyes which occasionally become stern and piercing. At first glance he seems rather too frail for the strenuous propaganda upon which he is engaged but when he speaks this impression fades.’
He was indeed a man past middle age (for that era); when he arrived in Britain as a missionary he was approaching 60, a married man who left a large family behind in Utah. A native of Harlestone, Northants, Albert with his wife Mary Ann first encountered the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the year after their marriage in 1879. He was baptised the following year, Mary Ann the year after. By 1882 they had left for America, to join the main body of the church in Utah – partly because of encouragement for converts to ‘gather’ and partly because of hostility from family members due to their affiliation with the Church. The couple settled in Salt Lake City, where Albert set up as a butcher, the trade he had learned as a young man in Northamptonshire. It was in 1910 – almost thirty years later - that Albert was asked to return to Britain to serve a mission.
When Albert and his missionary companion Harper W. Noble arrived in Nuneaton in the August of 1911, missionaries had not been there for some time, because of the anti-‘Mormon’ feeling in the town. William Jarman – a former member – had been distributing anti-‘Mormon’ literature, and this had evidently coloured local views about the Latter Day Saints. Jarman was a seasoned activist. He had been travelling the country since the 1880s, lecturing wherever he could find someone to pay his fees and expenses. He claimed that the missionaries were taking young female converts to Utah to become polygamous wives – even though the Manifesto had been issued 1890, declaring polygamy was no longer to be practised by church members.
Jarman had been taken to court in at least two towns (Swansea and Cardiff) and bound over to keep the peace, because he incited his audiences to violence against local members. But this does appear to have been a time when feelings against the Church were running high in Britain – it was not by any means restricted to Nuneaton. Missionaries and members had been subjected to threats, disturbances and sometimes violence in Sunderland, Birmingham, London, Bristol, Birkenhead and elsewhere. [1]
The Millennial Star reported in its 6 June 1912 issue:
It becomes our unpleasant duty to record the fact that our missionaries at Nuneaton were recently subjected to cruel, inhuman and unlawful treatment – especially Elder Albert Smith, a man 60 years of age, who, while in the peaceful discharge of his duty as a preacher of the gospel of Jesus Christ, was attacked, and before escaping his tormentors was literally covered with tar and feathers.
The local newspaper, the Midland Counties Tribune, also reported the story [2] Under the heading ‘MORMON’ ELDERS ATTACKED, it stated:
The Nuneaton anti-Mormons have again broken out, and on Sunday morning exciting scenes were witnessed, Elder Smith, who has been in Nuneaton since August, [3] having a bucket of tar and feathers poured over him.
The article pointed out that the ‘Mormons’ were still in town, despite repeated demands that they leave and threats of consequences if they did not. The incident occurred when a Sunday meeting was being held, May 26th 1912, at the Gate Hotel Assembly room. Special tickets were distributed to church members, to prevent unwanted company, as there had been previous disturbances outside their Sunday meetings. Once this meeting began, the crowd which had gathered in the street rushed the door and the meeting had to be discontinued. Members were jostled as they left, but it was Albert Smith who was apparently the real target and the only one who suffered significantly. As he was leaving via the stairs (presumably the Assembly room was on an upper floor of the hotel), local builder Richard H. Smith was the individual who poured tar from a container he had been hiding under his coat.
In fairness the Tribune remarked: This dastardly treatment will hardly commend itself to right-thinking people.
Smith’s missionary companion, Elder Jones (who had by then replaced Elder Noble) – described in the newspaper as a big beefy young man, stolid and phlegmatic - ran out of the meeting to find a police officer. This did not go un-noticed by the crowd. Elder Jones escaped harm, but not threat. The paper remarked:
There is evidently more trouble in store, for this morning, bearing the Nuneaton postmark 4.30, Elder Jones received the following postcard: —
''My bold hero, — We could not but admire your pluck in bolting and leaving the old man to face the music, but your turn next. — Yours for the Homes of England,
Anti-Mormon. “
The police response to the request for help was that, as the building wasn’t officially a place of worship, there was little they could do.
This is Albert Smith’s account of the aftermath of the attack:
As soon as I reached the door, the tar began to get into my eyes and I saw no more but was led to our lodge by two sisters [female members of the church], Nettie Horne and Sarah Ann Bates. They covered my head over with a coat, took hold of my arms and led me through the streets. The mob followed and the police also followed to see, what well might be, that we had police protection. Sister Hartoff, at whose home we were boarding, and her daughters worked hard with warm water, oil and carbolic soap until they got all the tar off my head and face. When I could open my eyes, I looked in the glass and said, “I wish I could have had my picture taken before they had cleaned me up so I could see just how I looked.” Everything but my socks were gas tarred.
Monday morning May 27, 1912… I feel fine, no worse for the experience, only my face is sore from the burns of the tar and my eyes are swollen and a little sore, and “oh” the looks of my whole Sunday. suit and silk hat!!
The Millennial Star [4] included an excerpt of a letter written by the president of the Birmingham conference. He reported that he had seen Elder Smith and although he was quite badly burned from the effects of the tar, his condition was better than expected as he had not been roughly handled during the attack.
Albert Smith chose to take Richard H. Smith to court for the attack, on two counts: wilful damage to his clothes and hat to the value of four guineas, and assault. The Nuneaton Observer of June 7th 1912 reported on the court case, stating that Richard H. Smith pled guilty on both counts. He did make the point however, that his actions had been wilful, rather than malicious – a rather nice distinction, given his follow-up statement that Albert Smith had not a tithe of what he deserved and what he was likely to get from other sources. Richard Smith was ordered to pay the four guineas of damages – a sum which barely covered replacement of the ruined clothes - or face one month of hard labour. The owners of the Gate Hotel apparently also sued him for £8. 10s. to cover damage to their property, caused by the tar spilt on the stairs.
The Daily News and Leader of May 31st, in reporting the attack and subsequent court case, also stated: Scarcely one Mormon meeting is held now without police protection, and frequent disturbances they say take place outside the houses in which the elders reside.
Although it didn’t quote the source of the information, the Millennial Star reported that on June 3rd, Richard H. Smith had chaired a meeting at which the following resolution was passed:
That this meeting of the rate-payers of Nuneaton respectfully requests the Mayor of this borough to inform the ‘Mormon’ elders that it will be to their own interest to quit this district within three days of receiving this notice, as their presence here is a menace to the public peace.
This was between the tarring and feathering incident and the court case. The mayor reportedly replied to the resolution:
What can I do? I have no more power over them than I have over you or anyone else. I can only deal with them from a legal point of view, and so long as they conform to the law they have as much right here as anyone else.
Shortly after the court case was concluded, Albert Smith’s wife, Mary Ann, and their daughter Julia joined him for a month of visiting relatives and friends before the completion of his time as a missionary. Other missionaries continued to work in the Nuneaton area, and the general British public soon had other priorities, with the outbreak of the Great War on the horizon. But Albert Smith was clearly not too frail for the strenuous propaganda upon which he [was] engaged, as the newspaper had speculated, but kept his commitments faithfully. He would live almost another twenty years after returning to Utah, where he died at home among his family.
1. 'The Mormon Peril': The Crusade against the Saints in Britain, 1910-1914. Malcolm R. Thorp Journal of Mormon History, Vol. 2 (1975), pp. 69-88
2. 8th May 1912
3. Albert Smith had actually arrived the previous year
4. June 6th 1912