As acts of futility go, the task that a magistrate named Stuart Deacon was asked to perform on 13 August 1911 takes some beating. Deacon was charged with reading the riot act to a vast crowd of strikers that had descended on the area around St George's Hall in central Liverpool. His words were, in effect, the authorities’ last-minute bid to persuade the demonstrators to disperse and return to their homes peacefully.
The crowd, however, was in no mood to listen – perhaps 80,000 of them had taken to the streets in support of what was being described as the
