It is exactly 90 years since Pear Tree radical Alice Wheeldon and members of her family were arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate the then Prime Minister, Lloyd George, with a poison dart. Their trial and conviction, based largely, on the evidence of two agents provocateur, continues to raise questions about whether they were “set up”. Maxwell Craven investigates.

NINETY years ago today, Derby narrowly escaped international notoriety as the place which nurtured the murderers of Britain’s prime minister.

This bid at assassinating Lloyd George (and Arthur Henderson, the Commons Labour leader and War Cabinet minister without portfolio), had something of an element of farce about it.

Mrs Alice Wheeldon’s alleged assassination plot was certainly not done well. She was accused of plotting to kill Lloyd George with a poison dart while out walking on a Surrey golf course.

Poison would seem to be a strange method for political murder; yet the fact that the matter was serious enough to merit trial and conviction demonstrates that the plot was thought to be in earnest.

Mrs Wheeldon’s son, Willie, was a conscientious objector and this had inevitably resulted in victimisation for the lad. Furthermore, she herself was an anarchist and outraged that the war had ended the campaign for women’s suffrage in which she had played an active part.

Her contribution was described as one of “of arson and sabotage” by William Rickards, one of two covert government agents who infiltrated her circle. The other, Herbert Booth, became known to the conspirators as Comrade Bert!

At her second-hand clothes shop, over which she lived in Pear Tree Road, Alice Wheeldon is alleged to have hatched the conspiracy with her two daughters – Hettie, a schoolmistress at Ilkeston, and Winifred, married to Southampton chemist Alfred Mason.

Elaborate preparations were made, in which the two agents took part, but on January 29, 1917, the police swooped, arresting the conspirators, including Mrs Mason, who was picked up in Southampton the next day.

They were remanded at the Guildhall and committed for trial. This was held in March 1917, with the Attorney General and Churchill’s great friend, F E Smith, leading for the prosecution.

Although the charge was tantamount to treason, at the end of the trial Mrs Wheeldon received just 10 years, Lloyd George allowing her release some months later.

Mason, in charge of the actual poisoning, got seven years, his wife, five. Hettie was acquitted.

They all protested their innocence, claiming the poison was for guard dogs at a camp for conscientious objectors.

There is no doubt that the Wheeldons were a family of extreme left-wing leanings, closely involved in a local political cell and not averse to “direct action” – a euphemism for violence.

It was alleged that they were involved with a suffragist group that had set fire to Breadsall church three years before, a charge still emphatically denied by some.

The question still debated is whether they were innocent left-wing sympathisers, set up by a pair of agents provocateurs or genuinely dangerous conspirators.

Records of the case and the trial do not conclusively settle the matter. However, Rickards, who used the alias Alex Gordon, never appeared at the trial and was, over a decade later, admitted to a mental asylum, facts which impugn his evidence.

However, the transcripts show clearly that the two agents did not actually suggest the plot but merely offered to assist once the matter had been broached.

The waters have subsequently become muddied by the ideological baggage of the 20th century, in that the romantic afterglow of Soviet Communism has tended to get mixed up the movement for women’s rights.

Consequently, Mrs Wheeldon has been seen variously as a martyr, an innocent dupe and as “set-up”.

But subsequent events serve as a telling coda to what occurred. Hettie (1890-1920) married Arthur MacManus, himself shortly to become the first chairman of the British Communist Party and later a defector to Russia, where he became a Soviet citizen.

Alice’s son, Willie, also went to Russia as a translator and was sufficiently integrated into the fabric of Soviet life as to be executed on Stalin’s orders by the OGPU (fore-runner of the KGB) in 1927. He was presumably of a Trotskyist inclination.

The stark fact was that Mrs Wheeldon was a passionate anarchist whose family inclined to Communist activism. They were, understandably, seen as a threat to stable government in a nation at war, which had already had to deal with rebellion in Ireland and a world where Marxist communism was increasingly making itself felt. The Russian October Revolution was but nine months away.

The case for infiltrating two agents must have been seen, in late autumn 1916, as a sensible precaution. The only question is – did they provoke the Wheeldon plot?

One has to give Lloyd George’s government credit for keeping its finger on the pulse of various wartime dissidents. And Lloyd George’s decision to release Alice as soon as she decided on a hunger strike in prison clearly demonstrates that the Government was not the luridly vengeful organisation depicted by many.

When Alice Wheeldon died at 907 London Road, Derby, in February 1919 – a victim of the great influenza pandemic – Willie made a lengthy pro-Soviet peroration at her graveside before draping her coffin with a metre-square red flag.

• Did agents provoke plot to murder Lloyd George?
• Any Answers?

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