Before dawn, there were already dense queues at the gates of grain stores in major cities, and the people were worried that the price of grain would rise sharply, so they came to buy grain with flour bags and sacks. And Mark Street in London, which was the grain distribution center of the British Empire, was densely packed with more than 100,000 people.

In the crowd, there were rumors that flour was no longer available today. And even the coarsest of wheat costs 120 shillings, or £6, per bag, which is twice as much as four or five days ago.

The Times was so concerned about the matter that early in the morning a reporter wanted to enter Mark Street to find out the price of wheat or flour, the main food of the British, but unfortunately the whole of Mark Street was like an ant's nest, and it was already crowded with people with all kinds of pockets.

Not long after, the news came that all the grain stores on Mark Street were out of stock and all were sold out. Suddenly, the angry people began to riot, and the whole of Mark Street began to boil like a pot of boiling water. I don't know who shouted the words, "The evil wheat merchants and flour merchants have hoarded and don't sell grain, and want to sell it at a higher price", and in the excitement of the crowd, and I don't know who took the lead, a flour shop was broken through the iron door, and the small amount of flour and a large amount of wheat stored in the store, along with the machinery for processing flour, were all set on fire.

"Burn them all! We can't buy it, and we don't want them to sell it at a high price! ”

Like a contagious disease, fires and smoke erupted, and dozens of grain stores throughout Mark Street were set on fire.

Because of the crowd, Mark Street was so crowded that London firefighters and military police arrived belatedly and wandered outside the street but never entered.

The flames rose into the sky, and the smoke billowed out, and there was a sense of terror in the crowd on Mark Street. The well-meaning military police fired warning shots and shouted for the people to withdraw from Mark Street, but it backfired, and without the knowledge of the panicked people, an even greater panic broke out, and people scattered and fled from the streets, and a frantic stampede broke out at once.

Most of the poor 200 firefighters and hundreds of military police standing at the corner of the street had no time to dodge and were trampled into pulp by the people who fled frantically. Not only that, but even the two Times reporters were not spared. Of course, more than 5,000 people were trampled and injured, more than 2,000 were trampled to death, and 2,000 or 3,000 people were stunned by the smoke of burning food because they could not get out of the street, and then the whole of Mark Street burned, and a small number of people were crowded and buried in the fire.

The arson and stampede throughout Mark Street killed and injured tens of thousands of Londoners. And all this, ultimately, stems from the soaring price of food.

Although the London Metropolitan Police and the British Home Office brought in a large number of police and military personnel to maintain order, it did not help.

As soon as the people of Mark Street and the surrounding areas had gathered, and there were many of them, a large number of unemployed workers numbered more than 300,000, and some families who were watching the bustle had taken to the streets to get some food, and the whole of London was in a state of disorder. There are only 20,000 police officers in London, and a third of them are still on leave, and in this era, there is no telephone to notify you of the waiver of leave, only through letters or verbal notices, so there is no time to notify them. The number of troops was not very large, most of them were stationed in the suburbs of London, and even by train they could not be mobilized at once, and even if they were mobilized, they could not be compared with the number of people who wandered the streets.

Second, the police and soldiers are also pitiful, especially the policemen, whose wages are very meager, and these working-class people have no surplus food at home, and at this time they also began to worry about the rations of their families, and wondered where to buy a batch of food. These policemen are paid 17 shillings a week, not even a pound sterling, of course, they cannot afford the expensive flour and wheat, etc., and the main thing to feed a family is cheap coarse grains such as bread and barley, but even these coarse grains are skyrocketing, and they all regret that they did not exchange all their wages for food two days earlier. I could have bought 4 quarts, but now I can only buy 2 quarts, and if I don't buy grain earlier today, I'm afraid that tomorrow the money in my hand will only be exchanged for 1 quart. These policemen, as the main labor force of the family, are simply not enough to support their families, and they have to rely on their wives and children to work as servants or helpers, and they themselves have to do odd jobs at night to barely make ends meet.

Therefore, the minds of these policemen are not here at all, but they are thinking about making this gang of people make a fuss, and if the trouble is big, let the government come out, let go of grain, and bring down the price. Because of this, these police officers are just putting on a show.

The British government's response was finally a little slower, and by the time they remembered to send more police and troops to mobilize troops outside London, as well as Luton, Oxford, and other places, the whole of London was in chaos.

Mark Street is just an introduction. And it is precisely because the vast majority of London's police and army have been transferred to the vicinity of Mark Street that the police force in other streets and alleys is very weak, and when hundreds of thousands of people in London began to demonstrate everywhere against the sharp rise in food prices, the troops sent by foreign enemies have just arrived in the suburbs of London.

Gladstone, the prime minister of the cabinet government, has always been slow to respond, and he is a rare prime minister who thinks about the common people, and he is reluctant to order the army to suppress the people who are holding demonstrations, and he always thinks about organizing parliamentarians in various regions to persuade people to return to their families. Moreover, he knew that the root of the problem ultimately lay in the major grain merchants in Britain, and when he learned of the riots in Mark Street in the morning, his first reaction was to send the Home Secretary of the Cabinet and the London Police Department to the scene to deal with it, and to summon the grain merchants to demand a reduction in grain prices. But those grain merchants are not government officials, and they have a lot of parliamentarian resources, how can they listen to him. To put it mildly, those grain merchants only promised not to continue to raise prices for the time being, for the sake of his face as prime minister.

And at this moment, London, which had already entered the evening, entered a moment of crime, and the frenzied ransacking of shops by the people, who had completely lost control, broke out.

These people, who took advantage of the darkness of the night, were indignant at their disappointment with the government and despair of life, and began to indulge and redeem themselves. Start in the block next to burning Mark Street and quickly spread through the neighborhoods. The poor people of all London went mad, and the whole of London fell into a catastrophe of savage smashing and looting.

It was not that no one restrained or ignored it, at first, many soldiers and police stopped them, but the kind prime minister greeted them in advance, strictly forbidding them to shoot at innocent people, and only using weapons such as shields and batons, which gave the rioters a chance. In fact, at the beginning, the disgruntled workers, mainly the people, did not think of smashing and looting, but the general hooligan proletarians, drunkards, villains, thieves and addicts could not help but fish in troubled waters, and when they encouraged the surrounding people to storm the shops, smash the windows and loot the property, no one stopped them, and at this moment, the evil of human nature burst out from the bottom of their hearts. In the same way, the strong workers followed, at first they just looted the grain stores, and then they were out of control, and all the shops and possessions were looted, and then everything in the neighborhood, shops, post offices, banks, hospitals, schools, even the tax office, and so on.

And a bunch of impoverished policemen are red-eyed. At first, they were afraid that they would be recognized, so they took off their police uniforms to smear their faces, and also joined the team of looting property, but later more and more police officers joined the team, and everything didn't matter, and they were directly wearing police uniforms to rob property. Everything is out of order.

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