employer. After flatly refusing to obey District Inspector Thomas Keaveney when the latter ordered him to accompany the driver, he was promptly suspended. In response, 300 angry policemen attended a meeting at Musgrave Street Barracks and declared their support for the strike. A brawl instantly broke out inside the barracks when Barrett resisted attempts by RIC officers to arrest him. This led to another 800 policemen (about 70 per cent of the police force) joining the mutiny. They refused to offer any protection to the blacklegs, made no further attempts to disperse the strikers' pickets and Larkin persuaded them to carry out their own strike for higher wages and better pensions. In 1907, policemen's pay in Belfast ranged from £66, 16 shillings to £78 per annum. This was a wage just marginally above that earned by the best-paid dockers and carters. At the request of the Lord Mayor, extra British Army troops and cavalry were immediately deployed to Belfast to restore order, taking command of strategic areas such as the Docks and city centre; on 1 August nine warships sailed into Belfast Lough and martial law was quickly imposed in the city. On 2 August, four days before the police were due to go on strike, the leaders of the mutiny along with 200 dissident policemen were transferred from Belfast. Barrett and six other constables were dismissed from the RIC. The day after Barrett's dismissal, the strikers carried him from one police barracks to another; a mass demonstration followed where he addressed a crowd of 5,000 people, mainly striking workers. The police mutiny, however, was effectively crushed without their threatened strike having taken place. End of the strike The Dock strike was ultimately ended on 28 August not by Larkin but by James Sexton, the overall head of the NUDL in Britain and Ireland. Sexton found the 10 shillings a week strike payments that had to be made to the dockers crippling high and, fearing that the union might be bankrupted, negotiated with the employers before agreeing to terms that amounted to capitulation by the NUDL. These separate negotiations with the other employers left the dock labourers isolated. In the weeks leading up to the strike's termination, the Unionist press had begun to employ scare-mongering and other divisive methods to alienate the Protestant strikers from their Catholic counterparts by alluding to Irish nationalism and socialism. It also published allegations that