Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History
396
Rebel Footprints: A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History
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Overview
The radical response to conservative heritage tours and banal day-tripper guides, Rebel Footprints brings to life the history of social movements in the capital. Transporting readers from well-known landmarks to history-making hidden corners, David Rosenberg tells the story of protest and struggle in London from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.
From the suffragettes to the socialists, from the Chartists to the trade unionists, the book invites us to step into the footprints of a diverse cast of dedicated fighters for social justice.
Self-directed walks pair with narratives that seamlessly blend history, politics and geography, and beautifully illustrated maps immerse the reader in the story of the city. Whether you are visiting it for the first time, or born and raised in it, Rosenberg invites you to see London as you never have before: the nation’s capital as its radical centre.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786804150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 04/20/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 396 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
REBELLIOUS CITY
London from the 1830s to the 1930s
[A]gainst those who laud the present state of society, with its unjustly rich and its unjustly poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its paupers, be it ours to proclaim that there is a higher ideal in life than that of being first in the race for wealth ... Be it ours to declare that health, comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more desirable than the breathless struggle for existence, furious trampling down of the weak by the strong, huge fortunes accumulated out of the toil of others, to be handed down to those who had done nothing to earn them.
Annie Besant, Our Corner
The writer and activist Annie Besant wrote these extraordinary lines in the mid-1880s, when she was living in the comfort of London's West End but becoming increasingly immersed, albeit transiently, in the struggles for better lives led by impoverished Eastenders. She depicts a city mired in conflict between the powerful and the marginalised, the exploiters and the exploited, and the brazen sense of entitlement by those who were ravaging the lives of an underclass. Her description reads just as hauntingly today as the struggles for a more equal city that marked the decades after the Second World War have given rise to a widening gap between London's rich and poor. The wealthy classes are rampantly recolonising significant pockets of inner London, expanding the number of gated communities, installing exclusive boutiques, gyms, restaurants and luxury outlets, while pushing longstanding residents towards the city limits, where new pound shops open weekly.
But Besant was writing, speaking and acting in the middle of a remarkable era of campaigning and protest, in which significant numbers of London's citizens of all ages showed that they refused to accept injustice. Five decades earlier, the class-conscious Chartist movement placed the struggle for political rights firmly on the map, unimpressed by a 'Great Reform Act' that failed to live up to its title, offering crumbs to elements of a rising urban bourgeoisie. It adopted its People's Charter at the Crown and Anchor pub on the Strand and launched the first mass struggles for democratic rights in London. Fifty years after Besant's blast at inequality, the people of the East End and of Bermondsey built barricades on the streets to thwart the ambitions of Oswald Mosley, a true son of the aristocracy, who had focused his attention especially on the capital city. He had mesmerised segments of all London's classes including significant numbers of workers, and built a para-military movement, spreading hatred and promoting dictatorship.
In the intervening decades Londoners continually gave proof that this is indeed a rebellious city. The fear stalking London's elites in the late 1840s brought troops into the capital to guard strategic buildings, while Queen Victoria was spirited away from potential harm. In the 1860s protesters demanding political reform unceremoniously removed the railings enclosing its most elegant park. The 1880s saw bloody battles for free speech in Trafalgar Square and an explosion of industrial struggles, spontaneously ignited by atrociously paid women workers in London's original and largest manufacturing area – the East End. During the 1900s and 1910s, women's economic struggles in London were temporarily overshadowed by political battles. Rebellious women were imprisoned for smashing windows of shops along London's showpiece thoroughfare of Oxford Street, attacking government property and randomly setting fire to pillar boxes, as they forced politicians to notice and respond to their agenda for change. Even behind bars they found ways to continue to challenge the authorities. In the 1920s, two London prisons – Brixton and Holloway – temporarily hosted elected councillors who refused to accede to demands on them that they considered an injustice and an outrage to the people who democratically elected them.
But rebellion has not always taken such sensational forms. Other dissenters adopted peaceful means to challenge and subvert the orthodoxies of the age, expose hypocrisies and pose questions and demands, using the power of the written word. They published radical newspapers, wrote incendiary pamphlets and generated mass petitions that simultaneously shook the powerful and gave heart and inspiration to those struggling for change.
This book shines a spotlight on a dramatic set of interlocking struggles that took place in London from the early nineteenth century to the eve of the Second World War. Rebellious Londoners spoke several different mother tongues but had a common campaigning language. They learned from each other's struggles and derived strength from each other's efforts and victories. Many participants in these rebellious struggles had their eyes open to the wider world and were convinced internationalists. Some among them found creative ways to give solidarity to their counterparts in other countries and publicise their causes here, but their efforts were primarily focused on democracy, freedom and equality in the city where they lived and worked.
Who were these Londoners? In 1831 this was a city of 1.7 million people; a century later the population of inner London alone had reached 5 million, with another 3 million in the growing suburbs of outer London. The development of the railways from the 1850s and 1860s displaced several very poor communities, without any compensation, but also enabled a massive expansion of factories and workshops. This drew new communities to the capital and, in turn, provided a basis for large numbers of workers to come together to fight collectively for better pay and conditions within their workplaces. The trade union movement expanded, especially among men in skilled work. An all-London Trades Council was formed in 1860, and towards the end of the nineteenth century local trades councils emerged, enabling workers across industries to support each other's struggles. By the 1890s a 'new unionism' was adding swathes of low-skilled and unskilled workers to a bigger and more combative trade union movement in London.
At the time when Annie Besant was writing, one out of three Londoners had been born outside of the metropolis. Some had travelled to the capital from other towns and villages within Britain; others arrived as international migrants seeking opportunities for economic advancement. In many cases they also sought greater freedom, security and refuge from persecution and oppression. London had long been a city of migrants, but the numbers increased dramatically towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth century.
The influx and settlement of these people coincided with an upsurge of rebellious political movements. But this was not just a coincidence. Although new migrants were reluctant to put themselves in a position of confrontation with the authorities here, they were also determined that their children should have freer and more prosperous lives than they had done. They arrived with a finely tuned sense of the necessity to fight for their rights, and with a determination not to let those rights slip away once they had grasped them. Many new Londoners threw themselves into struggles for better lives and played an outstanding role in London's rebellious campaigns. Chapters 2 and 6 feature the contributions of individual migrants of Caribbean and Indian heritage, Chapters 3, 4 and 10, those of migrants from Jewish and Irish heritage.
Grassroots Movements
This book is about grassroots movements for change. To the extent that it celebrates outstanding and iconoclastic individuals, it highlights those who based their hopes for change on a collective movement. Some of these individuals are more well known, such as the docks' strike leader Ben Tillett, suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, secularist and anti-war campaigner Bertrand Russell, writer and activist, Eleanor Marx and Labour politician George Lansbury, but readers will also meet individuals with whom they may be less familiar, such as the Chartist leader William Cuffay, whose father was born into slavery in the Caribbean (Chapter 2), the sweatshop worker and anarchist campaigner Milly Witkop (Chapter 3), Rosa May Billinghurst, a suffragette who undertook courageous acts of civil disobedience from her wheelchair (Chapter 7), the veteran East End brushmaker Mrs Savoy, who made a powerful impact on the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, when they met in June 1914 (Chapter 8) and Charlie Goodman, whose anti-fascist activism took him from the charge room at Leman Street police station on the day of the Battle of Cable Street, over the Pyrenees to Spain where he joined the British Battalion, Fifteenth International Brigade (Chapter 10).
The word 'rebel' derives from the Latin rebellis, which signified a fresh declaration of war (bellum) after a defeat. Many of the rebels celebrated through this book were true to this spirit. They were resilient people, undaunted by temporary setbacks, who believed they would ultimately triumph. All of them challenged the status quo, some from the most marginalised and embattled starting points, others more comfortably ensconced within the mainstream, but their common attributes were their fervent refusal to let injustices go unchallenged, their belief that change was possible, and their determination to see their battles through to a conclusion.
In keeping with its 'history from below' approach, this book particularly celebrates those movements that have been less conspicuous in mainstream narratives. Much has been written about the Chartist movement, but less about its predecessors such as the National Union of the Working Classes, whose ideas and activities are outlined in the Introduction and Chapter 2. The Women's Freedom League, whose motto was 'Dare to be Free', fought for the vote but also for equal opportunities, equal rights and equal justice for women. History records them as being less 'militant' than Emmeline Pankhurst's Women's Social and Political Union but, as Chapter 7 argues, they were more politically radical. The Battle of Cable Street in October 1936 was an extraordinary event that dealt a severe blow to Oswald Mosley's fascist movement. But it was one battle in a long war and the complementary actions of the people of Bermondsey who took to the streets and built their own barricades exactly a year after the Cable Street conflagration, are described in Chapter 10.
The book ends on the eve of the Second World War, by which time many of the causes for which rebel Londoners and their counterparts nationwide had mobilised, marched, petitioned, demonstrated and endured imprisonment, had chalked up several significant gains. Fascism had been defeated domestically and within years would be defeated internationally; trade unions were an accepted part of society; the Labour Party was a mass party seeking redistribution of wealth, whose members were drawn largely from the working class; there was free universal education, and higher educational opportunities were about to expand. With very few exceptions, all female and male adults could vote, basic freedoms were guaranteed, and organisations such as the National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) were monitoring and challenging breaches of civil rights. A freely-speaking national press was widely read and, although ownership of newspapers was still largely concentrated in the hands of Conservative political and economic elites, newspapers such as the Daily Worker, the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle flourished and provided accessible and affordable alternatives. The post-war Labour administration brought in further radical reform, reflecting a broad consensus in society, demanding greater fairness, democracy and equality of opportunity.
This war, in which for the second time in three decades, ordinary workers had proportionally made the greatest sacrifice, was a watershed for Britain and especially for its capital city, which suffered so much damage during the Blitz. Thousands of homes were destroyed and communities dislocated. Slum clearance and renovation of the city's infrastructure, which had been taking place all too slowly from the end of the nineteenth century, suddenly presented itself as an urgent necessity. The economic divisions in British society and in its capital city remained conspicuous but the rebels and protesters taking to London's streets in the 1950s, and in the decades immediately beyond could generally undertake their activities from a more comfortable and stable starting point. Protests in London became focused on a more diverse and eclectic, though no less urgent set of issues – for example, the environment, lesbian and gay rights, women's equality, antiracism, disability equality, nuclear disarmament, the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, trade justice – all of which are much more difficult to locate specifically within the London context as opposed to the national or global context.
Areas Covered
Most of the events described in this book took place within inner London boroughs and central London areas. London developed unevenly as a city. The financial centre developed first. Its legal and political institutions developed to the west of the financial area. Industry in London was founded towards the east. The development of the East India and West India docks there brought a host of related industries into existence. Gradually the urbanisation combined with industrial development that occurred in the east was replicated across the capital. But this meant that the demands of rebellious movements for change were first fought out and often took their most dramatic forms in east London, so four of the chapters and the walks that accompany them are in different parts of the East End.
Several areas south of the river underwent a rapid urbanisation and industrialisation later than east London, towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. The two southern districts that developed particularly strong radical movements, motivated and energised by extraordinary individuals, were Battersea and Bermondsey, and they are the south London areas represented in the walks.
The most central location represented is Westminster. In contrast with the east London and south London districts, this was not at the heart of a local community struggle but rather the focus of a broader movement – the suffragettes – spread over several areas, that concentrated its rallies and public protests on visible centres and symbols of political power, which were plentiful in Westminster.
Although the complete period the book covers ranges from the beginning of the 1830s to the end of the 1930s, most chapters with their corresponding walks relate to narrower slices of time. The Bermondsey chapter, for example, covers the 1890s to the 1930s. The Bloomsbury chapter is the exception to the pattern. This area was a hothouse for the development of radical ideas throughout the period the book covers and that is reflected in a wide-ranging walk. The other important location that the book will lead you through is where our story begins – Clerkenwell.
Using the Book: Text and Maps
The chapters follow a roughly chronological pattern, although several are more thematic. Each chapter conveys accounts of rebellious individuals, movements, incidents and campaigns that occurred principally within that specific locality. The walks stop at key points mentioned in the chapter, and indicate physical remnants that recall this history, but also add other intriguing fragments of historical information. Each chapter, together with its accompanying walk, can be used in a 'stand-alone' manner, although it is worth reading the whole of the relevant chapter first in order to get the most out of the walk. And if you do the walks in the order in which they appear in the book, the way in which different individuals and movements inspired and related to each other will become more apparent.
CHAPTER 2
TRAILBLAZERS FOR DEMOCRACY IN CLERKENWELL GREEN
When furious suffragettes aimed their first stones at Downing Street's windows in the summer of 1908, as part of their struggle for the vote, government ministers feigned shock and hurt, and asked naively what might have provoked such violent actions. From far away in New Zealand, where women won the vote in 1893, the Wanganui Chronicle reminded them of an earlier incident: 'In 1830 the Duke of Wellington declared the House of Commons did not need reform; but when an angry mob smashed his windows and let in a little more light, he saw the matter differently.'
Not differently enough to make real change, though. The following year, Wellington's government fell to the Whigs, who promised a Great Reform Act and won a landslide victory. For the vast majority, long excluded from having any political voice, this election created a rare frisson of excitement. The year 1831 this election created a rare frisson of excitement. The year 1831 had been unusually wet and thundery, especially August: a sign, perhaps, of imminent political turbulence. But in the early months of 1832, many Londoners were more exercised by the right to live than the right to vote.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2015 David Rosenberg.
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