 It seems to be a North London thing - an ancient clock tower which has outlived the church of which it was once part. There's St Mary's in Hornsey village, which dates from the end of the fifteenth century. And here's the perhaps older, and certainly taller, St Augustine's Tower in Hackney - a glorious and unexpected survival from the medieval period. The tower is all that remains of the old church of St Augustine's, which dates back to the late thirteenth century and was rebuilt in 1519. In the seventeenth century, the dedication of the church changed to St John. And then in the late eighteenth century, a new church was built - the one that still stands - alongside the old one, which was demolished.  The tower has been refurbished - it's open on Sunday afternoons, is a venue for meetings on Hackney's history and has a working clock (and bell) which makes quite a racket when you are sitting on the floor below listening to a talk on times past. It was getting a little late in the evening by the time I made it up a distinctly narrow spiral staircase, squeezed through a small aperture and got on to the roof. Great views - and that's the historian Anna Davin in the photo. 
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 I've never seen a Quaker meeting house quite this imposing. It's in Brighton and dates from 1805. And for the first half century of the meeting house, the surrounding grounds served as the Quakers' burial ground. The windows of the meeting room were placed high up to stop any distraction during worship. That sounds like the Quakers!
The Quakers organised adult education from here for the people of Brighton and the meeting house was also a campaigning organisation and the venue for many large public gatherings on issues from anti-slavery to temperance.  The building is today put to many uses but it remains the home of an active Quaker community and a place of worship.  And there are other markers of Brighton's long and distinguished history of religious dissent. Just down the road from the Quaker meeting house is a glorious Unitarian church dating from 1820 and with a design based on that of an ancient Greek temple. It remains in use as a Unitarian place of worship.   This is the writer Ela Sen. It's the first time I've seen a photo of her. The image she's gazing depicts a meeting of Tagore and Gandhi. Among the books Ela Sen wrote was a powerful first-hand account of the Bengal famine of 1943-4, Darkening Days. I blogged about that book some years ago, and that post recently caught the attention of Ela's son. It transpires that Srikumar Sen lives just walking distance from me in London. And this week I had the pleasure of meeting him.  This blog is about both mother and son. Ela Mitter was a Bengali - the family home was in Park Circus in the most fashionable part of Calcutta. Sen was the name of her first husband (and Srikumar's father) - the marriage ended in divorce. Ela's second husband was Alec Reid, at the time the news editor of the main Calcutta daily paper, The Statesman - the paper which, under the editorship of Ian Stephens, did so much to expose the truth about the wartime famine and the at least partial culpability of the colonial authorities. They lived at the top of Statesman House in the heart of Calcutta. As well as for her writing, Ela is remembered for setting up a progressive women's group which met in her top floor apartment, the Mahila Atnorakhya Samity. She was very much on the left. Not a Communist, says Srikumar, but perhaps a fellow traveller. Her best friend, Betty Hutheesing (or more formally Krishna Nehru Hutheesing), was Jawaharlal Nehru's younger sister. Srikumar was born in 1932 and educated at a boarding school at Mount Abu on the opposite flank of India. In 1946, when he was a teenager, the family moved to London. Their home was in Kensington, but Srikumar travelled across the city to attend Highgate School (which he liked much more than the Christian Brothers' school at Mount Abu).  From Highgate, Srikumar Sen went to Jesus College, Oxford, to read history. Perhaps of more moment, he was an Oxford Boxing Blue. This photograph - for which I am indebted to the Vincent's Club website - is of Oxford's 1951 Boxing Blues. It's fairly easy to spot Srikumar. He married a South African artist, Eileen Hartwell. A tainee post at The Times was his entry point to a career in journalism, but in about 1954, Srikumar and Eileen moved to India and spent a decade there before returning to London. He worked for The Times - for which he was the Boxing Correspondent for sixteen years - as well as the Observer and the Guardian.  Srikumar Sen's novel The Skinning Tree won the Tibor Jones South Asia Prize in 2012. He has now completed a second novel, a sequel of sorts. to which he has given the title The Nowherian. Both are drawn in large measure from his own life and experiences. The more recent novel is an account of being caught between two different cultures and not feeling truly at home in either. I took this photo of Srikumar when I called on him the other day - one of my better snaps. He's given me permission to post it.   It's taken a while. But the reviews are now coming in of my book, A Devilish Kind of Courage: Anarchists, Aliens and the Siege of Sidney Street (published by Reaktion Books, hardback, illustrated and really nicely produced and only £15.99!) Here's a taster: 'Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their [Latvian anarchists'] world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland.' - TLS 'With its themes of immigration, xenophobia, antisemitism and foreign atrocities on English soil, Whitehead's book is contemporary and relevant. His meticulous research is lightly worn in a book that propels the reader forward in lively, elegant prose.' - The Critic 'brilliantly recounts the events' - Camden New Journal '[This] well-researched and detailed book looks like being the definitive study' - Socialist Standard 'a comprehensible and readable narrative' - Socialist History Society Newsletter 'a master class in social history' - Policing and Society 'This book has certainly renewed my interest in East End Jewish Radicals before the First World War and brings a human side to an important period in working-class politics in East London. I would thoroughly recommend it.' - Socialist History It's particularly wonderful to have a full, and appreciative, review in the hugely prestigious TLS (behind a subscription paywall). Here's what Josh Ireland made of the book in a piece entitled - inevitable really - 'Anarchy in the UK'.  Anarchy in the UK: The story of the siege of Sidney Street By Josh Ireland May 17, 2024 A DEVILISH KIND OF COURAGE Anarchists, aliens and the siege of Sidney Street 320pp. Reaktion. £15.99. Andrew Whitehead A few days before Christmas in 1910, a gang of Latvian anarchists (nobody knows exactly how many were involved) tried to tunnel their way into a jeweller’s shop on Houndsditch in London. Had they been successful they would have escaped with a haul worth, in today’s terms, more than a million pounds – money they could have used to fund the struggle against tsarist repression back home. Instead they were interrupted after a neighbour noticed the noise they were making. When police arrived to stop them, the thieves opened fire, killing three officers and leaving two others seriously wounded. One robber was hit by one of his comrades’ bullets and died within hours. The others slipped away. On January 3, 1911, two of the criminals were tracked down to a house in Stepney, 100 Sidney Street. Aware that they were outgunned, the police on the scene appealed for help from the army, who sent Scots Guards equipped with machineguns and horse-pulled artillery (not used). A siege ensued; it went on for six hours, during which time the building caught fire. Nobody intervened. When the authorities picked through the still-hot wreckage, they found two bodies. One gunman had been shot; the other had died from smoke inhalation. This was clearly a tragedy, but it was also a spectacle exhilarating enough to draw tens of thousands of spectators and grab the attention of the young home secretary, Winston Churchill, who quickly – and many would say rashly – involved himself in proceedings. (It was Churchill who ordered that the fire brigade should not try to quench the blaze consuming the thieves’ hideout.) The incident shocked the population, who were not used to the sound of gunfire and had barely registered the existence of the foreign anarchists living among them. It remains the bloodiest day in the history of London’s police. It is also – along with the Iranian embassy siege of 1980 – the only time in history that troops have opened fire in the British capital. So perhaps it’s no surprise that even before the rubble had been cleared and the bodies carried away, the story was acquiring the dimensions of a myth. The fault line between what actually happened and what the world believed, or wanted to believe, is the focus of Andrew Whitehead’s A Devilish Kind of Courage. The author patiently explores the haphazard community of Latvian anarchists and their mingling with the other eastern European migrants in the East End. The threads he takes up lead him from Russian prison cells to the streets of Melbourne. Those most directly concerned with the Houndsditch operation – and both men and women played significant roles – were almost all members of a mysterious group known as Liesma, the Latvian word for flame. Through careful use of police documents, as well as reports in the contemporary Yiddish press, Whitehead renders their world in vivid detail: the reader sees the cheap furniture in rented rooms lit by sputtering gas lamps, the love affairs that would sometimes blossom briefly between two comrades, and the details of their shared dreams about transforming their homeland. A Devilish Kind of Courage also shows how impressions of the anarchists were shaped by the lurid coverage they received from a news media that was itself in the process of being transformed. Printing innovations allowed the sale of halfpenny daily newspapers, which attracted a new mass readership in search of sensationalist accounts. Action photographs had begun to replace artists’ sketches and newsreel cinematography meant that dramatic footage of the day’s events could be shown in cinemas in a matter of hours. The result of all this was that events could be reported more quickly and in greater detail than ever. But it also meant that myths could be created with unprecedented speed. Inaccuracies, exaggerations and outright falsehoods could swiftly appear in print (or on screen) and, once these phantasms were out in the world, it was harder than ever before to dispel them. The few anarchists unfortunate enough to be swept up by the police in the siege’s aftermath were not given the chance to correct the record. More than 100 years later, Andrew Whitehead’s book makes a strong attempt to do so on their behalf. Josh Ireland is a writer based in London. He is the author of The Traitors, 2017, and Churchill & Son, 2021 So I am well pleased with that. And with Mark Glanville's review in the June issue of The Critic - also entitled 'Anarchy in the UK'.  And there's another very positive and full review by Dan Carrier in the Camden New Journal which is of course - and you should know this - the UK weekly newspaper of the year. (This review also appeared in the Westminster Extra and the Islington Tribune).  You want more? Well, here's a recording of the book's launch at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town - with many thanks to friend, neigbour and camera operator extraordinaire, Brian Kelly: I've recorded an audio essay with the title 'The Anarchist Big Three and the Siege of Sidney Street', which you can find here. And here Im am talking at the Hackney History Festival -  Hackney doesn't have a lot in the way of Tudor manor houses. But happily it does have Sutton House on Homerton High Street - which dates back to 1535 and is the oldest residential building in the borough.  It was built by Sir Ralph Sadleir, a courtier of Henry VIII. And it has over the years been a home, school, squat and trade union office. And as for the reference to 'Breakers' Yard' - well, until not that l0ng ago a patch of adjoining land which is now part of Sutton House was used for breaking-up cars and vans. It's now home to a community garden.  Sutton House is run by the National Trust, and is open to the public on Fridays and Sundays. Get thee off to Homerton! Entrance is not free - but you won't regret the chance to see a largely unaltered Tudor home.   British universities have been slower than their counterparts across the Atlantic to set up pro-Palestine protest camps. But they are starting to catch up. On Monday morning, a group of Oxford students set up a camp on the green space outside the Natural History Museum - that's opposite Keble College. There are now a couple of dozen small tents, and a few bigger tents - one a media centre, another a library/study centre, and there's a clearing house for food and other donations in support of the protest.  The mood is friendly and relaxed - the main problem is that recent heavy rain has turned part of the camp to mush, and the protestors are using planks, plastic and donated straw to stop the site becoming a Glasto-style wash-out.
When I popped by on Tuesday afternoon, the sun was shining and there was a trickle of news journalists - I spotted one from The Times - taking a look around. The protestors say they don't know how long they will be sleeping out - but having taken the university authorities by surprise in striking camp, they don't seem to intend to pull up their tent pegs anytime soon.   Introducing Francisco de Miranda - a guy who liked a good scrap. If there was a bit of a bargy anywhere, he wanted a bit of the action. The American Revolutionary wars ... the French Revolutionary wars ... the independence struggles in Latin America: he fought in them all. The one place he didn't do any fighting is London. But that hasn't stopped his statue sprouting up on a corner of the very fashionable Fitzroy Square - it's on the flank wall of the Adams-designed 40 Fitzroy Square, opposite the Indian YWCA.  Why here? Well, Francisco de Miranda - born in Caracas in 1750 - apparently lived for a few years nearby on Grafton Way. There are a couple plaques to him on that building too. He married a Yorkshire woman, Sarah Andrews, and this is where they lived together. But the dates given are perhaps approximate - and certainly not a period of continuous residence in this corner of Fitzrovia.  Francisco de Miranda is regarded in Venezuela as a hero of the independence movement. He is known as the 'First Universal Venezuelan'. But he didn't meet the happiest of ends. He feuded with that other Latin American military legend Simon Bolivar and died in prison in the Spanish port of Cadiz in 1816 - the Spanish of course being the enemy as far as Latin American independence movements were concerned. Miranda was buried in a mass grave and his remains have never been identified. An empty tomb has been left for him in the National Pantheon of Venezuela. This statue is apparently a copy of one made in 1895 by the Venezuelan sculptor Rafael de la Cova. It was put in position here on Fitzroy Square in 1990. The location of this statue adjoining a private property and behind railings makes it appear a private endeavour rather than a routine piece of hagiography in bronze. But why shouldn't a Venezuelan general get a look in on London's streets?  |
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