 This eye-smacking mural takes up much of a wall in the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. I popped in this week to give a talk, I'd never been to the first floor of the library. And there I was confronted by the handiwork of the Red Earl. And if you think the mural has a touch (OK, just a touch) of Diego Rivera about it, you're right. The artist, Jack Hastings - to be more precise, Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet Hastings, or Viscount Hastings - had been a pupil of Rivera. And in 1935 he executed this mural in what was then Marx House, the home of the Workers' School, a wonderful eighteenth century building fronting Clerkenwell Green. He gave the mural the snappy title 'The Worker of the Future Clearing away the Chaos of Capitalism'. You will spot Marx and Lenin (happily, no Stalin) along with various figures from the history of the British labour movement in a supporting role.
It seems that the worker of the future is clearing away the Houses of Parliament along with all the other detritus of global capitalism.  Hasting was educated at Eton and Christ Curch and while at Oxford played in the Varsity polo team. In 1939, he became the 16th Earl of Huntingdon. He sat on the Labour benches in the House of Lords and became a junior minister in the post-war Attlee government. He also taught art and for much of the 1950s was chairman of the Society of Mural Painters. The Red Earl was the title of a biography written by his daughter. I can't help wondering who was the model for the starring role of the worker of the future.  The mural was 'lost' for decades - concealed behind shelving and hidden from view. It was rediscovered in 1991, a story told in this documentary 'Marx on the Wall'.
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 This was one of many engaging displays and installations during Clerkenwell Design Week. I came across it in a boutique design studio, one of dozens which welcomed in the curious and intrepid as part of the Week. Jung is a brand which specialises in 'modern electrical planning' - switches, principally - and it has offices on Albemarle Way, a short, narrow street off Clerkenwell Road.  I was intrigued because in the latter part of the nineteenth century, another Jung lived in Clerkenwell. Hermann Jung was a Swiss watchmaker - Clerkenwell was then the centre of London's watch trade - and a leftist, who had been involved as a teenager in revolutionary movements in Germany before coming to London. His home and workshop in Charles Street would have been just a five minute stroll from what's now the site of Jung's showroom. Jung was prominent alongside Karl Marx in the International Working Men's Association of the late 1860s and early 70s, but in a different faction. He was regarded as sympathetic to anarchism. Sadly Jung came to a tragic end - some news cuttings about his murder or on this site and one I've reposted one or two below along with an imposing photograph of the man from around 1880.
Ernest Belfort Bax, in his memoirs, has an affectionate account of Jung: In 1882 I joined the Democratic Federation, rather more than a year after its foundation. But before entering upon the history of Socialism in England, the beginnings of which were identified with the organization in question, I may perhaps say a few words about some men whose acquaintance I made some little while before this. Hermann Jung was a working watchmaker by trade, and a French Swiss (Vaudois) by origin. He used to live and carry on his business in Charles Street, Clerkenwell, where I on several occasions had conversations with him. Jung was an extraordinary autodidact. He had lived in London for many years-indeed, since he was quite a young man. Speaking English, French, and German alike fluently, before long he came into close touch with political refugees of the ’48 movement, and made the acquaintance of Marx and his circle. He soon got to be one of Marx’s intimate disciples, and when the International Association was founded, in the Autumn of 1864, he took his place among the most enthusiastic spirits of the London section. He used to have much to tell of his relations with Marx, for whom he had the profoundest admiration. They finally quarrelled over the break-up of the old International. The reason of the difference was Jung’s disapproval of the arbitrary and, as he considered, unfair methods adopted by Marx and his friend Engels at the Hague Congress of 1872 to get rid of the disciples of Bakunin and other non-Marxian and anti-Marxian elements in the body. The Marxists, as is well known, succeeded in overriding all opposition and getting their motions carried, the most important of these being the transference of the General Council of the Association to New York. This meant, of course, as it was intended to mean, the death-blow of the old organization. The reasons given for the Marxists’ action by Friedrich Engels, who was probably its chief promoter, at the Zurich Congress of 1893, have been stated on a former page. The immediate result of the steps taken at the initiation of Marx and his friends was the split up of the International into three or four fragments, each claiming to represent the original body. Hermann Jung, although theoretically as strict a Marxist as ever, sympathized strongly with the opposition parties and with their determination to treat the resolutions of the Hague Congress, obtained by intrigue and unfair means, as he viewed the matter, as null and void. The fragments dragged on a precarious existence for a few years, but by the end of the decade of the seventies the old International had definitively ceased to exist.
I first made the acquaintance of Hermann Jung at one of the meetings of the London Dialectical Society, then held in Langham Hall, Great Portland Street. The lecturer was the late Mr. Leonard Montefiore, his subject being German Social Democracy. He treated the matter from the then conventional middle-class point of view as a somewhat foolish aberration of the masses, although he strongly denounced the anti-Socialist coercion laws, the enactment of which Bismarck had just succeeded in procuring. The treatment of the subject in the somewhat de haut en bas manner of the lecturer brought Jung, as soon as the lecture was concluded, to his feet in a fury. The result was one of the most effective and rousing speeches in defence of Socialism I have ever heard. There was no mistake about it. Hermann Jung was a born orator. When I knew him he seldom took part in public meetings, but in his younger days, when he was an active propagandist, he must have been extraordinarily effective and powerful. Poor Hermann Jung came to a sad end. Among the numerous persons who, claiming to be political refugees, always found a welcome in his workshop, was a French criminal who, while Jung was bending over his bench, struck him a blow on the head with some sharp instrument which killed him at once. The object was robbery, but his assailant, although he fled from the house, did not succeed in escaping, being caught red-handed, and in due course tried and executed.  In 1867, an explosion triggered by Fenians, Irish Republicans, brought down much of a street in Clerkenwell, then a working class area of central London, Six people were killed outright, Another nine people (or some accounts say six) succumbed to their injuries. The incident became known as the Clerkenwell Outrage. This plaque in memory of the victims is in Clerkenwell's parish church, St James's. on Clerkenwell Close.  The Fenians were trying to blow a hole in the wall of the Clerkenwell House of Detention to enable the escape of two of their leaders, whom they believed would be in the exercise yard at the time of the blast. Here's more on that story. The authorities discovered the plan and ensured that the two Fenian leaders were kept out of the exercise yard on that day. What the police didn't allow for is that the Fenians would put much too much explosive in the barrel that they detonated, bringing down many of the houses opposite the north side of the prison wall and causing such heavy casualties.  I'm writnig about this now because Clerkenwell Design Week prompted me to revisit St James's - a wonderful church dating from 1792, and much more than the 'box with a spire' it's sometimes described as. I was able to appreciate the elegant interior of the church, and for the first time had the chance to visit the crypt (both, of course, being used by Design Week exhibitors to show their wares).  Just round the corner is the location of the jail the Fenians blew up. Only a small part of the old buildings are visible above ground - I believe this striking building with no windows overlooking the street was once the chief warder's house. It was, needless to say, at the opposite side of the jail to the spot where the barrel of explosives was placed.
But the real thrll - the surviving underground portion of the jail was open, incuding some of the cells. Take a look!   And thanks to Clerkenwell Design Week for luring me back to my favourite part of inner city London.
 It's a sumptuous building, classical in design and comp;leted in 1782. For a century, the Sessions House was just that, the courthouse for the Middlesex Quarter Sessions. It looks out on the distinctly non-verdant Clerkenwell Green, once a rallying point for Chartist, Reform, Republican and all sorts of demonstrations, and a place of popular assembly and occasional tumult.  For a large part of the twentieth century, the building was the HQ of the Avery weighing machine company. Then it becamse a Masonic conference cntre. More recently, it's been a top end eating place. Today, as part of Clerkenwell Design Week, I had my first chance to mosey around. I was impressed!  The dome, just by the way, is said to be based on that of the Pantheon.  
Even the art work had more than a touch of style - take a look ... and the stripped back walls add to the period lustre  And here's the Sessions House from the Farringdon Road side, giving a sense of just how commanding a building this is.   Here's a mystery in a minor key. This is a path that leads from the hidden-away Spa Fields in Clerkenwell to Exmouth Market. The three silver painted bollards are all embossed 'C.V.'- but what on earth was 'CV'? It took me a while. But I think I have cracked it. And it is sort of bleedin' obvious.
And the clue is in the rather imposing late Victorian municipal building nearby.  This is the rear view of Finsbury Town Hall, which stands on a peculiarly shaped triangular parcel of land. But it wasn't built by the Borough of Finsbury. This was constructed in 1894-5 as the Clerkenwell Vestry Hall on ground cleared during the construction of Rosebery Avenue. The vestry was the form of local government in place until 1900 - when Clerkenwell was joined with neighbouring St Luke's in the new Borough of Finsbury (which was in turn subsumed into the London Borough of Islington in the 1960s). The Clerkenwell Vestry was notorious for guzzling (dining well at ratepayers' expense) and for the house agents who contested elections largely to obstruct the enforcement of sanitary and building regulations. There was an earlier vestry hall on the same site, which had been built in 1814 as the Spa Fields watch house. This later and clearly ambitious building - its interior is much more grand - was constructed in the closing years of the vestry and was, by their parsimonious standards, an opulent spend.  Strangely, although the back end of the town hall is architecturally impressive it doesn't have an entrance to match. The main entrance is on the Rosebery Avenue side.  So 'C.V.'? It has to stand for Clerkenwell Vestry, doesn't it?   I went in search yesterday of William John Pinks. It's strange to set off in pursuit of someone who died 160 years ago. But, after a fashion, I found him. So, who was he? Well, he was among the best - and most productive - of the battalion of antiquarians and local historians of Victorian London. Some years ago, in a review of the Survey of London volumes about Clerkenwell, I paid a tribute to this rather tragic figure: William John Pinks had been buried for five years in Highgate cemetery when his huge and ambitious History of Clerkenwell first appeared in book form. It is among the most impressive London parish histories of the Victorian era. The antiquarianism is tempered by contemporary anecdote and a keen social eye, and its 800 pages are enlivened by scores of engravings – among them one depicting the author’s grave. Pinks was himself a Clerkenwellian, apprenticed as a bookbinder, and later a full-time contributor to the ‘Clerkenwell News’, the first and most successful of London’s district papers. He died from TB at the age of thirty-one. When J.T. Pickburn, the proprietor of the ‘Clerkenwell News’, published Pinks’s local history in 1865, it was the high water mark of prosperous, industrious Clerkenwell. A second edition, in essence unchanged, appeared in 1880 – the format of the book, reflecting Clerkenwell’s fortunes, a little more cramped and pinched in appearance. The ‘Clerkenwell News’ had by then metamorphosed into the much grander ‘Daily Chronicle’ which, as the ‘News Chronicle’, remained a leading national daily until 1960.  So it was of course William John Pinks's grave that I was seeking yesterday, in the older west section of Highgate Cemetery. And with the help of a guide, Charles, I found it - though as it was some distance away from any of the paths, I couldn't venture there myself (health and safety etc). Charles did, for which many thanks - and while from the plan he had of the cemetery this is certainly Pink's grave and tombstone, he couldn't immediately make out any of the inscription. Pinks's magnum opus, The History of Clerkenwell, provides us with the text of the inscription -
It's worth including here the account of Pinks which appeared in the volume he wrote, which was first published towards the end of 1865 -     The history was a stupendous achievement - of both author and of the editor, Edward J. Wood. It is certainly antiquarian, but Pinks also knew well the streets he wrote about and every now-and-again he gives a sense of the Clerkenwell of his day as well as earlier days. There is an account, for example, of the arrival of the Metropolitan Railway and the building of Farringdon station - events he would have witnessed as a teenager. Pinks's History appeared in a second edition in 1880. And rather marvellously it was republished in a facsimile edition in 2001 - an edition which sold out. Not many local histories have such a long life. And if you don't know where Clerkenwell is, perhaps the folding map included in the History may help!   What a brilliant piece of political ephemera - from 150 years ago, and relating to my own back yard. Many thanks to the wonderfully named Bloomsbury booksellers, Jarndyce - yes, it's an allusion to Dickens's Bleak House - for providing me both with this prize item (at a price to match, naturally) and the high quality image above.
This is a programme for a Reform League procession to the Agricultural Hall in Islington's Upper Street, just a couple of miles from where I live. They were a nationwide, and very effective, campaign organisation which demanded an extension of the franchise and the introduction of the secret ballot. The Second Reform Act of 1867 didn't deliver the manhood suffrage they sought but it more than doubled the number of those eligible to vote (a property restriction remained, but male borough householders and lodgers who paid £10 or more in rent a year now qualified to vote). The Ballot Act followed in 1872. It was another half century, 1918 to be precise, before any women got the vote in Parliamentary elections The Reform League was largely middle class-led, but artisan radicals and the craft trade societies also rallied to its standard. In central London (and Holborn most notably) several of the League's branches were notoriously left-wing, extending to sympathy for Republicanism and for the Irish nationalist 'Fenian' movement. Some of London's radical working men's clubs, such as the Patriotic on Clerkenwell Green - it's now the Marx Memorial Library - were born out of Reform League branches. The legend 'God Save the Queen!', in capitals at the bottom of the programme, was clearly intended to emphasise the League's loyalty to the Crown, whatever some of its more wayward members might have spouted from their Sunday morning speaking platforms. You can see from this programme how important the trade societies were to the Reform League - and also the care the League took in ensuring that its processions were well arranged and effectively marshalled. They even had mounted marshals (in other words, on horseback) - among their number was my old friend Samuel Brighty. Many years (sorry, decades) ago I started a doctoral thesis about popular politics in Clerkenwell in just this period (the chapter on the Reform League was finished, which is more than can be said for the wider thesis - details on request). Brighty was one of several local radical notables (in his case a member of the Clerkenwell Vestry) who engaged my attention. He famously gave evidence to the Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes of 1884-5, but that's another story ... I did wonder whether the 'Mr Coffey' who is also listed as a marshal might be William Cuffay, the noted black Chartist activist, Not so - Cuffay, whose father was from St Kitt's, was deported to Tasmania and elected to stay there at the end of his sentence. He died there in 1870.  A wonderful drawing from 1933 of what is now the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green. It was built in the eighteenth century as a Welsh charity school, in the 1870s housed the Patriotic Club, one of London's leading radical clubs, and later was home to a socialist publishing house. Clerkenwell Green is one of my favourite London haunts - it has not just Marx House, but a wonderful sessions house, The Crown tavern (once a music hall), and overlooking it all the bleached tower of St James, Clerkenwell.  This drawing is on the cover of a pamphlet I've just bought - Tommy Jackson's lively account of the radical associations of Clerkenwell Green. As he says: 'To find a spot in London, or even in the British Islands, richer in historical associations than Clerkenwell Green and its vicinity would be hard indeed.' A few decades later, another leftist, Andrew Rothstein, pursued the same territory in A House on Clerkenwell Green. Tommy Jackson knew the area well - he was born in Clerkenwell, and imbibed the traditions of artisan radicalism which then flourished here. He makes that lineage clear in this pamphlet (see below right), and in his wonderfully engaging 1953 autobiography Solo Trumpet. My copy of that title includes a cutting from the 'Daily Worker' (below left) two years later reporting Jackson's death - one of the last of the left's great auto-didacts.
 In the post today, I received this rather wonderful book - published in 1885 by the noted, and distinctly quarrelsome, radical Martin Boon.
Yes, it's an odd volume - both volumes together would have been well beyond my pocket. Boon is a hugely interesting figure in the annals of radicalism. He was born in 1840 in Clerkenwell, greatly influenced by the Chartist Bronterre O'Brien, active alongside Karl Marx in the First International and a lively and quixotic campaigner above all for land and currency reform. There was also a distinct puritan streak to his views - he disapproved both of lasciviousness and of contraception. In 1874, Martin Boon - who had campaigned actively against emigration - emigrated. To South Africa. There he made himself hugely unpopular by tilting at just about every windmill he could find - Boers, Jews, and black South Africans all came under his withering gaze. He wrote prolifically about the place, and didn't find all that much positive to relate. This book concludes: 'I HAVE NOT WRITTEN TO PLEASE, BUT TO REFORM.' He certainly didn't please, getting himself involved in a succession of court cases and public rows. Boon played a part in the development of the goldfields in the Transvaal. He died there - apparently taking his own life by jumping into a mine shaft - on December 27th 1888. I realised with a start that today is the 125th anniversary of his death. For all his idiosyncracies and often intemperate views, he deserves remembrance. Martin James Boon, 1840-1888: land nationaliser, currency reformer, radical propagandist and pamphleteer, settler in and chronicler of South Africa.  Well, this guy doesn't seem to have enjoyed my talk! Last night I spoke about London Fictions in the truly remarkable surroundings of the Norman crypt (from the 1140s) of St John, the old Priory church in St John's Square, Clerkenwell. Listening in the wings was Prior Weston - that's him above - who died in April 1540 on the very day that Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of his religious order. Spitalfields Life, as ever, has been here before me - here's 'A Dead Man in Clerkenwell.' Still closer to hand was the tomb and effigy of Don Juan Ruyz de Vergara, a sixteenth century procurator of the Knights of St John in Castile. The effigy is not simply of Don Juan but, grotesquely, of his page boy as well - I'm not clear whether he too is buried in the crypt.
It did seem a touch sacrilegious to be talking about matters so secular and profane - George Gissing, Sam Selvon, Zadie Smith, Colin MacInnes, could you ever hope for a more profane bunch - from what was very close to the altar. But the close to capacity current day audience didn't seem to mind (and indeed I sold out of copies of the book) so I hope the ghosts of St John past were equally entertained. Last night was part of the excellent Footprints of London Literary Festival - more details here.  |
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