Jung of Clerkenwell, then and now

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:
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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.