 This Nupkins is not so much awakened as thoroughly delighted by his latest pamphlet purchase. I bought a nicely bound copy of William Morris's agitprop play, The Tables Turned: or, Nupkins Awakened - both Morris and his daughter were part of the cast when it was first performed ...  I saw the play on stage many years ago in Walthamstow - produced by the Riff Raff poet Jeff Cloves. So it's lovely to have a nice clean copy of the text. But even more thrilling, although I bought this online simply as a single title, The Tables Turned is bound in with seven other Morris socialist pamphlets from the late 1880s and 1890s. What about that for an unexpected bonus!
William Morris is such a marvellous writer - these pamphlets are in exceptionally fine condition - some are quite rare - and several bear the designs Walter Crane made for the Socialist League and the Hammersmith Socialist Society. Very nice!
5 Comments
 It's taken me a while to clock on to this - but just yards from where I live a wonderful pocket-size community garden has sprung up. It's a small plot of land facing Chetwynd Road which I am sure the owner hopes to build on at some stage. But for now, whoever has rights over the land has formally allowed a group of local volunteers to set up a garden growing organic fruit and veg and some flowers too. It's such a lovely spot - and well cared for. You can find out more on the community garden's Instagram page.  Richard was tending the garden as I passed by - he was very welcoming and explained how the garden was set up and what it seeks to achieve.  Richard said that neighbouring back gardens were once part of a sizable orchard, and some of the mature fruit trees nearby - incuding this bountiful pear tree (more fruit laden than the photo suggests) - are a remnant of that orchard. Wishing the community garden a fruitful future. And do look in if you are passing by!
 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'.  Now we are five. Curious Muswell Hill has just been published, the fifth in the 'Curious' series of titles. What's in it? Well, there's more details here and an extract is available on line too. Or you can sit back and enjoy my spiel at the launch event, filmed by friend and camera legend Brian Kelly.  This is 6 Edmund Street in central Bradford. It's now a private house in a quiet inner-city street. But it was for decades the location of the Bradford Left Club, and over those years hosted no doubt hundreds of meetings, socials, debates and discussions. I am working on a history of the British New Left. In London, the New Left had for several years its own club, the Partisan on Carlisle Street in Soho. This was a coffee bar, meeting venue, art gallery, library and admin hub combined. It opened in 1958 and survived for five years. I thought this was the only club linked to the New Left that had its own premises. But the West Yorkshire-based historian David Goodway mentioned that the peace activist Dorothy Greenald used to speak of a Bradford Left Club as a New Left venue. I also stumbled across a book review by one of the leading figures in the New Left, Dorothy Thompson, in which she stated, in a New Left context, that: 'The Bradford Left Club ... owned a small house at which meetings and social events were held regularly.' Thanks to John Baruch, there's more to be said about the club, which was not so much a New Left meeting place, but a venue which was available to a wide range of left groups and progressive campaigns. He started going to 6 Edmund Street as a teenager in about 1960 to attend meetings of CND and the Young Communist League.  John Baruch believes that 6 Edmund Street was a house that was bequeathed to the Bradford left by a member of the Independent Labour Party who probably died in the 1930s. It was, he says, certainly up and running as the Bradford Left Club in the late 1940s. The ILP had their own, locked room in the buildings. Local communists started meeting here when they lost the use of rooms elsewhere in the city centre at some time in the 1950s. As well as CND, the direct action peace movement the Committee of 100 at times used the buidling, as did a local anarchist group. John recalls that as you walked in through the door, the main meeting room was on the left, with a desk and about 20 to 30 chairs. There was another room on the right which led to a small kitchen where visitors could make tea or coffee (there was no bar, and while there may have been 'bring your own' for occasional socials in the cellar, there was a 'Methodist, temperance ethos'). On the first floor there were two rooms, one of which was the ILP's room, which John recalls was furnished much as a sitting room and with a library. He believes the trustees probably decided to sell the building in the late 1980s, by which time it was little used by the left, and it reverted to being a private house. The building is set back a little from Edmund Street. The local businesses opposite are South Asian-run - including a translation service with the name 'Bhasha', Hindi for language. A little further down is the seemingly thriving Polish Community Centre and at the end of the street there's the Polish Catholic church. If you have memories of the Bradford Left Club, please do contribute them as a comment to this post.   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.   What a spectacular building! And a real treat to be invited to give a talk here today as part of the Hackney History Festival.  This is the Round Chapel in Lower Clapton, a non-conformist church built in 1871 and able to seat a thousand worshippers. It's such an elegant, and well-maintained, space. The building is no longer used as a Congregational church but is looked after by the Hackney Historic Buildings Trust, which also is responsible for St Augustine's Tower nearby. I was there to talk about my work on the oral history of the New Left. It was such an attentive audience with sharp comments and questions. This was my first talk based on my research on the New Left. And yes, there will be a book - eventually,
And whatever you do, find a reason to get down to the Round Chapel for a concert or a performance, and enjoy this glorious 150 year old building.
 To the Torriano Meeting House this weekend, a small community arts venue on - you've guessed it! - Torriano Avenue in Kentish Town. It's been there for more than forty years: 'anarchist, bohemian, poetic' in the words of one of its admirers. As a belated marking of the anniversary, the meeting house is hosting a project 'It Happened here', devised and implemented principally by Gustavo Dias-Vallejo.  Gustavo's the guy in the orange shirt. The speaker is Emily Johns, another key figure in the project. Also featured is Emily's mother, Susan Johns, the mainstay of the Torriano Meeting House ever since it was established in the early 1980s. Here's how Gustavo describes the initiative: 'It Happened Here is a participatory performance project where residents of Kentish Town are invited to recall meaningful events in their lives that happened in specific places in the area. Participants walk together, share their stories, and have their photograph taken: in the image, each person holds a sheet of paper with a sentence that summarizes the story they share with that place.' Torriano is hosting a display of photographs of eleven people who feature in the project and a matching account that combines place and memory. There's an accompanying booklet. Here's one of the picture-cum-photo items:  And Emily Johns has designed a map which locates all eleven stories in and around Kentish Town  There was a warm feel to the launch evening - nice to see the meeting house serving the local community so effectively.
And if you want to catch the exhibition, it's on for four weeks until 24 May.  |
Andrew Whitehead's blogWelcome - read - comment - throw stones - pick up threads - and tell me how to do this better! Archives
December 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed