Routledge Revivals: Metropolis London (1989)

Histories and Representations since 1800

David Feldman, Gareth Stedman Jones, David Feldman, Gareth Stedman Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315446660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1989, this book seeks to demonstrate the social and political images of late-twentieth century London — the post-big-bang city, docklands, trade union defeats, a mounting north-south divide — do not mark as decisive break with the past as they may appear to. It argues that the most striking thing about London's history since 1800 is the continuities and recurrences which punctuate it. The essays collected in this book focus on these themes and address important questions about class, nationality, sexual difference, and radical politics. They combine the established strengths of social history with more innovative approaches such as the history of representations.

Politics:
visions and practices

5

Radical clubs and London politics, 1870–1900

John Davis

Late-Victorian London contained a large and discrete working class but lacked a firmly founded labour movement. Though the metropolis was the setting for much of the emergent social politics of the 1880s, London’s contribution to early labour politics was limited, and the London Labour Party was not formed until 1914. The claim of Liberal Progressivism to the metropolitan working-class vote was not effectively challenged until after the First World War.

The problem posed by this paradox is, if anything, emphasized by the approach adopted in the classic political study of London labour’s emergence. Paul Thompson is actually more anxious to show ‘why the Liberal Party failed to hold the allegiance of the working-class voter’¹ in the long run than why it took so long to lose it; but the almost messianic role given to the manifestly weak Independent Labour Party and Social Democratic Federation raises obliquely the question of their inadequacy. Ten years after Thompson, Gareth Stedman Jones portrayed the political attitude of the London working class as the product of a developing class culture.² Commercialization of the central area from the 1870s entailed the destruction of traditional artisan centres. The highly political work-centred culture of mid-century artisans consequently gave way to a culture based upon the ‘depoliticized haven’ of the working-class home. Social outlets like the pub and the music-hall – apolitical if not Tory in tone – became central to a substitute ‘culture of consolation’.³

The argument is extended to explain the general conformism of the British working class before 1914. I do not wish to question the assertion that British labour recognized ‘the existing social order as the inevitable framework of action’.⁴ I am more concerned with the model presented of London’s particular depoliticization, and the reasons why ‘after 1870 London pioneered music-hall, while coal, cotton and ship-building areas in the north generated the most solid advances in trade unionism’.⁵ I believe that while the emphasis upon class culture has given London labour history a vital dimension absent in Thompson’s more traditional approach, it carries an inherent risk of exaggerating any apparent political decline. I will argue that the political weakness of the London working class derived more from institutional than from cultural forces.

London’s Radical working men’s clubs invite study because they encapsulate the changing nature of London labour politics.⁶ On the face of it they embody precisely Stedman Jones’s model of the displacement of politics by leisure. Until the mid-1880s they provided ‘a lively focus for working class political enthusiasm’.⁷ Thereafter they became increasingly devoted to the provision of professional entertainment, to the distress of their political founders and the contempt of the ascetics in the SDF.⁸ Until the mid-1880s the social appeal of club life had appeared to answer the problem of working-class political mobilization, compensating in part for the organizational superiority of the established middle-class parties. By 1900, however, club politicians concluded that the clubs’ social attractions had sapped their members’ political commitment. The transformation raises the question of the relationship between the social and political interests of the London working class.

In 1875 there were 77 clubs in the metropolitan area affiliated to the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union, with perhaps 16,000 members.⁹ By 1900 153 metropolitan clubs were affiliated, with an estimated 45,000 members.¹⁰ This rapid growth brought changes in the nature of the clubs themselves. The early clubs had often developed from a nucleus of artisans from a single trade or even a single workshop. Some, like the Alliance Cabinetmakers’ Club or the Cigarmakers’ Club, were directly linked to craft unions; others, like the shoemaker-dominated United Radical Club in Hackney, were largely composed of men in the same trade. Club expansion, however, giving the largest clubs four-figure membership totals by the end of the century,¹¹ worked to erode both the links between clubs and particular industries and workshops and the artisan predominance in the movement as a whole. Though the clubman of 1900 had still to have a sufficient disposable income to take advantage of the entertainment and refreshments available, and though he was still very likely to be a trade unionist, his club would probably have evolved into much more than a social outlet for a localized craft.

The early club had provided a craft forum, offering ‘a conversazione on labour, work and wages, and where to find it’¹² in a city where industry was characteristically scattered and small scale. George Howell depicted the club as a platform for ‘certain craftsmen who prided themselves upon their skill at their particular crafts’:

Thither these ‘dons’, as they were termed in some trades, would congregate to discuss politics and parade their ability as workmen; and thither, also, would go the youthful aspirant, anxious to pick up scraps of information as to ‘tricks in trade’.¹³

Howell took for granted the conjunction of trade and political discussion in this ad hoc education. F. W. Galton, apprenticed as an engraver in Holborn in 1880, recalled that his ‘early interest in politics was assured by the continual discussion going on in the workshops for no word on such subjects was ever heard at home’.¹⁴ The political atmosphere of the small workshop and the political awareness of the London artisan need no fresh emphasis, and the political commitment of the clubs produced by this culture is unsurprising. Many of the clubs prominent at the peak of club Radicalism in the 1880s could claim political ancestry. The Eleusis in the King’s Road and the Borough of Hackney Club evolved from branches of the Reform League, the Patriotic Club on Clerkenwell Green from a group of Finsbury republicans.¹⁵ The Tower Hamlets Radical Club was formed by ‘about a score of old and resolute Radicals … driven from tavern to tavern by police espionage and presumptive officialism’.¹⁶ The United Radical Club in Kay Street, Hackney, was the product of a politically inspired secession from Lady Clifden’s institute in Goldsmith’s Row,¹⁷ and the desire for unfettered political discussion frequently inspired opposition to middle-class philanthropic control of clubs. Around half the London clubs affiliated to the Club Union advertised their political commitment in their titles; many others claimed a political role.

The metropolitan club politician of the 1870s and 1880s subscribed to the values of post-Chartist artisan Radicalism. The Chartist legacy included a self-conscious labourism and the conviction that working-class progress depended upon constitutional reform, as ‘those who were not voters were practically the slaves of those who were’.¹⁸ It included also a belief in the mass protest as a political weapon, drawing upon memories of Kennington Common in 1848 and Hyde Park in 1866. Much of the directness of Chartism and the Reform League had been lost, energy being dissipated in the conventional Radical pursuit of sinister interests – the royal family, the House of Lords, the established church, ground landlords, the City Corporation – but there survived a sense of class identity and a faith in direct action. Associational politics in the clubs reinforced both, and was taken by club politicians to give their organizations a basis of legitimacy lacking in the official Liberal caucuses.

The Birmingham-model caucus adopted in all the London boroughs from the late 1870s was stigmatized by club Radicals as ‘a mutual admiration society’, ‘an anti-democratic institution – a mere conscienceless party machine’, seeking ‘the substitution of local discipline for popular force’.¹⁹ In London’s enormous pre-1885 parliamentary boroughs the caucus had provided a means of resolving – or suppressing – tension between suburban Whig and inner-city Radical through the discipline of the machine. The charge that ‘caucuses never, or very rarely, publish a programme or statement of objects and … have never been known to remonstrate with the party leaders for the most flagrant violations of Liberal principles’,²⁰ had some substance as the demands of party unity placed loyalty before ideology. The franchise extension of 1867 and the liberal registration of tenement occupiers in London from the early 1880s was also creating a working-class Radical constituency inadequately represented by the borough associations. This ‘vast body of latent Radicalism that only wanted the opportunity to assert itself’²¹ found its outlets not in the borough Liberal associations so much as in the various single-issue pressure groups which proliferated in that decade, in the political action of some craft unions or the London Trades Council, and in the activities of the Radical clubs.

Systematic political activity by Radical clubs began in Chelsea in the mid-1870s. There the Eleusis had promoted working-class electoral registration and, with the three other components of the borough’s Combined Political Committee of Radical Clubs, had involved itself in the selection of parliamentary candidates.²² The Combined Political Committee pre-dated the Chelsea caucus and was later said to dominate it.²³ It encouraged imitative club federations in Westminster, Finsbury, Hackney, Marylebone, and Tower Hamlets.²⁴ By 1884 the Hackney Radical Federation, with 3,600 members and ‘militant to a degree’, could be seen as the dominant political force in the borough.²⁵ In the following year the Marylebone Radical Club pronounced its ostentatious hostility to official Liberalism and called for ‘the establishment of the independent Radical Party’.²⁶

As the divisions within London Liberalism grew in the mid-1880s, club dissidence contributed to the party’s discomfiture. In the mêlée of the 1885 general election no fewer than fourteen of the fifty-eight new London seats were threatened with Liberal splits.²⁷ Some were caused by the intransigence of sitting MPs, who had never acknowledged the prerogative of the caucus, let alone that claimed by the clubs, but others were prompted by Radicals ‘in open revolt against the Whig candidates brought forward by the local wirepullers’.²⁸ Many seats saw open club opposition to caucus candidates – Lorne in Hampstead, Hozier in Woolwich, Knight in West Marylebone, Holms in Central Hackney.²⁹ In Bethnal Green NE George Howell’s successful labour candidature was promoted by the United Radical Club and the Hackney Radical Federation.³⁰ In Haggerston another successful labour candidate, W. R. Cremer, was foisted upon the Liberal Association with the support of local clubs and unions, displacing the Manchester businessman and temperance advocate who could have expected the Liberal nomination in quieter times.³¹

Club Radicalism displayed a growing confidence in the mid-1880s. Seventy-eight new London clubs were founded in the five years 1884–8,³² an expansion which appeared to emphasize the weak popular foundations of official Liberalism. Sidney Webb, writing in 1890, believed these ‘spontaneous democratic organizations of the metropolitan artisans’ to be ‘the most important part of the fighting strength of London Liberalism’, controlling at least a fifth of the Liberal vote.³³ The period saw a steady increase in the number of political demonstrations, a form of populist protest much favoured by the clubs. These rallies lent apparent plausibility to the clubs’ repeated claim that their associational politics gave them a strength which could not be attained by the party machines. The Liberal managers, conscious that the clubs represented a vein of enthusiasm not well tapped by the party, and sensitive to any indication that franchise extension and the Corrupt Practices Act had made London politics more ‘popular’, responded with a cautious sponsorship of political demonstrations. Although the presence of Cabinet ministers at such rallies was discouraged, as this ‘would rob them of their spontaneous character’,³⁴ the massive demonstration against the Lords’ obstruction of the franchise Bill in 1884 was co-ordinated from the National Liberal Club,³⁵ and answered Gladstone’s call for protests of ‘dignity and weight… [as] at the time of the first Reform Bill’.³⁶ The next largest demonstration of the decade, the 1887 rally against Irish coercion, was organized by James Stuart and the London Liberal MPs.³⁷ With the party then out of office, the Weekly Dispatch argued that ‘the only substitute for a general election is public demonstrations on a vast and imposing scale’.³⁸

More tangible evidence of the party’s new interest in associationalism came with the reorganization of the London constituency parties in 1886–7.³⁹ In many areas new political clubs were founded in conjunction with the reformed associations, and with party support. ‘Ever since the upsetting of the old me...