Rebel Footprints

A Guide to Uncovering London's Radical History

David Rosenberg

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786804150
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

The radical response to conservative heritage tours and banal day-tripper guides, Rebel Footprints brings to life the history of social movements in the capital. Transporting readers from well-known landmarks to history-making hidden corners, David Rosenberg tells the story of protest and struggle in London from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. From the suffragettes to the socialists, from the Chartists to the trade unionists, the book invites us to step into the footprints of a diverse cast of dedicated fighters for social justice. Self-directed walks pair with narratives that seamlessly blend history, politics and geography, and beautifully illustrated maps immerse the reader in the story of the city. Whether you are visiting it for the first time, or born and raised in it, Rosenberg invites you to see London as you never have before: the nation's capital as its radical centre.

1

WRITERS AND RIOTERS IN THE FLEET STREET PRECINCT

The year is 1381. Armed and angry mobs from Kent and Essex converge at Blackheath, south of the Thames, before they cross London Bridge and engage in several days of targeted riots that became known as the ‘Peasants’ Revolt’. The Savoy Palace, on the site of today’s luxurious Savoy Hotel on London’s Strand, is one of the rebels’ chief targets. Built by Simon de Montfort in 1245, this palace passed through the hands of various ‘nobles’, into those of John of Gaunt, not only the richest man in England, but effectively the most powerful: he determines the policies made in name by his teenage nephew, King Richard II. Gaunt introduces a flat-rate Poll Tax hated by the poor, upon whom it falls most heavily, intended to pay for military adventures to which ordinary people have not consented. The peasants fight back collectively. Margaret Thatcher failed to recall this stark history lesson in 1990 when she introduced a similarly unpopular Poll Tax. As the mob reaches London, John of Gaunt wisely stays in Scotland. He is threatened with beheading by the rebels if he returns to his London home.

An angry riot by the poor in 1377 over a poll tax introduced that year was suppressed, but the 1381 revolt is far greater in scale. The rebels burn the Savoy Palace to the ground, destroying rather than looting its treasures. Their leader, Wat Tyler, expounds the principles and purpose of the protest: an attack on wealth and unaccountable power. He threatens a death sentence for any participant taking this opportunity to profit personally.

On their journey to London Tyler’s rebels rampage through prisons, freeing the prisoners before burning these oppressive institutions to the ground. At Maidstone Prison they free the radical preacher John Ball, who had declared that: ‘Things will never go well in England – nor shall they ever – until all things be held in common, and the lords are no greater masters than ourselves.’

A few hundred yards east of the Savoy Hotel stands a street with meandering side alleys, many of whose occupants inherited Tyler’s spirit of revolt. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the antagonisms between its richer and poorer inhabitants frequently spilled on to Fleet Street, but by the nineteenth century that spirit was expressed more by the pen than the sword. It was home to radical writers and pamphleteers, whose works were bought and sold, passed around, read aloud, and clandestinely distributed in times of repression.¹ Sharing John Ball’s vision of a fairer, more equal society, their authors wrote incendiary words to challenge those who exercised power only for the benefit of elites; they exposed injustices, provided information, gave confidence to campaigners, and incited rebellion among the disenfranchised and neglected. Like John Ball, they were willing to be imprisoned for making a stand.

That tradition of radical pamphleteering was already well established by the 1830s, which is when this book’s main chunk of history begins. This chapter tells the story of these earlier writers and publishers of the Fleet Street precinct, who laid the ground for the grassroots movements that followed in their wake, and are described in subsequent chapters.

An economic migrant from Alsace, Wynkyn de Worde, established a printing press near the eastern end of Fleet Street in the early 1500s. The street became the country’s pre-eminent home for printing and publishing. London’s first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, was published here from 1702. By the early 1800s, its central area, and the courts and alleys running from it, contained printing presses and bookshops circulating a range of radical publications. These included Pig’s Meat, published by Thomas Spence, a radical teacher from Newcastle, who moved to London in 1792; the satirical Black Dwarf, published by Yorkshire-born Thomas Jonathan Wooler; and The Republican, by Devon-born Richard Carlile. These same courts and alleys housed the offices of organisations seeking to bring about fundamental social change.

For many decades, though, this same street also provided a home for national newspapers that were firm upholders of the capitalist status quo and bastions of right-wing reaction. In the early 1930s, when the Daily Mail published articles enthusiastically welcoming Hitler’s takeover of Germany and extolling Oswald Mosley’s ideas for ‘a Greater Britain’, with headlines such as ‘Youth Triumphant’² and ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ respectively, its offices and printing works were in Northcliffe House, just south of Fleet Street. For many years the Daily Mail lived across the road from the Victoria House Printing Company, which published the Daily Herald, a newspaper that began its life as a strike bulletin for printing workers campaigning for a 48-hour week in January 1911. The Herald launched itself formally as an unofficial and rebellious Labour daily with capital of £300, and was later owned by the Trade Union Congress. When the Daily Mail left the Fleet Street precinct for west London, its owner, Lord Rothermere, took the boardroom with him and relocated it in its new premises.

Just beyond Fleet Street’s far end, on the eastern bank of the River Fleet,³ a prison was built in 1187. It was deliberately burnt down during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, unintentionally destroyed on the third day of the Fire of London in September 1666, and then burnt down again during the Gordon Riots of 1781. These riots initially comprised a popular protest against the relaxation of anti-Catholic discrimination, but morphed into a more general attack by the poorer classes on targets they identified with their wretchedness and oppression, such as the prisons filled by hopeless debtors. Two inmates of Fleet Prison in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – John Lilburne and Samuel Byrom – wrote some of the earliest radical tracts relating to this precinct. Their work inspired many radical pamphleteers later associated with Fleet Street.

John Lilburne was known to his followers as ‘Freeborn John’ for promoting the concept that people possessed ‘inalienable rights’ from birth, irrespective of any ‘rights’ grudgingly granted by the state. During the English Civil War, Freeborn John prominently supported the egalitarian and anti-establishment movement whose members were disparaged by their opponents as ‘Levellers’.⁴

On 18 April 1638, Lilburne was flogged on his bare back as he was dragged from Fleet Prison along Fleet Street, his hands tied to the rear of an ox cart, to a pillory at Westminster. After facing the fury of a mob there, he was returned to his cell. He began writing an account of his punishment in Fleet Prison that same year, which he called The Work of the Beast. He had been jailed for falling foul of repressive censorship laws by publishing pamphlets making incendiary attacks on the power and authority of the bishops. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Queen Elizabeth had delegated to the Court of High Commission ‘the licensing and monitoring of pamphlets, plays and ballets to ensure that “nothing therein should be either heretical, seditious or unseemly for Christian ears”’.⁵ There were public burnings of pamphlets seen as subversive.

Modern-day human rights campaigners are challenging the increasing privatisation of prisons as state-run institutions for punishment and rehabilitation. Companies enjoy lucrative contracts for running prison services privately, and many corporations employ cheap prison labour. There are historical precedents. For example, in 1725, Samuel Byrom, son of the poet John Byrom, was incarcerated for debts he hadn’t repaid. In a 1729 petition to his old schoolfriend, the Duke of Dorset (Lionel Cranfield Sackville), Byrom wrote a blistering critique of Fleet Prison’s profit-making activities, enacted under the notorious wardenship of Thomas Bambridge, who came into the post the previous year. Byrom described how prisoners had to pay for food and lodging, with additional fees for turning keys or for taking irons off. Fleet Prison had the highest prison fees in England. Byrom wrote:

What barbarity can be greater than for gaolers (without any provocation) to load prisoners with irons, and thrust them into dungeons, and manacle them, and deny their friends to visit them, and force them to pay excessive fines for their chamber-rent, their victuals and drinks; to open their letters and seize the charity that is sent to them . . . by all the ways that the worst of tyrants can invent? Such cruelty reduces the prisoners to despair . . . many choose to shoot, hang or throw themselves out of the window, than to be insulted, beaten and imposed upon by the gaolers.⁶

In the book’s preface he displayed his own penchant for poetry:

Whoever reads this Book, in it will find,
Reasons to move the Sov’reignty to be kind,
And free the Prisoners from a troubled Mind
That Gaolers may no more our Bodies grind.⁷

Fleet Street in the early 1700s had a striking visual appearance, described in George Walter Thornbury’s Old and New London. It was, he writes:

. . . rendered picturesque, not only by its many gable-ended houses adorned with quaint carvings and plaster stamped in patterns, but also by the countless signs, gay with gilding and painted with strange devices, which hung above the shop-fronts . . . Lions blue and red, falcons, and dragons of all colours, alternated with heads of John the Baptist, flying pigs, and hogs in armour. On a windy day these huge masses of painted timber creaked and waved overhead, to the terror of nervous pedestrians.⁸

Thornbury recounts that on 2 December 1718 a signboard opposite Bride Lane, Fleet Street, ‘suddenly gave way, fell, and brought the house down with it, killing four persons, one of whom was the Queen’s jeweller’. It was not until 40 years later that King George II ordered the signboards in Fleet Street to be placed flat against the walls of the houses.

Thornbury describes a street full of taverns and coffee houses. These were populated by journalists and pamphleteers, exchanging stories and gossip which would often end up as news copy. The corporate newspaper giants have relocated to new fortresses in Wapping after the bruising battles between Margaret Thatcher’s government and the print unions in the 1980s, but several of Fleet Street’s taverns remain. Others, though, have changed their usage. The Devil Tavern, at 2 Fleet Street, was acquired by Child’s Bank which had established itself next door in the 1660s. The tavern once housed the Apollo Club, presided over by the playwright, poet and literary critic Ben Jonson, or as Thornbury described him, ‘that grim but jovial despot’.

With so many taverns in one street, publicans vied to attract customers by offering bizarre attractions. According to Thornbury, ‘between the “Queen’s Head” and “Crooked Billet” . . . two strange, wonderful, and remarkable monstrous creatures – an old she-dromedary, seven feet high and ten feet long, lately arrived from Mongolia, and her young one’ were exhibited. He continued: ‘At the “Rummer” in Three Kings’ Court, was to be seen an Essex woman . . . not nineteen years old, though seven feet high . . . at the “Globe” was shown Matthew Buckinger, a German dwarf, born in 1674 . . . twenty-nine inches high.’⁹

In between the taverns, more mundane business was conducted. At 161 Fleet Street, Thomas Hardy, who had moved to London from Larbert in Scotland at the age of 22 with just 18 pence in his pocket, made and sold boots and shoes. Hardy’s father, a merchant seaman, died when Thomas was eight years old. He learnt shoemaking from his maternal grandfather, but had very little education beyond his training in this work-skill. Outside of working hours, though, he traded in radical ideas, heavily influenced by the French Revolution, the writings on civil liberty by the moral philosopher and dissenting minister Richard Price, and ideas spread by middle-class and working-class dissenters he found locally.¹⁰ Hardy helped to form a short-lived but very important grassroots movement to advocate for these ideas collectively.

The number of Londoners of different classes voicing radical ideas in the wake of the French Revolution w...