Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy

Sophie Scott-Brown

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000622867
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Biografías políticas

Colin Ward and the Art of Everyday Anarchy is the first full account of Ward's life and work. Drawing on unseen archival sources, as well as oral interviews, it excavates the worlds and words of his anarchist thought, illuminating his methods and charting the legacies of his enduring influence.

Colin Ward (1924–2010) was the most prominent British writer on anarchism in the 20th century. As a radical journalist, later author, he applied his distinctive anarchist principles to all aspects of community life including the built environment, education, and public policy. His thought was subtle, universal in aspiration, international in implication, but, at the same time, deeply rooted in the local and the everyday. Underlying the breadth of his interests was one simple principle: freedom was always a social activity.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and general readers with an interest in anarchism, social movements, and the history of radical ideas in contemporary Britain.

1 The Forward View

DOI: 10.4324/9781003100409-2

Whenever he was asked how he became an anarchist Ward’s usual response was to dash lightly over his first 18 years and arrive at the point of ‘conversion’, in Glasgow, autumn 1943. But epiphanies only feel unexpected; the groundwork that makes them possible has usually been long in the preparation. How was it possible for him to have been ‘won for anarchism’?¹ What values, ideas, and inclinations made him receptive in the first place and what sort of anarchist had been won?

In The Angry Decade (1958), Kenneth Allsop, four years older than Ward, reflected on his generation. They had lived through the General Strike, the Depression, the war and its ‘epilogue of dreary years’, the atomic bomb – in short, they had known ‘a lifetime incessantly crisscrossed by catastrophe’.² Perhaps so, but on the other hand, these were also decades of increasing social mobility, of more scholarships for poor children, full employment during the war, emergent industries, and job opportunities, of new consumer goods: cars, washing machines, television. Importantly, this lurching between extremes – hope and tragedy, progress and loss – was not remote; it touched everyone. It was what underpinned Ward’s attraction to anarchism and, ultimately, directed his revision of it.

Wanstead, Childhood, and Youth

It is hard to develop the story of Ward’s early life as little survives in his personal papers from this time, and he rarely spoke about his childhood unless prompted, not even to Harriet (his wife), or his children. Silence can hide trauma, but lack of remark can also mean simply that experiences felt unremarkable. In Ward’s case, unremarkable was important.

His parents, Arnold Ward and Ruby Ward, nee West, were both born into working-class families on the East India Dock Road, London. Ruby’s father was a carpenter and, as with many self-employed tradesmen, reliant on the mercurial fortunes of the building industry. Life could be precarious with the need to seek out work constant, but the family were never desperate. The youngest of three sisters, Ruby was the favourite, and where her sisters were sent to work as soon as possible, she was encouraged to take secretarial training after she finished school. Clerical work offered a respectable means of self and social improvement. With a smart appearance, good diction, and a reasonable standard of written English, she could undertake ‘unskilled’ office work (skilled office work, such as that required for the civil service, required higher levels of education along with additional languages). Those, like Ruby, with an aptitude for the work could pick up shorthand qualifications, taken at evening classes, increasing their chances for higher-paid positions (she later became a shorthand teacher).³

Arnold’s father, originally from Ireland, was a ‘general dealer’. Like Ruby, Arnold was the youngest, and favourite, child. On completing the elementary levels at school, he trained to become a pupil-teacher. At 18 he passed the King’s scholarship examination to study at one of the new Local Authority–run teacher training colleges introduced following the 1902 Education Act, a qualification that permitted entry into senior positions, with higher salaries, in the profession. An instinctive, rather than official, pacifist, he bluffed his way to a job in a sausage factory during the First World War (protected, as food production, from conscription), later resuming his studies. In the early 20s, he attended evening classes at the London School of Economics (LSE), eventually gaining a BSc in Economics.⁴ Eventually, he rose to a headship at Custom House primary school,⁵ Canning Town, but, prior to that, and for most of Ward’s childhood, he taught in a series of schools around Barking and Dagenham.⁶

Since the mid-19th century, this borough had been subject to rapid growth and heavy industrialisation. Consequently, it had a high working-class population. Increasing employment opportunities, combined with proximity to central London and the comparative affordability of land, appealed to social reformers eager to address overcrowding in inner-city slums. Between 1882 and 1892, 7,000 housing development plans across the borough were approved. Following the First World War, London County Council (LCC) embarked on the Becontree estate, the largest ever government housing project, 24,000 houses on 3,000 acres of land encompassing Dagenham, Barking, and Ilford, formerly market gardens with clusters of cottages which were bought up through compulsory acquisition orders. Prospective tenants were interviewed to assure their financial and moral suitability, further reinforced by The Tenants Handbook which set out strict stipulations on standards of cleanliness and conduct.⁷

Arnold taught the children of those families, but his own family lived in neighbouring Wanstead which was considered genteel (from 1924 to 1964 Wanstead’s MP was Winston Churchill). Arnold and Ruby bought 8 Collinwood Gardens, a three-bedroom semi-detached house with top and bottom bay windows, a front and back garden, on a quiet cul-de-sac of similar-looking houses. These ‘domestic-vernacular’ details marked it out as the handiwork of a ‘speculative builder’, one of the many who generated 50,000 more houses than the government managed during the interwar years, but always with the aspirations, and budgets, of a rising middle class (not an improving working class) in mind.⁸

Arnold and Ruby’s story could be seen as one of meritocratic social mobility: expanding educational opportunity plus individual endeavour. The couple made two moves, first joining a swelling stratum of salaried ‘semi-professions’,⁹ teaching and clerical, and then a further ‘ascent’ following Arnold’s degree and promotion to a headship at a state-owned primary school. From another perspective, enhanced material prosperity aside, this was also a process of proletarianisation, a shift away from the self-employment of their parents to the status of employees, albeit, in Arnold’s case a high-status one.

But if his parents accepted the status quo and aspired to advance within it, this had an egalitarian spirit. Both had benefited from educational opportunities themselves and believed the same should be extended to others. Arnold’s school, Custom House Primary, taught children from poor families, children of dockworkers, whose parents would keep them off school for lack of shoes.¹⁰ Over his years as a teacher, then headmaster, he saw first-hand the vicious cycle of poverty and the role schools could play in breaking it. As such, theirs was an active Labour-supporting household. For the Wards, and, initially, their two sons, the Party took the place of any formal religion in providing the main moral outlook for their lives.¹¹

During the interwar years, Labour transformed from a relatively marginal political force into the only credible alternative to the Conservatives as a party of governance. In 1924, the year Ward was born, the first Labour government took office. It was short-lived, lasting only 9 months, ousted because of accusations of Bolshevism which, as Matthew Worley points out, was ironic because during this period Parliamentary Labour strove to assert itself within the establishment, pursuing a moderate agenda. For ideological hardliners, like George Lansbury, the sight of Labour MPs donning formal dress, working men taking their place alongside the members of a cultural elite, was incongruous.¹²

The consolidation of respectable credentials, when combined with the Baldwin government’s calamitous handling of the General Strike, returned them to power in 1929. Again, success was fleeting, the internal split over cuts to unemployment benefit prompting another collapse in the summer of 1931. Nevertheless, important ground had been gained. Labour was also beginning to enjoy success at local levels. In 1934, the Labour Party gained control of the LCC, and, led by Herbert Morrison, retained it with an increased majority in 1937. While in office, they launched an offensive on the capital’s slums, increasing expenditure on housing, education, and health. As Naomi Woolf, a Labour councillor for Hammersmith from 1934, recalled: ‘the domestic political thing – that was the basis of the labour party […] housing and health I think dominated the Labour Party at that time’.¹³

The Party still faced serious obstacles on their road to becoming a parliamentary force. Their organisational and funding structure remained rooted in the staple industries of the 19th century, leaving them poorly equipped to engage with the emerging new industries, such as transport, artificial textiles, chemicals, and electricity,¹⁴ and, therefore, the new forms of work, and workers, these generated. The Party also encompassed a complex ideological blend, where the ends and interests of working people, trade unionists and socialist intellectuals often contradicted, causing division over the proper direction it needed to pursue.

In some ways, however, ideological clarity was less of a priority at this point than gaining and retaining power. There was a widespread sense that practical electoral work, rather than intellectual debate, was the business of the day. What Labour lacked in cars and money, it made up for in volunteers and energetic canvassing. With this came a shift in political culture from the ‘tub thumping’ of the old politics to the more artful means of persistent persuasion at grass-roots levels, a more ‘scientific’ approach, privileging structure and organisation over reliance on charismatic personalities and gifted orators.¹⁵ Arnold and Ruby were two such volunteers, using the family car to ferry prospective voters to the polls on election days. Arnold was probably active beyond this given that the headship of his school was in the gift of the Labour borough council.¹⁶ As such, it might be reasonably supposed that left-leaning newspapers, Party literature, perhaps even discussions on political strategy were commonplace in the household.

But the internal struggles of the Labour Party were just one aspect of a complicated political landscape, not least the rise and spread of fascism across Western Europe. In Britain, Oswald Mosley, a former Labour MP, founded the British Union of Fascists, which, although never more than a minority movement, gave an uncomfortably close taste of menace. Amongst the wider movement, Spain seized the popular imagination as symbolic of the struggle between left and right, but while sympathetic groups and individuals swung into action with collections and campaigns, both the Government’s and the Labour leadership’s responses were considered evasive and inadequate.

Marginalised political forces, including the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), but also other independents including anarchists like art critic Herbert Read, now came to the fore, attracting support for their more decisive stances. This was the background against which Ward, then 13, was taken by his parents, to the 1938 May Day rally in Hyde Park where he saw Emma Goldman speak about the anarchist cause in Spain. From the perspective of his parents, this was less a sign of radicalisation than of their sustained commitment to a notion of democracy. From his perspective, this was important exposure, not necessarily, at this stage, to the nuances of different ideologies, but to a general set of values worth fighting for, not least individual freedom. Less directly, it also planted the idea that politics was not confined to parliamentary activity (and often more sincere outside of that framework) and that ordinary people could have a stake and play their part.

Political activism did not dominate family life. There were other, more pleasurable activities such as concerts at Queen’s Hall in Langham Place where the BBC orchestra played popular classics, regular visits to grandparents still living in East London, seaside holidays in Southend and Clacton. Later, he and elder brother Harvey took long summer cycle rides in the Essex countryside where he encountered, first-hand, the plotlanders he would later champion. Cycling by these examples of ‘domestic bricolage’, the makeshift homes and productive gardens, far removed from the uniformity and constraints of suburban life, the association with freedom was intuitive.¹⁷ Especially when the alternative was a dull classroom.

He found school a dismal affair. Aged 10, he passed a scholarship examination, the forerunner of the 11-plus, to attend Ilford County High School (ICHS)...