endangered phoenix


A SHORT TOUR OF CLERKENWELL RADICALISM, PART TWO

From

workhouse to apprenticeship to Master of escape

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Jack Sheppard was the most famous inmate of Clerkenwell’s prisons – in his day he became the most famous name in England and he remained a folk-hero to the poor for over a century after his death. (In the 1840s plays based on his life were still regularly being performed for working class audiences; in the first publication of Dicken’s Oliver Twist in 1838/39, serialised in the Miscellany magazine, it shared the pages with a fictionalised account of Sheppard’s life; in the 1840s his name was said to be better known amongst many of the poor than that of Queen Victoria.)

Born in Spitalfields in 1702, his carpenter father died during Jack’s childhood. His mother was forced by circumstance to place him in Bishopsgate workhouse where he remained for one and a half years. He then began a carpenter’s apprenticeship. He also picked up some locksmithing skills along the way that would stand him in good stead in later years.

“…I did not like my master, he did not treat me well

So I took a resolution, not long with him to dwell

Unknown to my poor parents, from him I ran away

I made my course for London, cursed be that day…”

- The Sheffield Apprentice

“The apprenticeship system was still controlled by an Act passed under Queen Elizabeth, the Statute of Artificers. The system provided young people with a vocational education, in another household…. they were ‘bound apprentice’ between twelve and sixteen. Parish children might begin their apprenticeship as early as eleven, and continue in it until they were twenty-four. (Remember that the expectation of life at birth was then about 36 years.) The contract would continue for seven years or more, until the master was satisfied that the apprentice knew his trade. Apart from some public holidays, no home leave was given. The boy’s parents might not see him again until his time was up. Imagine the child of twelve leaving his home to live in strange surroundings with no parental love, withstanding the storms of adolescence and reaching physical maturity with only the recollection of his childhood and what support his master gave him to sustain him, and perhaps occasional letters from home if his parents could write.” (Restoration London, Liza Picard, 1997.)

With just ten months of his apprenticeship left to serve, Sheppard left his master and the narrow confines of the apprentice life. He joined the swelling ranks of the ‘idle apprentices’ – a group that invoked fear and suspicion in the 18^th century. The London trades were undergoing a series of transformations as a result of new technologies and the expanding economy. New machinery was deskilling some, factory methods of organisation were making the protective practices of the Craft guilds obsolete and these were changing the relationship between apprentices and their masters. Depending on their trade and circumstances some masters began to fulfil one or more roles simultaneously – they might be working craftsmen, workshop overseers, shopkeepers, or wholesale suppliers. Equally they might be expanding into factory ownership or begin farming out piecework to home workers – or they could be in the process of declining into deskilled casual labour. So the artisan class was fragmenting and reforming in both upwardly and downwardly mobile directions.

“The crisis of apprenticeship was part of a deeper, structural recomposition of the London proletariat. There existed a tension between, on the one hand, those journeymen, small masters and apprentices in trades that no longer enjoyed the protection of guild organization and thus were exposed to the ravaging shocks of divisions of labour and experimentations in industrial organization, and, on the other, all those whose social existence was defined by their refusal to accept the new conditions of exploitation. The circulation of experience between those two poles was characteristic of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Many apprentices, journeymen and small masters would have experienced substantial periods in which they were without wage work and would therefore have sought out other expedients, such as the sea, gaming, the tramp, ‘going on the Account’. Similarly, those who lived from day to day as paupers, sharpers, footpads or beggars will almost surely have had some direct acquaintance with the structures of production, such as apprenticeship to a trade or service to a rich family. The zone of circulation between these two poles is what new institutions of Queen Anne’s reign – the workhouse, the charity school, the Society for the Reformation of manners, the new punishments of the penal code – sought to demarcate and control.” (Linebaugh, op. cit.)

After deserting his apprenticeship Jack took with enthusiasm to a life of robbery; he was imprisoned five times and escaped four. It was these technically brilliant and daring escapades, as well as his taunting attitude to authority that secured his long reputation among the working class.

In the spring of 1723 he aided the escape of his girlfriend Edgeworth Bess from St Giles’s Roundhouse. In April he ended up there himself; betrayed by his brother Tom (who was hoping to bargain his own release from a burglary charge) and his friend James Sykes, he was lured into a trap and delivered to a Justice Parry.

It took him less than three hours to escape. “He was confined in the top floor. He cut through the ceiling, untiled the roof, and with the aid of a sheet and blanket lowered himself into the churchyard, climbed a wall, and joined a gathering throng which had been attracted to the scene by the falling roof tiles. That was in April 1724. From then until the end of November the saga of his escapes grew, astounding ever-increasing numbers of people for their daring and dexterity.” (Linebaugh, op. cit.)

Arrested again for pickpocketing a gentleman’s watch, Jack was now taken to Clerkenwell’s New Prison. As his common law wife, Edgworth Bess was allowed to join him from her confinement in the Roundhouse. They were locked in the most secure area, ‘Newgate Ward’, and Jack was weighed down with 28lb of shackles and chains. He soon set to work sawing through these and then through an iron bar. Boring through a nine-inch-thick oak bar, then fastening sheets, gowns and petticoats together, they descended 25ft to ground level; only to find they had landed themselves in the neighbouring prison of Clerkenwell Bridewell. Driving his gimblets and piercers into the 22ft wall, Jack and Bess used them as steps and hand-holds and made their way over the wall to freedom in the early morning of Whit Monday 1724.

While Sheppard’s later “escape from the condemned hold of Newgate made ‘a far greater Noise in the World’, the London gaolkeepers regarded the New Prison escape as the most ‘miraculous’ ever performed in England, so they preserved the broken chains and bars ‘to Testifie, and Preserve the memory of this extraordinary Event and Villian.’” (Linebaugh, op. cit.)

Jack spent the next three months of freedom engaging in highway robbery and burglary. He was recaptured after he robbed his old master, Mr Kneebone. Kneebone contacted Jonathan Wild, ‘the thief-taker General’. Wild was both a trainer of thieves and a deliverer of them to the courts, a fence of stolen goods and returner of them to rightful owners; “a complex and parasitic system” that “had in these years become a system of municipal policing.” (Linebaugh, op. cit.) Sheppard always refused to compromise himself by having any dealings with Wild, either for fencing goods or in attempt to gain more lenient sentences in court.

Edgeworth Bess was pressured to reveal Jack’s hideaway, and, after an exchange of pistol fire, he was captured and taken to Newgate prison. In August he was tried and sentenced to hang. On the day his death-warrant arrived he implemented his escape plan; dislodging a spike, he inserted himself into a small hole he had worked in a wall and with the help of visitors was pulled through to freedom. He walked through the City to Spitalfields where he spent the night with Edgworth Bess.

Sheppard’s latest escape threw the shopkeepers of Drury Lane and the Strand into a panic; Jack took up robbing again, this time from a watchmaker’s shop in Fleet St. But he and his accomplice were recognised so they left London for Finchley Common. They were pursued and soon apprehended – Jack was taken to Newgate once again.

By this time Sheppard was a celebrity and folk hero of the labouring classes; visited by the famous and interviewed by journalists and ballad makers. He offered some lucid comments; when urged by a prison official to concentrate on preparing himself for the afterlife rather than attempting to escape, he replied ‘One file’s worth all the Bibles in the world.’ He also condemned the corruption and hypocrisy of the criminal justice system.

As his trial approached Jack implemented his escape plan on the 14^th October. This amazing flight from Newgate was to make him an enduring legend amongst the working class for over a century afterwards. Freeing himself from his shackles he then worked his way up the chimney, through several locked rooms and eventually on to the roof and over the wall to freedom.

On 29^th October Sheppard robbed a pawnshop for some spending money and began a triumphant tour, a defiant spree through his old haunts and hunting grounds. He hired a coach and, with some female companions, toured his own native Spitalfields – he also drove through Newgate! Defiantly parading himself around the ale-houses and gin-shops, he was recaptured after fifteen days of glorious liberty.

Jack Sheppard was hanged on 16^th November 1724 at Tyburn; a cheering crowd, said to number 200,000, lined the route to salute him.

The Fenians

Throughout the 19^th century the question of national independence for Ireland was a major issue in British politics. There was considerable support for this cause amongst the British working class; but this was to be severely dented by the events of 1867 in Clerkenwell.

1867 was a major year for the Fenians (otherwise known as the Irish Republican Brotherhood) in Britain – there was an unsuccessful attempt to seize Chester Castle. As Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine put it: ‘ Who can doubt, had the attack on Chester Castle succeeded, but that in St Giles [the rookery - with a large Irish community], perhaps at Islington, not less than in Kerry disturbances would have broken out.’

During November there were two demonstrations on Clerkenwell Green to protest against the forthcoming executions of three Fenians in Manchester. On the 23rd the three were hanged at Strangeways Prison.

On the 20^th two men had been arrested in London; one, Richard O’Sullivan Burke, was a leading member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He was charged with treason-felony while his companion Casey was only charged with obstruction. They were remanded to the Middlesex House of Detention at Clerkenwell.

An escape plan was organised with outside supporters via smuggled notes written in invisible ink. A first attempt on 12^th December was aborted when the fuse failed to ignite and was postponed to the following day. Meanwhile British intelligence had learned of the plan; Burke and Casey were moved to a more secure area and plain-clothes police began to patrol the outer walls of the prison.

At noon on 13^th December plain-clothes police observed three men and a woman of ‘suspicious appearance’ surveying the area. At about 3.30pm three people were seen in the fading light wheeling a large beer cask covered with a tarpaulin into Corporation Lane and placing it at the foot of the prison wall. Obtaining a light from one of the kids playing in the street, they lit the fuse. The consequences of the explosion that followed were a great hole in the prison wall – 16 feet wide at the bottom and 60 feet at the top – and the virtual demolition of the tenements on the opposite side of the street. Three people died instantly, six later and forty were injured, some seriously.

The damage was spread across the surrounding streets. Some staves of the barrel were found and their size indicated it had been a 30 gallon cask. A Fenian who claimed later to have lit the fuse said it had held a massive 548lb of gunpowder – enough to kill any prisoners on the other side of the wall had they been waiting to be rescued.

Three people were arrested at the scene, one of whom turned out to be a police spy. Another four were later arrested but the cases against all but one collapsed. Michael Barrett alone was convicted and sentenced to death.

The explosion caused a temporary panic in London – the Police Commissioner hysterically claimed there were 10,000 armed Fenians at large in London! 50,000 special constables were sworn in to deal with this perceived threat. This event has been seen by some as the birth of the image of the coldly calculating terrorist figure in popular consciousness (though usage of the word ‘terrorist’ did not become common until the Fenian bombing campaign of the 1880s) and the panic caused by the accidental damage of the explosion possibly encouraged Fenians in their chosen tactics of later campaigns. Marx described the explosion as “a colossal stupidity” as it “infuriated” the London masses who had, like Marx, shown much sympathy with the Fenian struggle. He continued "The last exploit of the Fenians in Clerkenwell was a very stupid thing. The London masses, who have shown great sympathy for Ireland, will be made wild by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletariat to allow themselves to be blown up in honour of the Fenian emissaries. There is always a kind of fatality about such a secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy."

The hanging of Michael Barrett at Newgate Prison on 26th May 1868 before 2,000 people was the last public execution in England.

How Irishmen became Micks

For a time the term 'Mick Barretts' became an unpleasant way of referring to Irish Fenian nationalists - this was later shortened to 'Micks' and this is the origin of the term 'Mick' that has commonly been applied to Irishmen.

Fenian activities in Clerkenwell did not end; in 1882 a large arms cache was found in St John St. And from 1906 to 1910 a young Michael Collins – future commander-in-chief of the military forces of the Irish Free State (Eire) – worked in Mount Pleasant post office on the site of the old House of Correction. In 1909 he took the secret oath of allegiance to a local cell of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

* * *

The Killing of PC Culley and the Calthorpe Arms Inquest

In 1833 a meeting was called by the National Union of the Working Classes for Monday 13^th May to take place on Coldbath Fields, now the site of Mount Pleasant sorting office. While the NUWC committee sat in the Union Tavern [still a pub today], people began assembling outside in Coldbath fields, including a body from the NUWC with a banner reading ‘Death or Liberty’. Meanwhile large numbers of police were assembling in Grays Inn Rd from where they were deployed in stableyards around Coldbath Fields. At around 3pm the committee left the tavern to address the assembly, by now between one and two thousand strong. The chairman had barely started speaking when the cry of ‘Police’ went up from the crowd. The police, between 1700 and 3000 in number, had formed up across Calthorpe Street before advancing on the meeting, while others came up another side street. In the words of the Gentleman’s Magazine the police having ‘completely surrounded the actors and spectators of the scene…commenced a general and indiscriminate attack on the populace inflicting broken heads alike on those who stood and parleyed and those who endeavoured to retreat’. New Bell’s Weekly Messenger also writes of the police attacking those assembled: ‘The Police came on and used their staves pretty freely…many heads were broken.’

During the assault three policeman were stabbed; PC Culley ‘ran about thirty yards and upon reaching the Calthorpe Arms [still a pub today] he seized the barmaid by the wrist and exclaimed “Oh, I am very ill”’. These were his dying words. One man, George Fursey, was sent for trial on the charge of murdering PC Culley and wounding PC Brooks. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

There then followed a local inquest on the death of PC Culley; it was convened in an upstairs room of the Calthorpe Arms, close to the site of the demonstration. The inquest jury of seventeen men consisted largely of bakers from the Grays Inn neighbourhood. Summing up, the coroner called upon the jury to return a verdict of wilful murder. The jury retired and after half an hour sent a message to the coroner saying that sixteen of them were agreed on a verdict condemnatory of the police. The coroner protested and urged them to reconsider. A short while later their final verdict was delivered:

‘We find a verdict of justifiable homicide on these grounds; that no riot act was read, nor any proclamation advising the people to disperse, that the Government did not take the proper precautions to prevent the meeting from assembling; and we moreover express our anxious hope that the Government will in future take better precautions to prevent the recurrence of such disgraceful transactions in the metropolis.’

Reading between the lines, it appears that the jury’s view was that the demonstrators were deliberately penned in and ambushed by the police. Sir Robert Peel had only recently introduced his Act for policing the Metropolis in 1829 and the new police force were still generally disliked and distrusted, not yet generally seen to be a legitimate presence in society.

Again the coroner protested, but the jury remained firm and insisted on their verdict; he could dismiss them and appoint another jury but their verdict would stand. They said that they were neither in favour of the meeting nor against the police, just the way the police behaved. As the foreman put it: ‘Mr Coroner we are firmly of the opinion that if they had acted with moderation the deceased would not have been stabbed.’

“When the inquest ended small impromptu torchlit processions carried the jurors to their respective homes. The Milton Street Committee arranged a free trip up the Thames to Twickenham for them. In July it was a free trip to the London Bridge Theatre to see A Rowland for Oliver. Each member of the jury was presented with a pewter medallion which bore the inscription ‘In honour of men who nobly withstood the dictation of a coroner; and by the judicious, independent and conscientious discharge of their duty promoted a continued reliance upon the laws under the protection of a British jury’. Funds were raised for a memorial. On the first anniversary of the verdict a procession took place from the Calthorpe Arms to St Katherine’s Dock. It was led by a specially commissioned banner, the funds for which had been raised by a Mr Ritchie, the landlord of the Marquess of Wellesley in Cromer Street, Grays Inn Lane. After reaching St Katherine’s Dock the procession boarded the Royal Sovereign for a return trip to Rochester, complete with free food and drink. A pewter cup was presented to the foreman of the jury with the inscription ‘…as a perpetual memorial of their glorious verdict of justifiable homicide on the body of Robert Culley, a policeman, who was slain while brutally attacking the people when peacefully assembled in Calthorpe Street on 13^th May 1833’.” (Criminal Islington, op. cit.)

Chartism

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Chartism, the world’s first mass political working class movement, demanded universal suffrage for all; i.e. the extension of the vote to all workingmen (there was a small female element within Chartism). There were two wings of Chartism: physical force Chartism, which was ready to use insurrection if all else failed to achieve its goals; and the moral force wing, which put its trust in the fact of having right on its side and advocated the peaceful use of political activity as its preferred method.

The Industrial Revolution

Chartism emerged at a time when the labouring classes were still in the process of being formed into an industrial proletariat; the combination of artisan craftsmen and a mass of un- and semi-skilled labour were all being reshaped by forces such as de-skilling, an increased division of labour and factory production methods. From its emergence in the 1830s, Chartism inherited the problems of earlier artisan activists and organisations. As E.P. Thompson put it; “It was the dilemma of all Radical reformers to the time of Chartism and beyond. How were the unrepresented, their organizations face with persecution and repression, to effect their objects? As the Chartists termed it, ‘moral’ or ‘physical’ force?… Again and again, between 1792 and 1848, this dilemma was to recur. The Jacobin or Chartist, who implied the threat of overwhelming numbers but who held back from actual revolutionary preparation, was always exposed, at some critical moment, both to the loss of confidence of his own supporters and the ridicule of his opponents.” (The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson, 1963.) (It could be added that whenever the Chartists did prepare for insurrection they were so consistently inept and sloppy in their planning and security that the authorities were inevitably forewarned of their intentions.)

The two wings of Chartism reflected changes in the earlier and later periods of working class formation, self-organisation and political expression. In the earlier period, from the 1780s to the 1830s, the physical force aspects were to the fore. In the Gordon Riots of 1780 the London Mob of slum dwellers and dissatisfied apprentices ruled the city for several days, finally defeated by Army guns and blades as the Mob attempted to storm the Bank of England. Clerkenwell’s New Prison was stormed, the prisoners released and it was then burned to the ground, as was Newgate. There were numerous riots, violent strikes and attempted insurrections throughout this period, strongly influenced by the1789 French Revolution.

From the 1830s onwards, independent working class political organisation began to replace the earlier spontaneous violent outbreaks and became the dominant form of struggle. The failed great syndicalist union movement of the 1830s had revolutionary goals to abolish (or at least ‘level’) class society through workers mass action but it was intended to be achieved through an entirely peaceful withdrawal of labour. This domestication corresponded more to the moral force philosophy of the other wing of Chartism, but Chartism itself was by the 1840s a spent force and the new working class representative and social organisations – unions, workingmen’s clubs and debating societies – moved centre stage.

Clerkenwell Green and the Chartists

Clerkenwell was the heart of the radical political scene in Victorian London and Clerkenwell Green was a central venue for public meetings, demonstrations and frequent clashes between Chartists and the recently formed Metropolitan Police Force. Dan Chatterton participated in these events in his youth; he was badly injured during these clashes.

The London Democratic Association was established in 1837 with its main strength in North and East London. They held regular meetings in the area. Though part of the broader Chartist movement they were closest to the physical force Chartists of the North; their membership cards bore the motto ‘Our rights – peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’. A major period of Chartist activity was in 1848, in Clerkenwell as elsewhere. Here is an account by James Cornish, a local policeman;

“The Metropolitan policeman of the 1840s was a strange-looking individual. I wore a swallow tailed-coated suit with bright buttons and a tall hat. The hat was a fine protection for the head and saved me from many a Chartist’s bludgeon. It had a rim of stout leather round the top and a strip of covered steel each side. Then I had a truncheon, a weapon that was capable of doing a lot of execution and gave a good account of itself in those rough and dangerous times…When the Chartist agitation was at its worst I was stationed at Clerkenwell…in those days there were fields about and many open spaces. Clerkenwell was generally a rustic sort of suburb. There were of course great numbers of the working classes who listened readily enough to what agitators had to say about wrongs of which a lot of people knew nothing until attention was drawn to their existence. Stormy meetings were held everywhere and the police were nearly run off their legs in trying to keep order…Those were rougher, harder and coarser times and where in these days many arrests would be made, we in the ‘40s used to brush the mob off the streets and out of the way, the chief thing was to get rid of them…The rioting in London took the form of running fights between the Chartists and the Guardians of the Law, and the man who wanted excitement could get plenty of it at a very cheap rate. Every policeman became a target, and the way some of us got struck proved what first rate shots the Chartists were.

The weapons that were mostly used in the beginning were bludgeons and stone and bricks…as for the Chartists’ bludgeons they got them easily enough from trees and fences…a stake of this kind was about the only stake most of the rioters had in the country!

A famous battleground was Clerkenwell Green and another place I remember well was Cowcross Street. There was plenty of open space on the Green for fighting and many houses in which the Chartists could hide and throw things at us. Day after day we came into collision with them…One day the Chartists seemed to have vanished mysteriously and only two or three police were left to guard the Green. But that was merely a blind. They swooped down on us. By the time reinforcements arrived…the Chartists were giving us a thoroughly bad time.

It turned into a massive battle that extended to neighbouring streets, into houses and onto roofs.

Truncheons were useless against the defenders of the roofs but we made good use of them in clearing the streets…there was a terrible to-do that day and I have often thought that I should like to see a picture of the street as it looked when sticks and stones and bricks were flying and police and Chartists were struggling furiously for mastery…we cleared the streets at last leaving many an aching bone and sore head.

Then there was a message to go to Victoria Park “to the relief and rescue of ‘N’ Division’ who were besieged in the church there.”³ A busy day for Clerkenwell’s coppers.

On one occasion these clashes led to the occupying of the Green by a contingent of the Horse Guards with 5000 police in support, followed by Police Commissioner Robert Peel banning further meetings for a time.

Reds on The Green

Clerkenwell – the hub of the radical wheel

Every major political struggle of the 19^th century held demonstrations on the Green. When the Tolpuddle Martyrs returned from their transportation to Australia after being pardoned some of them were welcomed there by a large demonstration. As mentioned, the Chartists were a regular presence. During the 1860s there were renewed demands for reform of the voting system and enfranchisement of workingmen. In 1866 the Reform League called a demonstration in Hyde Park – the government banned the demonstration but marchers from different areas converged there anyway, despite the presence of 10,000 police and military. It was the Clerkenwell branch of the Reform League that led the way into the Park, carrying the red flag topped by the liberty cap, and the Park was soon filled with 150,000 demonstrators. In 1871 meetings supported the Paris Commune and for its duration a red flag hung from a lamp-post on the Green. 1884 saw the Social Democratic Federation meet there. The City Press called the Green the "headquarters of republicanism, revolution and ultra-nonconformity". In 1890 London's first full May Day March (following 2 years of various activities across the capital) started on the Green, organised by the London Trades Council in conjunction with 28 Radical Clubs and many trade unionists. Since that date many trade union marches have begun from the Green, including those by postal workers from Mount Pleasant Sorting Office just up the road or by print workers from Fleet Street. Many May Days have either begun from or ended at the Green.

In 1864 the IWMA, the 1^st International, was formed in London by trade unionists with the help of Marx and Engels. It eventually collapsed due to internal disagreements (represented by the two poles of Marx and Bakunin) in 1872, but was never truly representative of the great mass of the non-unionised working class. The emergence in the 1880s of political groups such as the SDF, the Socialist League and various anarchist groups has been called by historians the ‘revival of socialism’; it was in fact the first time that revolutionary Marxist and anarchist class struggle theory established itself as a part of working class culture in the form of political parties and groups calling themselves communist, socialist or anarchist. It could be seen as the beginning of the ‘institutional left’. For many working class militants the incubator for this development had been the theist/secularist/freethought movement of the 1860s. “At that time the working-men’s clubs were mostly freethought and radical, which meant republican, rather than socialist, although socialism was emerging. This is brought out by Stan Shipley in his Club Life and Socialism in mid-Victorian London (p. 40). He quotes Thomas Okey, A Basketful of Memories (1930):

‘…during the seventies and eighties of last century, indications were obvious, both on the platform and in the audience of the Hall of Science, that the Marxian bible, or, rather, the earlier Communist Manifesto (1848) of Marx and Engels – the first volume of Das Kapital did not appear till 1867 – had begun to leaven English democratic thought. It quickly made a more potent appeal than mere republicanism and negative freethought to the working and labouring classes of East London.’

Shipley comments: ‘The socialist turn was thus already well under way within Secularism in the later 1870s, and the process was a continuing one; down to the days of Guy Aldred and beyond, the Secularist movement served as the nursery of London Socialists.’” (Come Dungeons Dark, J.T. Caldwell, 1988.)

Clerkenwell Green was by now a major centre for regular soap-box street speakers as well as a venue for open air radical meetings and demonstrations. In his novel The Nether World George Gissing describes a Sunday evening on the Green;

‘…stood, as so often, listening to the eloquence, the wit, the wisdom, that give proud distinction to the name of Clerkenwell Green. Towards sundown, that modern Agora rang with the voices of orators, swarmed with listeners, with disputants, with mockers, with indifferent loungers. The circle closing about an agnostic lecturer intersected with one gathered for a prayer-meeting; the roar of an enthusiastic total-abstainer blended with the shriek of a Radical politician. Innumerable were the little groups which had broken away from the larger ones to hold semi-private debate on matters which demanded calm consideration and the finer intellect. From the doctrine of the Trinity to the question of cabbage versus beef; from Neo-Malthusianism to the grievance of compulsory vaccination; not a subject which modernism has thrown out to the multitude but here received its sufficient mauling. Above the crowd floated wreaths of rank tobacco smoke.’

“Yet at length something stirred him to a more pronounced interest. He was on the edge of a dense throng which had just been delighted by the rhetoric of a well-known Clerkenwell Radical; the topic under discussion was Rent, and the last speaker had, in truth, put before them certain noteworthy views of the subject as it affected the poor of London. What attracted Mr. Snowdon's attention was the voice of the speaker who next rose. Pressing a little nearer, he got a glimpse of a lean, haggard, grey-headed man, shabbily dressed, no bad example of a sufferer from the hardships he was beginning to denounce. 'That's old Hewett,' remarked somebody close by. 'He's the feller to let 'em 'ave it!' Yes, it was John Hewett, much older, much more broken, yet much fiercer than when we last saw him. Though it was evident that he spoke often at these meetings, he had no command of his voice and no coherence of style; after the first few words he seemed to be overcome by rage that was little short of frenzy. Inarticulate screams and yells interrupted the torrent of his invective; he raised both hands above his head and clenched them in a gesture of frantic passion; his visage was frightfully distorted, and in a few minutes there actually fell drops of blood from his bitten lip. Rent! -- it was a subject on which the poor fellow could speak to some purpose. What was the root of the difficulty a London workman found in making both ends meet? Wasn't it that accursed law by which the owner of property can make him pay a half, and often more, of his earnings or permission to put his wife and children under a roof? And what sort of dwellings were they, these in which the men who made the wealth of the country were born and lived and died? What would happen to the landlords of Clerkenwell if they got their due? Ay, what shall happen, my boys, and that before so very long? For fifteen or twenty minutes John expended his fury, until, in fact, he was speechless. It was terrible to look at him when at length he made his way out of the crowd; his face was livid, his eyes bloodshot, a red slaver covered his lips and beard; you might have taken him for a drunken man, so feebly did his limbs support him, so shattered was he by the fit through which he had passed.”

It seems most likely that Gissing based the above character of John Hewett on a Clerkenwell native, Dan Chatterton; this would seem to be a dramatic exaggeration of other descriptions of Chatterton’s fiery public speaking. (The novelist Richard Whiteing also based his character ‘Old 48’ in the best-seller No. 5 John St (1899) partly on Chatterton.) In his paper The Scorcher Chatterton had often written on the problems of working class rents and slum housing conditions – he lived most of his life in the slums of Clerkenwell, King’s Cross and Drury Lane.

Clerkenwell mavericks: Dan Chatterton and Guy Aldred

“The history of the left has conventionally been written as the story of movements and organisations. Those who left no institutional legacy, who were not pioneers of party or union, whose pamphlets have not been collected by libraries, have been more-or-less neglected. There’s an injustice in this – not so much a personal injustice, as an injustice to the generations that follow who are deprived of a proper sense of the complexity of the past. Those mavericks who kept aloof from organised politics and struggled alone to preach and to persuade according to their own idiosyncratic values could have quite as much importance in transmitting ideas, in however vulgarised a form, to a popular audience as the closely-printed journals and the in-house political rallies." ⁴

Dan Chatterton was born in Clerkenwell in August 1820 into a relatively prosperous artisan family. His father was a japanner, or furniture lacquerer, in an area now full of small workshops devoted to various trades such as watchmaking, jewellery and precious metals, bookbinding, printing and cabinet making. The artisan workforce had a long tradition of radicalism dating back to the 18^th century and Chatterton was taken as a boy by his atheist father to radical and freethought meetings at Richard Carlile’s Rotunda in nearby Blackfriars Rd.

Chatterton grew up at a time and in a place of great social ferment. The first explicitly Socialist, Communist or Anarchist political organisations were yet to emerge on British soil, but there were great struggles being fought as the working class developed a sense of its potential collective power. Chartism was at its height during his youth, the organisation of strikes and trade unionism was growing, and Clerkenwell was a centre for these movements. His enduring political influences appear to have been Richard Carlile, Chartism and the Paris Commune.

Apprenticed to a bootmaker, Chatterton acknowledged the influence on his political development of these craftsmen he described as ‘proverbial… thinkers’. Like many of his time, however, he was a downwardly-mobile artisan, suffering at the hands of new economic forces; also troubled with health problems, Chatterton was destined to spend the rest of his life as a poverty stricken slum dweller, a casualised worker and a political activist denouncing the conditions of his class. In his later years he made his income from billsticking (flyposting) and selling his own and others’ radical publications in the streets, pubs and at meetings.

An old Chartist and founder member of the Clerkenwell-based London Patriotic Club, a workers socialist and republican club of the 1870s, he was revitalised in his later years by the emergence of Marxist and Anarchist groups in the 1880s. Well known as a seller of radical pamphlets and papers at meetings and for his uncompromising contributions to debates, he is mentioned in many novels, political journals, newspapers and reminiscences of the period. One of his memorable explosive interventions was at a meeting organised by the Social Democratic Federation in January 1887. As described by the organiser of the meeting, the SDF had invited Lord Brabazon as their guest speaker, “and old Chatterton who, for all his diatribes against the aristocracy had never got the chance to give one of its members ‘a bit of his mind’, was naturally on hand. The noble philanthropist had just been round the world and was full of emigration as a panacea for the congested poverty of the old country. He discoursed on the subject for an hour, to the amusement of an audience of which no member could have raised the price of a railway ticket to Clacton-on Sea, much less the fare to Canada.

Then Chatterton struggled on to the platform and poured out his indignation. Gaunt, ragged, almost blind he stood, the embodiment of helpless, furious poverty, and shaking his palsied fist in Brabazon’s face, denounced him and his efforts to plaster over social sores, winding up with a lurid account of the Uprising of the People and the procession in which the prominent feature would be the head of the noble lecturer on a pike. I shall never forget Lady Brabazon’s face while this harangue was delivered.” (H.H. Champion, cited in Dan Chatterton and his ‘Atheistic Comunistic Scorcher’, Andrew Whitehead, History Workshop Journal 25, 1988.)

Chatterton was a militant atheist and even had an exchange of letters with the Archbishop of Canterbury published in The Times! The Observer reprimanded the Archbishop for being foolish enough to be drawn into public discussion with “an itinerant spouter of blasphemy.” “One of his pamphlets – The Fruits of a Philosophical Research (1877) – consisted of quotes from a work described as ‘a cesspool of filthy and immoral language, of foul deeds, of incest, of whoredom, of theft, of murder, and every vile and unnatural crime that disgraces our humanity’, viz. the Bible.” (Whitehead, op. cit.)

Chatterton produced several pamphlets on subjects such as atheism, women’s issues and birth control, but from the mid-1880s he concentrated on the Scorcher. Chatterton’s paper, The Atheistic Communistic Scorcher, was produced for 12 years by hand in the most primitive fashion, and in layout and writing style is probably the most unusual radical publication ever produced in the UK, or anywhere else. Typeset by the nearly-blind Chatterton with an mismatched old compositor’s alphabet of print blocks (rumoured to have been found in printers’ dustbins), as he said “My old eyes no longer see anything. So I must … use large letters which I can feeI, with my fingertips, one after the other ... Set it with my fingers, without eyes – and without manuscript, out of my head, - printed without a press, always one side at a time, stitched and published.” (Cited in J.H. Mackay, The Anarchists, 1891.) Spontaneously composed while setting the type, in a stream-of-consciousness style, consisting of a mixed content of humourous ridiculing of royalty, politicians and the wealthy, autobiography, some sharp critique of do-gooding reformism and calls for immediate bloody uprising of the poor to establish the Glorious Commune as a basis for a classless society, the paper is a unique document of a life of uncompromising struggle – and surprisingly, thanks to Chatterton’s pride and foresight, a full set of his works can still be read in the British Library.

Guy Aldred

Guy Aldred was of a younger generation than Chatterton but led a similar political life, though his political expression was more conventionally articulate, and was also from a radical Clerkenwell background. His grandfather, with whom Guy and his mother lived for most of his childhood, had sponsored in 1892 the first Asian to be elected to the Westminster parliament. He was selected as the Liberal Party candidate for the overwhelmingly white working class area of Clerkenwell. Dadabhai Naoroji was an anti-colonialist and was friendly with many radical figures of the day. Despite his opponents and those within the Liberal Party itself attempting to play the race card during the campaign, he was elected. Because he had won by only three votes Mr Naoroji became known locally as ‘Mr Narrow Majority’.

Aldred progressed from being a religious boy preacher, through secularism to become an Anarchist Communist, taking the best of Marx and Bakunin. Both Chatterton and Aldred were temperamentally unsuited to long-term membership of political organisations and pursued their own paths alongside the radical scene. They were both uncompromising anti-parliamentary anti-statist communists, critical of professional representatives of the working class, looking forwards to a self–organised class taking revolutionary action. Their political outlook stands up today better than most others of their time and place, and particularly in comparison to the dull compromises of the Official Organisations who were often so dismissive and patronising towards them.

Though their circulation would have been small, Chatterton’s publications, being hawked around the streets and pubs, would have reached an audience beyond most political journals; and they may have helped popularise certain radical attitudes and notions. Like Chatterton, Aldred had a reputation as an eccentric self-publisher; he was also well known as a soap-box public speaker for many years in the parks and streets of his adopted home of Glasgow, where he sold his various pamphlets. Their background in the melting pot of Clerkenwell radicalism gave them an independence of thought and activity that, combined with their maverick eccentricities, has led to them being ignored or dismissed by historians of the official organisational left. But while they can’t be so easily researched, categorised and evaluated as the political Parties, that in no way diminishes their importance – it only makes them more potentially intriguing and interesting.

‘The House on the Green’ – The Marx Memorial Library

The House was built in 1738 as the Welch Charity School and educated Children of poor Welsh artisans living in Clerkenwell. The school later expanded and in 1772 moved to Grays Inn Rd where a Welsh social centre still functions.

The building was then used as workshops by a variety of trades including cabinet makers, upholsterers, grocers, bootmakers, chemists, a tea urn manufacturer and a mattress maker. Between 1782 and 1838 part of the building was the Northumberland Arms pub and until 1880 also housed Coffee Rooms. Both the pub and coffee rooms were in effect workmen’s clubs. Coffee houses were common meeting places for working class radicals where newspapers and journals could be read. The minutes of the International Working Men’s Association (the 1^st International) note that “the next meeting is to be at Clerkenwell Coffee House”. William Morris and Eleanor Marx addressed crowds from the balconies of this building.

The Marx Memorial Library was established in this building in1933 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Marx's death and also as a counter to the burning of books then taking place in Nazi Germany.

Lenin

Lenin first came to London from Geneva in April 1902 with his wife Krupskaya and two members of the board of Iskra, the Russian Social Democratic Party’s paper. The Swiss authorities were making it difficult to continue publication there so production was moved to London. The RSDP had contacted The Social Democratic Federation in London for help and Harry Quelch, director of the SDF’s Twentieth Century Press, offered the use of office space in their headquarters on Clerkenwell Green. This is where Lenin edited the paper until he and Krupskaya left to return to Geneva.

The next time Lenin came to London was in 1903 for the RSDP’s 2^nd Congress, which was moved to London from Brussels due to Government pressure. The upstairs room of the Crown and Woolpack pub [now gone, though the disused building remains] in St John St was used for the planning of the event and is where an amusing incident occurred; the police sent a spy to hide in a cupboard and gather information on the Party’s planning. Unfortunately he could only report back to his superiors that he had learnt nothing useful as the whole meeting had been conducted in Russian. It was at this conference that the historic split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions occurred, though it was some time before the complete separation into two different parties was made. Lenin made three other trips to London; for the 3^rd Congress in 1905 when he and other delegates lodged in rented rooms off Grays Inn Rd, in 1907 for the 5^th Congress and a final lecture visit in 1911.

Lenin drank at several pubs in the area, including The Crown in Clerkenwell Green next to his office. The Crown was a venue for the music hall acts that were a part of the new emerging 20^th century working class leisure culture. It seems likely that this influenced one of Lenin’s more interesting comments where he sees something dialectical in the music hall performance – “In the London music halls there is a certain satirical or sceptical attitude towards the common-place, there is an attempt to turn it inside-out, to distrust it somewhat, to point up the illogicality of the everyday.” (London – A History, F. Sheppard, 1998.) It was in this period that Lenin was preparing to write his philosophical work Marxism and Empirio-Criticism [5](published 1908).

* * *

Gentrification

In the late nineteenth century the first social housing in Clerkenwell was built, the rookeries were cleared away and the twentieth century saw some large council estates built; in general -the more modern, the more ugly. The small artisan workshops declined, but a few have survived. And the changes continue…

Clerkenwell has, since the 1990’s, experienced a wave of gentrification with some of the fastest rising property prices in London. But unlike other areas, this has mainly been gentrification of commercial property, offices and shops, with even the little residential development being predominantly conversions; of warehouses, schools etc. Most of the residential property remains, for the moment, social housing. The atmosphere of the area has changed with some pubs being ruined by trendy refurbishment, shops and restaurants being geared towards the tastes and spending power of the dot-commer and fashion industry gentrifiers. For those who cannot afford to join in this colonisation the watch-word is dislocation, dislocation, dislocation. A walk down Exmouth Market illustrates the present schizophrenic, divided nature of the area. The once thriving fruit ‘n’ veg and cheap household goods stalls are gone, some of the old shops still useful to the working class sector remain, but many of the outlets are now selling cultural commodities or trendy ‘gastro-experience’-type eateries selling wildly overpriced slops to people who appear to take pride in defining themselves only by how they look, where they are seen, how they make their money and how they spend it.

There are other, more historical, examples of this schizophrenia; such as the yuppie development on the site of the Clerkenwell New Prison/House of Detention. While the cells remain underground (and were until recently open to the public as a tourist attraction), above ground the yuppies have built their own self-imposed prison – commonly known as a ‘gated community’, complete with CCTV and security guard.

Similarly, an expensive hotel for business executives and rich tourists is named The Rookery, without a trace of irony. (But this is at least historically accurate, as the building is located in and does date from the period of the old rookery slums.)

London’s most popular and influential historian at present, Peter Ackroyd, has a pet theory – ‘the territorial imperative’; “Of all capital cities, London is by common consent the most echoic. It has been continually inhabited for many thousands of years, and has relics of Druidic worship as well as of Roman and Saxon occupation. But it is not merely its longevity that is important. In my investigations of London I have been struck many times by what I call the territorial imperative at work in its streets and alleys, by which I mean that a certain area seems actively to guide or to determine the lives of those who live within its bounds. In that sense all its previous existences exist simultaneously, engendering a power that links the present with the past.” He applies this specifically to Clerkenwell;

“It’s just not something one can either prove or disprove,” he says, “it’s just something one believes by instinct or doesn’t. It first came to me when I was doing my book on London, which suggested that the territorial imperative worked in various areas. In Clerkenwell, Bloomsbury and other places, the same sort of activity has taken place in the same territory for, in some cases, a thousand years.”

The radical activity of Clerkenwell, for example, has been an aspect of that area from at least Wat Tyler up until the May Day riots of last year.” But his example of a recent May Day in Clerkenwell is unconvincing – the riots were not in Clerkenwell, all that happened there was an assembly point for another boring orderly leftist and trade union march organised by the most tame and unradical elements – not remotely fit to be mentioned in the same breath as Wat Tyler and his insurrectionary Peasant Army. But while his ‘territorial imperative’ may hold a partial truth - as we ourselves have been moved to try and connect with the submerged past to gain a sense of the roots of our present – it ignores completely the processes of contestation, including the defeat and loss of territory that are fundamental to real lived history in class society. If we look across Clerkenwell towards the Strand today, its not a Peasant Army destroying the property of the rich coming up the hill we see, but an army of the homeless sleeping in doorways – an inevitable consequence of the property market and property relations that fuel the gentrification process. Gentrification has no apparent place in the concept of ‘territorial imperative’.

Ackroyd gets things the wrong way round; his history tries to portray the environment as a force with a greater determining influence on us than we have on it, all driven by semi-mystical forces of ‘essential presence’ that perpetuate the ‘territorial imperative’ and supposedly give neat little continuities to locations. But it’s not the buildings and streets, but our use of them that gives life to the city and determines the content of that life. True, the capitalist organisation of territory constantly attempts to restrain behaviour to only what is profitable for them, but the history of Clerkenwell and its people is a history of the changing victories and defeats within that process and the possibilities for its transcendence. In an environment where, for the moment, history is often portrayed as a mere gentrified cosmetic marketing exercise, we sometimes need to remind ourselves that our history is not over yet.

As the old saying goes;

He who keeps one eye on the past is blind in one eye

But he who keeps no eye on the past is blind in both eyes.

THE (provisional) END

APPENDIX

Pubs

The Jerusalem Tavern in Britton St is owned by the small St Peter’s Brewery of Suffolk and carries a full range of their very fine ales. They acquired the building in 1996 and named it after earlier Taverns that had existed nearby in the 14^th and 18^th centuries. Built in the 1720s, originally as a residential house, it later became a watchmakers’ workshop. The shopfront was added in 1810. It was a café for many years until the Brewery made it a pub in 1996.

The décor is an attempt to recreate an 18^th century tavern; it’s debatable whether this qualifies as a over-the-top Theme Pub or a working museum, but it’s more interesting than most and its saving grace is its superb beer selection.

Ye Old Mitre in Ely Court, which runs between Hatton Garden and Ely Place, has been a tavern since 1546, though rebuilt in Georgian times. Originally built by the Bishop of Ely Palace for the use of his servants, the present building dates from the 18^th century. “The graceful sweep of Ely Place was built in 1773 on a very ancient and historic site. Ely House had been the London palace and estate of the Bishops of Ely. It became the Spanish Embassy in the 1620s; and when it was demolished the first building to go up in its place was almost certainly – if usual practice is anything to go by – the little mews pub which would first serve the builders as a canteen and would then become a modest place of refreshment for the servant population of the new houses.” (London by Pub – Pub Walks Around Historic London, Ted Bruning, 2001.)

St Etheldreda’s Church in Ely Place dates from 1298, though the crypt is even older. It was the first church in London to hear a Catholic mass after the Reformation. “St Etheldreda (630-679) was a Saxon Abbess of Ely,daughter of Anna, King of East Angles. She is sometimes known as Audry… At the fair of St Audry in Ely cheap necklaces made of worthless glass beads used to be sold under the name tawdry laces, which gives us the adjective tawdry.”

“During the Middle Ages, the part of modern Cambridgeshire known as the Isle of Ely was subject to the authority of the Bishops of Ely. When the bishops established their London base in Holborn in the late 13^th century, they secured the agreement of the Crown to treat their palace similarly. This, and its grounds, were thus exempt from the jurisdiction of both the king’s sheriff and the local Church hierarchy. In the 16^th century, the bishops lost much of their property to the Hatton family. In 1772, they sold to the Crown what remained of their land, by then amounting to little more than the present Ely Place and adjoining Mitre Court. After these were built in 1773, their inhabitants claimed independence from the adjacent Liberty of Saffron Hill, as occupants of both Crown land and of what they alleged to be still part of the See of Ely (and thus part of what had now become Cambridgeshire). The licensing and opening hours of the Mitre tavern long remained under the control of the Cambridgeshire justices, and the (claimed) exemption of Ely Place residents from payment of the Liberty poor rate was ended only in 1835. In other respects Place and Court continued to enjoy a special status. The Ely Place Improvements Act of 1842 provided for its government by elected commissioners with powers to levy rates and see to the “paving, lighting, watching, cleaning and improving” of the area. This arrangement lasted until 1901, when most of the powers of the commissioners were transferred to Holborn Borough Council. But the Act is still on the statute book, the commissioners still meet, and Ely Place remains one of the last private roads in Inner London.” (Streets of Old Holborn, op. cit.)

Route(?)

1. Start at Farringdon Station; intro – location and geography – Peasants Revolt

2. Up Cowcross St to Smithfield; continue Peasants Revolt - Great Fire

3. Past Rookery Hotel and into yard behind; rookeries – artisans

4. Britton St; drink at Jerusalem Tavern

5. St John’s Gateway; cross to Jerusalem Passage

6. Cross Green, up Sekforde St and Sans Walk to Prison; penal complex – Jack Sheppard – Fenians – gentrification

7. Down Clerkenwell Close to the Green; Chartists – meetings – library - Lenin

8. To Well in Farringdon Lane, then cross Farringdon Rd, down Clerkenwell Rd and turn into Saffron Hill; religious origins - crime in the rookeries

9. Hatton Place; down mews, right up Greville St into Hatton Garden to Holborn Circus; Gordon Riots and burning of Langdale’s Distillery - processions to Tyburn – summary.

10. Into Ely Place, up alley to The Mitre – final drink.

--------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

APPENDIX 2

The fair at Smithfield dates back to the 12th century. Held to celebrate the Feast of St. Bartholomew, it originally took place on 24th and 25th August but during Charles II's reign it was extended to a fortnight. By the 18th century St Bartholomew Fair was one of the most spectacular national and international events of the year. It featured sideshows, prize-fighters, musicians, wire-walkers, acrobats, puppets, freaks and wild animals. Irreverent plays critical of the ruling class and sympathetic to rebels such as Jack Sheppard were performed there. The Fair was eventually banned in the 1850’s as a ‘public nuisance’.

Smithfield like Tyburn and Newgate was also used for executions. Nearly 300 Protestants were burnt at the state here during Mary Tudor's reign.

In the 19th century Smithfield established itself as the largest meat market in England. Smithfield was also an important horse and cattle market until 1855 when livestock was sent to the Caledonian Market in Islington. In 1868 a market hall with an iron and glass roof was built at Smithfield.

 

(1) William Pyne, The Microcosm of London (1808)

The print is a representation of Bartholomew Fair. A number of youths, each with the lass he loves, are carelessly disporting in the swings; indeed so carelessly, that one of them seems to have fallen out. The surrounding scenery; St. Bartholomew's Hospital, the church and the houses of Smithfield give value to the scene.

 Overview of Ben Johnson’s play ‘Bartholomew Fair’.
The Justice goes to the Fair in diguise to root out the "enormities" he thinks are being committed there, two respectable gentleman are on the look-out for a rich widow, and in her pig-roasting booth, Ursula holds court to pimps, cutpurses, con artists and shady traders. Just a few of the many colourful characters who scheme and swindle their way through this bustling, boisterous and bawdy comedy. First performed in 1614, Bartholomew Fair was popular after the Restoration but then not seen again on stage until 1920.

A Ballad of Bartholomew Fair

Bartholomew Fair was held each year on the outskirts of London, where people of all classes and occupations gathered for business and pleasure. This ballad celebrates their variety.

Room for company, here comes good fellows,
Room for company in Bartholomew Fair.

Cobblers and broom-men, jailers and loom-men,
Botchers [tailors who did repairs] and tailors, shipwrights and sailors,
Paviers, bricklayers, potters and brickmakers,
Pinners [pin-makers] and pewterers, plummers and fruiterers
Room for company, well may they fare.

Pointers [lace-makers] and hosiers, sailmen and clothiers,
Horse-coursers [horse-dealers], carriers, blacksmiths and farriers,
Colliers [coal miners] and carvers, barbers and weavers,
Sergeants and yeomen, farmers and ploughmen,
Room for company, well may they fare.

Bellfounders, fellmongers [dealers in hides],
Pumpmakers, glassmakers, chamberlains and matmakers,
Collarmakers, needlemakers, buttonmakers, fiddlemakers,
Fletchers [arrow makers] and bowyers, drawers and sawyers,
Room for company, well may they fare.

Cutpurses and cheaters, and bawdy-house door-keepers,
Punks, ay, and panders, and cashier'd commanders,
Room for company, ill may they fare.
Room for company, here comes good fellows,
Room for company, well may they fare.

3 Criminal Islington, op. cit.

4Dan Chatterton and his ‘Atheistic Communistic Scorcher’; Andrew Whitehead, History Workshop Journal 25, Spring 1988. This article, along with Chatterton’s own writings, was the main source and inspiration for this section.

5: Pannekoek wrote an excellent critique of Lenin in "Lenin As Philosopher" in which he writes about this book by the old State capitalist bastard.

A printed version of this text has been recently produced by Past Tense or email: )

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