A previous post looks at pirate radio in 1990s Hackney and specifically Rush FM, a station based on the Nightingale Estate in Clapton.
In the summer of 1993, Rush was busted in a high profile raid:
Thanks to Steph for sending the scan of this story from the Evening Standard. (Click to enlarge).
I think the many of the claims made in the video and press coverage can be taken with a pinch of salt. People running pirate radio are no angels, but they’re not stupid – so broadcasting on airline or emergency frequencies is a no-no. I think the drugs connection is exaggerated, as is the claim that Rush was so well fortified that the army would have to be called in!
Steph has also uploaded a recording of a Kool FM show recorded the weekend after the raid on Rush. The MCs are in fine form reacting strongly against the media coverage of pirates and denying the drugs connection. See especially around the 23/24 minutes mark for mention of the Evening Standard.
More information on the show, including a tracklist over at Soundcloud.
Kool FM was also originally based around Hackney and Tower Hamlets and is one of the longest running pirates in the world, having broadcast pretty much continuously since 1991 (though I think they moved to internet radio recently). Here is a documentary on Kool and other pirates from 1996 (it includes a police officer from Stoke Newington station on a Station FM phone in!)
Perhaps the last word should go to Dica & Ben Intellect, whose “Can’t Stop The Pirates” samples extensively from the TV news report above:
In 1907 the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was held in a church on the corner of Southgate Road and Balmes Road in the De Beauvoir area of Hackney.
Attendees included Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg.
In Hackney, That Rose Red Empire, Iain Sinclair notes:
“RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONISTS AFRAID OF THE CAMERA Block headline. Daily Mirror, 1907. Southgate Road. Procession of men in bourgeois-workers’ funeral outfits, umbrellas, removed bowlers disguising beards. Iron railings. Lumpy ecclesiastical bricks. Churches like prisons. Journalists are spooks, double agents, narks. Pigment is metaphor: blood red. Not til the red fog rises. Afraid of the camera’s cyclopean eye, as they walk heads bowed towards it.”
According to Victor Sebestyen, the Mirror also took issue with a particular female delegate:
“a Princess… who has assassinated several provincial governors in Russia and always carries a bomb in her muff.”
Robert Henderson elborates:
“These woman delegates held a particular fascination for the English press pack which reported, with some amazement, the intelligence received that, just like the men, these ‘suffragists’ would also be entitled to vote at the Congress. The Mirror would later describe the rousing speech delivered by one young girl delegate, who called for ‘war at any price’. This firebrand, they reported, ‘spoke of barricades and bombs much as the average English girl will chatter about bridge and lawn tennis’.”
Here is Stella Rimington (former Director General of MI5) and Professor William J Fisham to tell us more about the event and its background:
The Congress
1947 painting by Joseph Serebryany “At London’s V Party Congress (April-May 1907)” Depicted in the foreground are Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Gorky, Kliment Voroshilov (behind the railing) and Joseph Stalin.
The Congress was a turning point for the RSDLP, with the revolutionary Bolshevik faction winning out against their moderate Menshevik rivals:
“the Party will henceforth pursue the strictly class policy of the socialist proletariat. The red flag of the proletariat will no longer be hauled down before the spell-binders of liberalism. A mortal blow has been struck at the vacillation characteristic of intellectuals, which is unbecoming to the proletariat.”
One of the other discussions was about whether or not armed robberies were an OK way of securing funds for revolutionary activity. Somehow the Mensheviks managed to get a resolution passed which condemned that sort of thing. Weeks later a group of Bolsheviks made off with 341,000 rubles (over 2 million quid in today’s money) in the Tiflis Bank Robbery in Georgia.
There is a more detailed account of the Contress at Wikipedia, and Lenin’s collected utterances during the event are available at marxists.org.
Trotsky provides some fascinating insights into the social and financial aspects of the Congress:
“The party congress of 1907 held its meetings in a socialist church in London. It was a protracted, crowded, stormy, and chaotic congress. The second Duma was still alive in St. Petersburg.
The revolution was subsiding, but it was still arousing great interest, even in English political circles. Prominent liberals invited the better-known delegates to their houses to show them off to their guests.
The ebbing tide of the revolution was already evident in the lessening of the party funds. There was not enough money for the return journey, or even to carry the congress to its conclusion. When this sad news re-echoed under the arches of the church, cutting into the discussion on armed uprisings as it did, the delegates looked at one another in alarm and amazement.
What was to be done? We could not stay in the church, of course. But a way out was found, and in quite an unexpected form. An English liberal agreed to lend the Russian revolution three thousand pounds, as nearly as I can remember the figure. He demanded, however, that the revolutionary promissory note be signed by all the delegates at the congress, and so the Englishman received a document bearing several hundred signatures, in the characteristic signs of all the races of Russia. He had to wait a long time, however, for the payment of the note.
During the years of the reaction and the war, the party could not even dream of such huge sums. It was the Soviet government that bought back the promissory note of the London congress. Revolution carries out its obligations, although usually not without delay.”
An article in the capitalist lapdog Evening Standard notes that:
Most participants at the congress lodged in Stepney. But not all of them. The individuals who then headed the Marxist movement – Lenin, Georgii Plekhanov and Yuli Martov – preferred to stay in bourgeois Bloomsbury.
They admired its cleanliness and orderliness. With the British Museum in the vicinity they obtained readers tickets under pseudonyms. Among the egalitarian Marxists, some were more equal than others.
Robert Henderson has also identified a Hackney accomodation site:
“Much to the indignity of one commentator, the only alternative offered by the English authorities was some disused army barracks, the exact location of which has remained a mystery. It is more than likely, however, that the accommodation in question was located to the north of Whitechapel on the western side of London Fields in Shrubland Road, Dalston.
In 1906 the site had been purchased for use as a bus garage and, two years later under the ownership of the London General Omnibus Company, had come into service as Dalston Garage. The garage was demolished and replaced by housing in 1981.”
Henderson also believes that the several hundred delegates who bunked in Dalston would have walked to and from the Congress venue each day, along the Regents Canal…
The Venue
Brotherhood Church, Southgate Road, Hackney
I can still see the bare walls of the ridiculously shabby wooden church in the suburbs of London, the lancet windows of a small narrow hall much like the classroom of a poor school. It was only from the outside that the building resembled a church. Inside there was a total absence of any religious attributes and even the low pulpit stood not in the back of the hall but squarely between the two doors.
I had never met Lenin until that year, nor even read him as much as I should have done. I was strongly drawn to him, how-ever, by what I had read of his writings, and particularly by the enthusiastic accounts of people who were personally acquainted with him. When we were introduced he gripped my hand firmly, probed me with his penetrating eyes, and said in the humorous tone of an old friend:
“I’m glad, you came. You like a fight, don’t you? Well, there’s going to be a big scrap here.”
It should not be thought that all religious thinking and church movements were unanimously hostile to the ideas of socialism. There was in this period a movement of Labour Churches.
One of the more ‘utopian’ religious projects which found itself a home in Hackney was the Brotherhood Church which was established in Southgate Road in 1891. It was set up by the Reverend Bruce Wallace – whose name later appears as a speaker at the Kingsland branch of the Socialist Democratic Federation – when he took over an almost derelict church and re-opened it as a centre for a long-term religious and political project.
The following account comes from a book on English utopian experiments, Heavens Below:
“With J.C. Kenworthy he (Wallace) propagated Tolstoyan ideals. A grocery and vegetable co-operative was opened on the 20th Jan. 1894 in Nos. 1 and 5 Downham Road, Kingsland. They aimed to pay Trade Union wages and provide sickness benefits and old age pensions. Unlike other contemporary co-ops the capital subscribed by the Brotherhood to the store earned no interest and the customer’s profit was not paid to them but saved for the purpose of land for new communities. (24)”
The Brotherhood Church survived into the 20th century, preaching and advocating a mixture of Marxism and Christianity so that services would combine readings from the Bible with hymns sung from the Labour Hymn Book.
I’m hoping to write more about The Brotherhood Church soon, but I think it’s clear from the above that it wasn’t such a strange choice to host the Congress – especially as 338 delegates attended – a few more than you can fit into a room above a pub.
So, Hackney played a minor role in the build up to the Russian Revolution! Part of me is quite chuffed with that, but another part wishes that the Irish Dockers mentioned in the Youtube clip had given Stalin a much bigger beating whilst they had the chance…
Lenin in Clapton, too!
The Wikipedia entry on Clapton Square also mentions Lenin visiting his comrade Theodore Rothstein there a couple of years earlier in 1905. Rothstein was a Russian emigre, forced to leave the country of his birth in 1890 “for political reasons”.
Theodore Rothstein, Clapton Communist
Rothstein wrote numerous articles for the British left-wing press at the time. He was a member of various British political groups also (the Social Democratic Federation, British Socialist Party, etc) as well as the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. He worked as a journalist, going on to become a Russian translator for the Foreign Office and War Office (although he opposed the First World War).
He lived in England for thirty years, returning to post-revolutionary Russia in 1920, where he served as a diplomat and academic. Theodore Rothstein died in Moscow in 1953. His son, Andrew was also a life-long communist who remained in the UK until his death in 1994.
Daily Mirror May 15 1907
Sources and further reading
With thanks to the commenters below for their help. And thanks to
Iain Sinclair – Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (Penguin, 2010)
Dr Sarah J. Young – Russians in London: Lenin – includes a raging debate in the comments about whether the anarchist Peter Kropotkin attended the Congress.
Victor Sebestyen – Lenin The Dictator (Pantheon Books, 2017)
Robert Henderson – The Spark That Lit The Revolution: Lenin in London and the politics that changed the world (I.B.Taurius 2020)
Robert Henderson – The Little Russian Island: Lenin in London (Talk for Anglo-Russian Research Network on Youtube uploaded 26th April 2021)
Not everyone develops their undying love of music sitting under the family’s mahogany dining table during air raids. Not everyone goes on to become an indefatigable peace campaigner, marching against nuclear weapons, the Iraq wars and Israel’s attacks on Gaza at the age of 103. Hetty Bower is not everyone.
Hetty was born in Dalston, London in 1905. During World War I air raids, the voice of Caruso singing arias from Pagliacci rang out from the giant horn of the ‘His Master’s Voice’ gramophone to drown the noise of anti-aircraft guns. Sometimes the family sheltering beneath the solid table sang along. Hetty’s eldest sister – a strong influence later, introduced symphonies into the musical mix. Hetty was hooked.
Since the interview above, Hetty has celebrated her 107th birthday and is now one of the oldest people in the UK. Proof of the restorative power of a life of struggle I guess!
In May 1926, the leaders of the Trades Union Congress called a General Strike. Nearly 2 million workers all over the country joined the strike, in support of a million miners, locked out by mine-owners for refusing to accept wage cuts of up to 25 per cent, after the ending of the Government’s coal subsidy. The General Council of the TUC didn’t want to call the Strike: they were pushed into it for fear of workers taking action themselves without them…
Nine days later, afraid of the losing control of the situation, in the face of massive working class solidarity, the TUC General Council called the Strike off. Since then the General Strike has entered into the mythology of the working class and the left in Britain. […]
The General Strike was of course a massive defeat for the working class. The TUC General Council capitulated; many of the strikers were forced to accept lower wages and conditions: the miners in whose support the Strike was called were eventually starved into submission.
The accounts here […] fail to analyse at all WHY the General Strike failed, despite the powerful unity of the working class nationally and locally. The TUC leaders sold out the Strike, but despite their anger, support for the miners and resentment towards the TUC, neither the Councils of Action, the Trades Councils, the militant left, nor the insurgent workers they claimed to represent, significantly broke out of the official structures, to either broaden the Strike while it was on or to continue it after it had been called off.
[…] When the union leaders called the strike off, millions of workers, after an initial upsurge, obeyed, whatever their feelings. Workers told not to strike or to go back to work even before the Strike ended, did as they were told. And the Communist Party of Great Britain […] made little attempt to challenge the TUC running of events in fact calling for “All power to the General Council.”
Thousands of working people fought the cops and scabs for nine days, all over the country. But only by breaking out of TUC control and extending the struggle on their own behalf could the outcome have been any different.
The following text is taken from Rebels With A Cause: The History of Hackney Trades Council 1900-1975 by Barry Burke (Hackney Trades Council and the Hackney Workers’ Educational Association, 1975):
When the strike was declared in May 1926, the Hackney Council of Action took over a local boxing hall, the Manor Hall in Kenmure Road [I think at number 16], as the headquarters and ran the strike from there. Throughout the duration of the strike the Council of Action was in continuous session organising the strike locally. Reports were arriving all the time from various parts of the borough and the place took on the character of a nerve centre.
Not everyone was called out on strike at once and there were others such as local tradesmen who were exempted by the TUC. These tradesmen had to present themselves to the Council of Action, give their reasons for wanting to carry on their business, and if the Council were satisfied they were given a permit and a sticker to be put on their vans. It stated “BY PERMISSION OF THE TUC” and the strikers had great satisfaction sticking these on.
Public meetings were held all over the borough, particularly around the Mare Street area and Kingsland Road, the two main thoroughfares that cut through the borough and in Victoria Park.
Police intimidation was always a problem for the strikers and it was in Kingsland Road that this manifested itself in an untypical but frightening confrontation on Wednesday 5th May. One eye-witness recalls:
“The whole area was a seething mass of frightened but nevertheless belligerent people. The roads and pavement were jammed, horse vans, lorries and ‘black’ transport were being manhandled; police were there in force and I suppose that for a time things could have been described as desperate.
The crucial point came when a fresh force of police arrived on the outskirts and I heard an officer call out ‘Charge the bastards. Use everything you’ve got’. And they did. I saw men, women and even youngsters knocked over and out like ninepins. Shades of Peterloo. If they had been armed, apart from their truncheons and boots, Kingsland Road would have gone down in history as an even greater massacre.”
The police carried out baton charges in other parts of Hackney on the same day and the St John’s Ambulance men set up a casualty station in Kingsland Road a day or so afterwards.
Mounted police escort vehicle during the General Strike in London, 1926
Mare Street Tram Depot, now Clapton Bus Garage [and now presumably the Bus Garage at the bottom of the Narrow Way?] was to be the scene of further incident on that same Wednesday. The men had all joined the strike on the first day along with the other transport workers and the depot was empty. Even the canteen staff had gone home and all that was left was the picket line outside. Suddenly, under military escort, along came a crowd of ‘patriotic volunteers’ to start up a tram service.
The picket line was not big enough to stop them entering the depot but by the time this was done, word had reached Harry Lee and his Council of Action round the corner in Kenmure Road. Within minutes the area outside was packed with strikers. Their attitude was that the ‘blacklegs’ may have got in but they were not going to let them out!
All day the crowd stayed outside and not a tram moved. As evening approached, the poor unfortunates trapped in the tram depot realised that their stomachs were complaining. None of them had brought food in with them and the canteen staff were not working so they just had to stay hungry.
A few attempts to escape were made but were unsuccessful and about midnight, the Manor Hall received a visit from the local police superintendent. He asked in the most polite way for the Council of Action to assist him. The reply from Harry Lee was less polite.
During the early hours of Thursday morning, a few did escape from the depot but were chased all the way down Mare Street, past Well Street to the Triangle where they were finally caught. Unfortunately, at this spot stood a horse trough full of water, so that it was a number of very bedraggled and hungry ‘blacklegs’ who made their way home that day. No further attempts were made to take any trams out from that particular depot.
Strikebreaking was enthusiastically encouraged by Hackney Borough Council, now no longer in Labour hands. Right from the start they issued a notice calling for volunteers to man essential services. An office was opened in the public library opposite the Town Hall where strikebreakers could sign on and this was kept open from 9am to 8pm. The Council at that time did not have a single Labour member on it and was comprised of 100% Municipal Reformers (Tories and Liberals who stood together on an anti-socialist ticket).
It is interesting to compare Hackney Council’s attitude to those of Shoredtich and Bethnal Green, two neighbouring boroughs. In both of these, Labour Borough Councils were in office and the respective strike headquarters there were in the Town Halls themselves!
In Hackney, the Council met on the Thursday and set up a special sub-committee to discharge any emergency functions that were needed. A squad of Special Constables was established for the protection of municipal buildings, one of those was the Mayor’s son who was ‘just down from Oxford’ and was on duty at the Town Hall.
The Hackney Gazette, the local newspaper, did not appear in its usual format as the printers had joined the strike. Instead the editor brought out a single sheet; which makes interesting reading, especially the bulletin brought out on the second Monday of the strike (10th May). With the headline MILITARY ARRIVE AT HACKNEY, it went on to state that:
“Victoria Park has been closed to the public. In the early hours of Saturday morning, residents in the locality were disturbed by the rumble of heavy motor lorries and afterwards found that military tents had been pitched near the bandstand… We understand that detachments of the East Lancashire Fusiliers, a Guards Regiment and the Middlesex Regiment have encamped in the park… another body of Regulars is stationed in the vicinity of the Marshes at Hackney Wick.”
Whether this was meant to frighten the strikers or not is not clear but it certainly had no effect on the numbers out on strike in the borough. Despite scares and rumours about people drifting back to work, the number of people on strike in the second week was more than had come out at the beginning on the 3rd of May. All the large factories in the borough had pickets outside them – Bergers Paint Factory in Hackney Wick, Polikoff Ltd., a clothing firm at Well Street and Zinkens Furniture manufacturers in Mare Street were three of the largest.
Nothing moves without our permission
All public utilities were either closed or being run rather badly by amateurs. The Hackney Gazette once again reported that three boys of the Clove Club (the Hackney Downs School ‘Old Boys’) were driving a train between Liverpool Street and Chingford and that one of the volunteers at the Council’s Dust Destructor was a parson who was busy shovelling refuse into the hoppers. That probably explains why the Council ended their meeting on the Thursday with the Lords Prayer!
The end of the General Strike came suddenly on Wednesday 12th May, with most strikers in a buoyant and confident mood. The TUC leaders, fearing what they had unleashed, went cap in hand and unconditionally surrendered to Baldwin at 10 Downing Street.
When the news came through to the Strike HQ at Kenmure Road, the first reaction was one of disbelief. Notice were put up advising strikers not to pay attention to what they called ‘BBC Bluff’, but when the official notice of a return to work was given to them during the afternoon, their first reaction was that the strike must have been successful. The Hackney Gazette reported that
“it was publicly alleged that the miners were going back to work without any reduction of wages. There were shouts of ‘We’ve won!’ and cheers, while a section of the crowd began to sing The Red Flag”.
However, as soon as the truth filtered through to them the reaction according to one participant was “bloody murder”. Julius Jacobs who was active in Hackney during the General Strike remembers that ‘The Bastards’ was the most favourable epithet applied to the General Council of the TUC:
“Everybody’s face dropped a mile because they had all been so enthusiastic. It was really working and victory seemed to be absolutely on the plate.”
However, the strikers were still in a militant mood unlike their leaders. That evening, a huge march took place. Several thousands of strikers took part in a march from the Manor Hall in Kenmure Road down Mare Street and Well Street to Hackney Wick and Homerton ending up in a mass meeting outside the Hackney Electricity Works at the end of Millfields Road. A drum and fife band accompanied the marchers and it was led by two men with a large banner. Before the arrival of the marchers, police were rushed up to the Works in a lorry which was driven at great speed through the crowd by one of the Special Constables and as the gates were opened for it, a number of soldiers in field uniform and wearing steel helmets were seen inside. The march was so long that after having a mass meeting by the head of the marchers, the speakers had to go to the back of the march which stretched for about a third of a mile and hold another one.
The return to work was orderly and in most cases without incident. A certain amount of victimisation of militants took place but no more than anywhere else.
The Radical History of Hackney 