by Christopher Draper
Forty years ago I discovered
a tattered old copy of the “Book of Lords” by J Morrison Davidson. The book excoriated
Britain’s
aristocracy but even more arresting than the text was a page advert, inserted in lieu of a frontispiece, for “THE BOMB
SHOP” run by a Mr Henderson. This set me wondering; who was Henderson, what did he sell in his “Bomb
Shop” and how did his explosive enterprise end - with a bang or a whimper? Over
the years I came across more references to this oddly named emporium and the
mysterious Mr Henderson but discovered only incomplete explanations until curiosity
drove me to look more deeply into this dusty corner of radical history.
Retailing Rebellion
It
seems Mr Henderson sold books not bombs but not any old books, “They must be rebel. Rebel a thousand years
ago, rebel yesterday, rebel since lunch: not yet rebel at all, but likely to be
rebel next week: rebel in politics, rebel in sex, rebel in religion – anything
anyhow or anywhere rebel, anything smelling or tasting of rebel”. Mr
Henderson sponsored all sorts of radical causes by promoting, publishing and
distributing incendiary literature. He supported the literary and artistic
avant-garde, distributed tickets for socialist events, provided a “talking
shop” for revolutionaries and even a safe-house for activists on the run. For
decades Henderson’s
“BOMB SHOP” encouraged rebellion whilst
the notehead modestly claimed, “Booksellers
to the People”.
The Shop
“Do you know The
Bomb Shop?”,
Hannen Swaffer inquired in the Daily
Herald, “its name, painted on the
front used to cause trouble. Timorous
women would hurry by, nervously fearful lest something would go off with a bang”. Reg Groves recalled, “In 1925, grimy and in working overalls, I
walked into the shop for the first time…the only socialist bookshop in the West End. An open-style shop – unusual then – it had been
designed and decorated in red and gold and emblazoned with the names of past
rebels by socialist painter Walter Crane. Its defiant name and, red doors and
window frames and display of socialist and anarchist publications incited
upper-class louts and their toadies to heave an occasional brick through the
full-length plate glass door.”
Swaffer
noted the names of some of those “past
rebels”: “Names painted on the bookshelves do honour to many fighters for human
freedom – Jack Cade, John Ball, Watt Tyler, William Morris, Shelley and
Tolstoy.”
Brother Henderson
Francis
Riddell Henderson was a Scot, born 8 January 1860 in Leith, Edinburgh’s port. His father
was a shipping clerk but Francis was more interested in literature. Initially
engaged as a “Stationers Shopman”, Frank was employed by the extraordinary Newcastle builder turned publisher,
Walter Scott. At Scott’s Frank discovered a world of radical ideas and émigré
influence. Amongst the company’s published authors in this 1880’s period were
Bernard Shaw, Ibsen and Stepniak, whilst Tolstoy’s works were churned out in
“super-abundance”.
In
1884, at Morpeth, Frank married local girl Sarah Pybus (1863-1941) and the
couple settled in Gateshead where their first
child, Alice, was born in 1886. When Walter Scott Publishing, in 1887, asked
Frank to represent the firm in London
the family moved south, settling at Nunhead where two more children, James (1888-1950)
and FR junior (1890-1979), were born.
By
that stage Henderson
had himself fully embraced Tolstoy’s anarcho-pacifist politics. Appointed
manager of Scott’s London
office he employed fellow enthusiast Charles William Daniel (1871-1955) who in
1900 founded the London Tolstoyan Society before in 1902 establishing his own
libertarian publishing house. Meanwhile, in May 1894, Frank joined several
other comrades in establishing their own Tolstoyan-influenced
socialist-anarchist organisation in South London,
“The Croydon Brotherhood Church”. The idea was to create a Tolstoyan Community
rather than just a campaigning organisation and the group organised its own
hostel, meeting rooms, shop and publishing after acquiring a former hotel at
Dupas Hill (now “The Waddon Hotel”) which became “Brotherhood’s House”,
effectively group HQ”.
In
1896 Frank and Sarah agreed to take over the management of “Brotherhood House”.
Unfortunately Croydon’s increasingly urban character on the fringe of an ever
expanding metropolis limited the group’s ability to realise an effective Tolstoyan
community so they searched for land further from London. Over the following five years they’d seeded
three Tolstoyan colonies in Essex – at Purleigh, Wickford (actually Downham) and
Ashingdon and further afield, and most successfully of all, at “Whiteway” in the
Gloucestershire Cotswolds.
Back to the Land?
Francis
and his family opted for Wickford as it had convenient rail access to London. In July 1898 thirty-three
like-minded pioneers gathered opposite Downham Hall, just south of the Parish Church,
to view 29 acres of land and three existing cottages on offer for £700. “The
land was visited in the afternoon and general satisfaction was expressed as to
its suitability to the purposes of the group.” Henry Power, like Frank, a former member of the Croydon
Brotherhood and founder member of the Wickford settlement explained that the
colonists aimed, “to cultivate a more
helpful and brotherly feeling towards each other…They feel it is useless
waiting for the millennium…At least they hope it will be found practicable to
show their children the possibilities of a more social, helpful and truthful
life than most of us have had the opportunity of realising.”
Less
communist than other Tolstoyan settlements, Wickford’s suitability for
“colonists” intent on maintaining paid employment caused it to be sometimes
derided as, “The Colony for City Men”. Frank remained a Tolstoyan at heart but
unlike Sarah who described herself in census returns as a “small farmer”, he
had ink in his blood and never abandoned publishing for a life on the land.
Peace and War
During
his Croydon years Frank continued managing Walter Scott’s London operation alongside his work for the
Brotherhood movement. In 1894 he combined both interests in publishing “From
Bondage to Brotherhood” by John Coleman Kenworthy under a joint “Brotherhood
Publishing Company – Walter Scott Company” Imprint but it wasn’t long before Tolstoyan
publishing became a battlefield.
Trouble
erupted in 1897 with the arrival of two Tolstoyan zealots from Russia, Aylmer
Maude (1858 – 1938) a millionaire Director of the Anglo-Russian Carpet Company
and Vladimir Chertkov (1854-1936), Tolstoy’s aristocratic confidante. Both came
with a declared commitment to channel Tolstoy’s publishing royalties into
financing the repatriation of the Doukabors, a pacifist Russian minority
outlawed by the Czar for refusal to serve in the military. This resulted in
five competing parties claiming rights to print Tolstoy’s works. Frank resigned
from Scott’s when the Company declined to publish Tolstoy’s latest novel
without an assurance of sole printing rights. Kenwood insisted that Tolstoy had
granted him sole rights whilst Chertkov established his own dedicated and well-resourced
“New Age” printing operation at Christchurch,
Bournemouth. In 1899, Frank published cheap
popular editions of Tolstoy’s “Resurrection” leaving Maude furiously
threatening his erstwhile comrades with legal action. The ferocity of this
wrangling drove Kenwood into a lunatic asylum and Frank into a court of law.
Kenworthy never recovered but Henderson
survived Maude’s suit and was awarded costs.
Publish and Be
Damned
The
year 1899 was a bit of a watershed for Frank. No longer formally tied to Scott’s
or the Croydon Brotherhood he lived at Downham, Essex in loose community with
Tostoyan-minded comrades and concentrated on establishing his own “Francis
Riddell Henderson” independent publishing house at 26 Paternoster Square,
London EC. He continued to write for and publish the movement’s journal, “The
New Order” but now under his own FRH impress and an 1899 edition included his spirited
defence of the “Whiteway Colony”.
Frank
wasn’t a polemicist or street corner agitator but was an iconoclast, happy to
go out on limb in support of anyone who had anything to say that challenged
orthodox opinion. As he got older he widened out rather than abandoned his early
Tolstoyan approach.
Apart
from Tolstoy’s “Resurrection”, the first title Frank published under his own imprint
was, “Sprays of Sweet Briar” a collection of country rambles described by Harry
Lowerison a teacher sacked by Hackney
School board for
political activitism. Environmental awareness was key to Lowerison’s political
and educational philosophy and the heart of the successful libertarian “Ruskin School”
that he founded following his dismissal. Harry Lowerison was just the sort of rebel
that Frank celebrated along with more established Tolstoyan’s like Ernest
Crosby whose, “Plain Talk in Psalms and Parables” Henderson published in 1901.
Frank
produced more than twenty titles in his first five years of independent
publishing with John Morrison Davidson his most prolific author. Davidson’s “The
Wisdom of Winstanley the Digger” (1904) received glowing press reviews. “This threepenny booklet is marvellously
keen and logical in every one of its forty odd pages…What Winstanley’s writing
remind us of is the fact – overlooked by all Cromwell’s biographers – that the
English revolution did little or nothing to improve the economic condition of
the people.”
An Explosion of
Anarchy
In
the autumn of 1907 Frank strengthened his publishing enterprise with the opening
of a central London
retail outlet, “The BOMB SHOP” at 66 Charing Cross Road.
The name was a deliberate provocation, an ironic title for a Tolstoyan but
guaranteed to excite publicity.
Political
factions such as the “Socialist League” had previously operated both their own
shops and publishing facilities but Henderson’s
utterly unsectarian approach was novel and elicited previously unheard voices.
Rebels of every variety gathered at the Bomb Shop and controversy was Henderson’s bread and
butter but this was no vanity project for Frank didn’t publish his own opinions
but channelled his energy and enthusiasm into encouraging others.
As
soon as he opened the shop Frank cooperated with the radical journalist William
Bellinger Northrop in publishing and distributing “The Deadly Parallel” a monthly magazine that kicks “Class War” into
a cocked hat. Right from the first October 1907 edition it graphically exposed,
ridiculed and reviled the vast gulf that lay (and still lies) between the
living conditions of the rich and the poor. “The Unemployed East” were depicted
on the cover’s left-hand column marching in rags along Embankment whilst on the
right were shown, “The Unemployed West” promenading in their finery in Hyde Park. Readers learned, “A millionaire this year gave
a dinner at a London Hotel. It was called the “Gondola Dinner”. There were just
twenty-four guests at this feast. It cost £2,500. This was £104 3s 4d. per
guest.”
Shelter from a Storm
On
25 October 1912 Hugh
Arthur Franklin (1889-1962) set fire to a railway carriage at Harrow
in support of women’s suffrage. Whilst avoiding arrest, Henderson sheltered him for two months at the
BOMB SHOP before in February 1913 Franklin
was apprehended, imprisoned and force-fed 114 times. To avoid the embarrassment
of imprisoning a corpse the authorities “temporarily” released him under the
terms of their newly devised “Cat and Mouse Act” – the first person to be so
released.
Victor’s Tale
Without
the BOMB SHOP there’d have been no “Left-Book Club” for in 1914 its initiator, Victor
Gollancz, was an unknown master at Repton
School. His progressive
approach was at odds with the disciplinarian headmaster Dr Fisher but the pair
rubbed along together and Victor was even allowed to organise a school magazine
for the boys. After Gollancz got Frank to publish his school mag and distribute
it through the BOMB SHOP, Fisher was incensed and gave Victor his marching
orders. Unemployed, Gollancz decided to start his own publishing enterprise and
the rest is history.
Oh What a Lovely War
In
1915 Parliament objected to the BOMB SHOP, not because of its incendiary
influence rather M.P.’s feared “Peace Propagandists” lodged at “66 Charing Cross Road”.
The Attorney-General reassured everyone that, “the activities of the group of
persons referred to are under consideration”. Invoking the “Defence of the
Realm Act” the following year the authorities raided the BOMB SHOP and
confiscated all remaining copies of “Two
Plays” by disillusioned soldier turned playwright-pacifist Miles Malleson.
In
the summer of 1917, Siegfried Sassoon’s war experiences caused him, like
Malleson, to oppose further fighting. The authorities attempted to silence
Sassoon by threatening to incarcerate him in a lunatic asylum but again, like Malleson
he first contacted Frank and sent his infamous “Statement of Defiance”
to the BOMB SHOP and it was subsequently published in “The Times”.
Amongst
the pacifist gems Henderson
published during the war years was, “The
Tyranny of the Super-State” by Edward G Smith. Commended at the time by
“Freedom”, a century later it’s a useful reminder to deluded libertarian
advocates of the European Union that, “The
international super-state may seem an imposing specific to the automatic
thinker: to the humanist it suggests intolerable tyranny”.
Avant Garde
After
the war the BOMB SHOP played a key role in stimulating a literary and artistic
revival. According to Robert Ross, “many young poets felt that during the war
established English literary journals had fallen too exclusively to the control
of conservative editors”, on May Day 1919 the BOMB SHOP published an antidote. Coterie
was a refreshingly original illustrated literary magazine that, “never baulked at presenting dissenting approaches
and aesthetics”. Aldous Huxley, T S
Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Modigliani, Nina Hamnett and Walter Sickert were just a
few amongst the many radicals featured in subsequent issues.
The
same year the BOMB SHOP also published Osbert Sitwell’s demolition of Winston Churchill
in three short illustrated satires, “The
Winstonburg Line”. Parodying Churchill’s casual disregard for the deaths of
others and his rampant enthusiasm for intervention against the Soviet
revolution…
“As I said in a great speech
After the last great war,
I begin to fear
That the nation’s heroic mood
Is over.
Only three years ago
I was allowed to waste
A million lives in Gallipoli,
But now
They object
To my gambling
With a few thousand men
In Russia!
It does seem a shame.
I shall burn my Daily Herald.”
In
1919 the enterprising Mr Henderson also published the now much sought-after collection
of six vorticist inspired lithographs of the “Russian Ballet” (above) by
renegade artist David Bomberg (1890-1957), expelled from the Slade in 1913.
The View from Above
By
the late 1920’s Henderson’s
bookshop was such a familiar feature of Charing Cross Road that even reporters
from “Society” magazines felt brave enough to drop in. In April 1927 it was the
turn of Sketch feature writer Beverley Nichols to enter. “The Bomb Shop which is supposed to be a nest of anarchy
though it strikes me as merely a clean amusing place kept by a highly
intelligent man whose red tie makes a pleasant splash of colour against his
grey beard”. Beverley was in search of light holiday reading for his
forthcoming weekend in Le Touquet. “I bought in this shop some of the papers
and magazines which aim at the total destruction, extermination and general
blowing-up of anybody who has anything to spare…among it was a crimson song-book
entitled Sixteen Songs for Sixpence
and it was well worth the money for it convinced me that as long as the Labour
Party sing such dreary nonsense there will be little danger of violent
upheavals in this country.”
Less
amusing than Beverley’s gentle ribbing were the antics of his “Hooray-Henry”
associates who regular smashed “The BOMB SHOP”’s windows as a jolly “anti-red”
jape.
Introducing the
Krondstadt Killer
Some
said Mr Henderson looked a lot like Lenin but ironically Reg Groves credits
Frank with introducing him to Trotsky. Although Groves was already disillusioned
with the Communist Party when he dropped into the BOMB SHOP “one bright cold
Spring morning in 1931” Reg hadn’t yet discovered “that there were organised
groups in Europe and America supporting the Left Opposition and Trotsky”. Once
Frank put him in the picture he abandoned Stalin and embraced the man who
massacred thousands of Kronstadt comrades for daring to demand free speech. Reg
returned to Balham and led his erstwhile communist comrades out of the frying
pan into another frying pan.
Lotta Continua
Francis
Riddell Henderson died on 21 May 1931 at Redhill Hospital, Edgware leaving an
estate valued at just £75. The Daily
Herald declared, “Thousands of
reformers of every kind will regret F R Henderson’s
passing” and recalled, “F R Henderson knew advanced
thinkers by the hundred and although stupid people looked rather shocked at the
sign over the door, the bookseller was really the kindest of men. He was a
friend, not only of the writers and the speakers but of hundreds of the
rank-and-file who would call in and talk by the hour”. The family kept the
business going for three years until going bust in 1934 when the BOMB SHOP was
bought for £617 by wealthy Quaker communist Eva Collet Reckitt who described it
as, “the haunt of advanced poets and
elderly anarchists”. Nothing much changed and for Eva and manager Olive
Parsons, “It was a very exciting time politically and we used to go on
anti-fascist demonstrations. The shop was a debating forum and lots of people
from the shop went to fight in the Spanish Civil War.”
Despite
Communist control the shop never abandoned its iconoclasm and stocked the
anarchists’ FREEDOM newspaper when anarchists refused to sell the DAILY WORKER
at their Aldgate shop. It’s a tragic irony that after eighty-two rebellious years
THE BOMB SHOP was destroyed by a bomb! At 3.30am
on 6 July 1989 in
an act of terror-protest against Salman Rushdie’s “”Satanic Verses” THE BOMB
SHOP was gutted by home-made explosives and never reopened by Collets. Now it’s
“Everwell Chinese Medical Centre”
and the spirit of Francis Riddell Henderson cries out to London comrades to commemorate its radical history
with the erection of a red plaque.
