British Library Event 10th July: Russian Revolution

Must Britain Travel the Moscow Road?
Tickets are now on sale for a one-day conference ‘Must Britain Travel the Moscow Road? The British Left and the Russian Revolution’, taking place on Monday 10^th July at the British Library. 

"What did H G Wells and Sylvia Pankhurst find on their visits to the first Communist state? What was it like being brought up in a Communist family in Britain following the events of 1917? Join writer and broadcaster David Aaronovitch alongside historians and archivists to uncover the effect of the Revolution on British socialists.

"The Russian Revolution and the birth of the Soviet state had a deep and enduring impact on the British Left, which continues to shape socialist politics to this day. Socialists in Britain watched the unexpected events of 1917 with amazement and confusion, and struggled to draw lessons for themselves. The Bolsheviks, meanwhile, saw the nations of the British Empire as key targets through which their revolt could spread, hoping to spark a world-wide revolution. At this packed day of talks, historians and archivists uncover stories and records of their responses at home, and visits made to witness the new state at first hand.  Writer and broadcaster David Aaronovitch concludes the day with an account of his upbringing in a loyal Communist family in Britain."

At 

Knowledge Centre

The British Library
96 Euston Road
London
NW1 2DB

Full Price: £20.00
BL Member: £14.00
Senior 60+: £16.00
Student: £14.00
Registered Unemployed: £14.00
Under 18: £14.00
Friend of the BL: £14.00

Programme

09.00 - Registration and coffee                 

09.30 – 10.15  - Dr Jonathan Davis (Anglia Ruskin University) opening keynote: ‘A new star of hope has arisen over Europe’: British Labour and the Russian Revolutions

10.15 – 11.00 - Dr Billy Kenefick (University of Dundee): The Scottish Radical Left and the impact of the Russian Revolution

11.00 – 11.20 - Coffee/tea break

11.20 – 13.00 - Dr John S. Partington (University of Reading): One Russia, Two Reflexions: H. G. Wells and Clara Zetkin on the Soviet Experiment, 1917-1934

Professor Mary Davis (Visiting Professor of Labour History, Royal Holloway, University of London): Sylvia Pankhurst and the Russian Revolution; Pioneering Solidarity

13.00- 14.15 - Lunch (not included)

14.15 – 15.30 - Short introductions to British Left archives and resources with Ralph Gibson (Society for Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies), Jeff Howarth (TUC Library), Meirian Jump (Marx Memorial Library) and Katya Rogatchevskaia (British Library)

15.30 – 15.50 - Coffee/tea break 

15.50 – 16.30 - David Aaronovitch concludes the day with an account of his upbringing in a loyal Communist family in Britain – a life filled with picket lines, militant trade unions, solidarity rallies for foreign Communists, the Red Army Choir, copies of the Daily Worker, all underpinned by a quiet love of the Soviet Union. He is the author of the recent autobiography Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists.

A temporary display The Russian Revolution and its impact on the course and outcome of WWI will be available to view at this event. This Heritage Lottery funded exhibition on the impact of the Russian Revolution 1917-22 looks at the two revolutions of 1917, their effect on WW1, the ensuing Wars of Intervention and Labour Movement responses in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

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A larger exhibition is also running:

Russian Revolution: Hope, Tragedy, Myths - full price £13.50 - until 29th August

 with associated merchandising in the BL shop, for those with a sense of irony, as in:

Women Workers Take Up Your Rifles Cushion  (£30) ========================

For a libertarian perspective on 1917 and after, see:

The Bolsheviks and workers' control: the state and counter-revolution - Maurice Brinton. Available online.   

Anarchy 81 (edited by Colin Ward). Available as large pdf (22MB)

SMOKY CRUSADE by R M Fox

Chapter 4

REVOLUTIONARY ORATORS

Link to Chapter3 

IN the days before the War - the romantic period of revolutionary oratory - Socialist speakers wore soft felt hats and red ties. Anderson conformed to this custom. He had, too, a well-shaped head, a good broad forehead crowned with a mass of curly hair and a slight cast in one of his eyes which gave them a fine rolling frenzy on the platform. He had energy, audacity and tireless­ness in attack. He would leap on to the platform and challenge all corners. And he was ready to leap on to his opponent's platform, too. Whether he loved Socialism or his own voice best perhaps he himself could not have told us, but if estab­lished society could have fallen before oratory, I am sure Anderson would have brought it down. He could talk all day - in fact, he did spend most of his Sundays talking - and remain fresh, ener­getic and interesting. On Sunday morning he held his meeting at West Green Corner. In the afternoon, snatching a scrappy meal, he went on to Finsbury Park. Here he occupied a disused bandstand around which the people flocked to listen. After buying cakes and tea at the Park restaurant, he took the tram back to West Green Corner and spellbound an audience until mid­night, or even later, when a small dazed group would stumble away convinced that they had assisted in striking thundering blows at the edifice of Capitalism. During his oratory he refreshed himself with long drinks from a lemonade bottle, its gassy sharpness making him hoarse or thin­ning his voice to a husky whisper, but he would talk on until his throat eased again.
     I could not resist these avalanches of oratory, especially as Anderson gave expression to all those feelings of resentment and bitterness which I could not put into words. My only regret was that I had to be up so

SMOKY CRUSADE by R M Fox

Chapter 3

THE HIGH CROSS

Link to chapter 2

From the workshop gate I could see, at the corner of the street, a big stone cross - the High Cross, a relic of the days of chivalry. I thought it marked a stage of the journey taken by the funeral procession of Queen Eleanor in 1290. The story of how she had sucked the poison from a dagger wound inflicted by a Moor upon her husband, King Edward, when he was crusading in the Holy Land was one of the romances of my school­days. Afterwards I learned that this was not one of those famous crosses, yet it held for me the glory and thrill of romantic history.
    Though not so fine as Charing Cross or Waltham Cross it still raised itself to the sky with a proud gesture as if the men who made it said, " We are not so little after all! " My eyes rested gratefully on the delicate stone traceries of the High Cross in those early misty mornings when I hurried by it to work. Almost opposite the High Cross above a shop - which may have been a saddler's - was the skeleton of a horse, propped up with iron supports against the sky. The wind whistled through its unprotected ribs and made play around its knobbly knees. It looked in­credibly mournful and desolate. As a decoration I preferred the medieval cross with its suggestion of beauty and dignity, but as an introduction to an age of realism perhaps the bony skeleton was more fitting. Alas! the age of realism proved too much for its symbol, for the bony skeleton has long since vanished while the High Cross still celebrates the triumph of human hands and minds.
    

SMOKY CRUSADE by R M Fox

 Chapter 2

 I FACE THE WORLD

Link to chapter 1

I soon slipped into the life of the workshop, extracting interest and amusement, as well as enduring boredom. Up in the woodwork shop we boiled cans of tea at breakfast time on the gas jet used for heating glue, and sometimes we fried sausages. Reid, a thick-set, clumsy young man, who was the workshop humorist, gained general applause one morning by cleaning the greasy frying-pan on his mop of hair. Another jest of his was to pour out grey paint from a bucket on to the newly made wooden shutters, then-instead of a paintbrush - he seized a broom and painted vigorously.
     I wore a leather apron now - black and shiny with oil - and with my sleeves rolled up, I ran every morning to the corner shop for "a penny tin of skim milk" for our workshop breakfast. The grocer asked me one morning if it had to be "skim," but I saw no humour in this. About five-thirty a.m., on my way to work, I would buy hot cheese cakes fresh from the oven for a half­penny at a coffee stall. Another halfpenny would buy a cup of hot tea. Thus fortified, the sleepy desolation of my morning journey gave way to a sense of well-being.

SMOKY CRUSADE - R M Fox

Published in 1937, Smoky Crusade by R M Fox is the autobiography of a socialist, anti-imperialist and supporter of the the Irish national revolution whose teenage years were spent in Tottenham. The Radical History Network is republishing those chapters of his autobiography that cover his early years and also his fight against the First World War.

CHAPTER I


THE FIRST DAY

On my fourteenth birthday I left a London elementary school and was flung into industrial life, or, to be exact, I left on Friday and was fourteen on Monday. There was nothing unusual about this, most of the boys at school followed that custom. I do not know what became of any after the school door closed on them and me, except one, whom I met some years later in prison. He recalled himself to my memory. I was then working in the prison kitchen.
    "I was at school with you - poke us a bit of pudden through the window!" he muttered urgently from outside. The others called him my college chum.
    When I left the red-brick building called the Lancastrian School, whose bell at the end of the street had so often hastened my morning toilet, I was anxious to find work and make my way in the world. I was very vague about how to do this. For although I took a vivid and romantic interest in the world around me I had no definite, practical aim. In any case I had to find a job whatever was open. It was not for me to choose.
I went to see an estate agent who advertised for a boy in his office. He was a most gentlemanly man, with

The variously radical life of Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst

(Estelle) Sylvia Pankhurst

5 May 1882 to 27 September 1960

September 2010 brings the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Sylvia Pankhurst. Her surname is inevitably associated first and foremost with the Suffragette movement, the militant campaign for votes for women in the early 20^th century, and she was certainly active and prominent in that, repeatedly risking health and liberty in the cause. But her determination to act on her principles led her into involvement in many other areas of equal or more interest to radical historians, including syndicalism, anarchism, soviet communism, peace campaigning and anti-fascism.

Socialism

Sylvia Pankhurst grew up in the early stages of the British political labour movement, in a household on close terms with some of its key elements – Fabians, Independent Labour Party (ILP) – and stood by the ideas she absorbed. Eventually she was to take them much further, and in rather different directions. She became a close friend of Keir Hardie, whom she called in an obituary (1915) the ‘greatest human being of our time’.

In 1907 she undertook a tour of parts of Britain, with the aim of making a visual record in paintings of working women; she had given up her studies in art to work for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Despite her social awareness she was not prepared for the scenes of hardship she found and heard about from the women themselves: in industry - pit-brow, textiles, potteries; on quays packing and gutting North Sea herring; doing agricultural labour in Berwickshire.

A few years later her travels extended to the USA, in the first three months of 1911and 1912, primarily for the suffrage movement but not confined to that. She noted the ‘squalid poverty’ of new immigrants in the ‘nightmare industrialisation’ of Pittsburgh, incurred hostile criticism by agreeing to speak at the Negro University of Tennessee, and Insisted on seeing prisons, as well as Nashville sawmills and a blanket factory. Such observations confirmed her misgivings about single-issue politics and elitism.

Nevertheless in 1913-14 Sylvia the Suffragette was arrested numerous times and suffered the torture of forcible feeding under the notorious ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act. She continued to speak and work for the WSPU, but was against the sort of ‘stealthy act of destruction’ (arson) ordered by her sister Christabel.