Anarchists in the East End
Whitechapel High Street and its surrounding side streets are rich with history. In Roman times it was part of the busy thoroughfare that connected Londinium to Colchester. In the medieval period it was popular with travellers and housed numerous coaching inns. By the 17th century the neighbourhood accommodated the kinds of businesses that were unwelcome in the City of London — slaughterhouses, tanneries, breweries, foundries and the like. And by the 18th and 19th centuries it was notorious for crime, squalor and prostitution.
The English clergyman John Strype, in his book A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (1720) called Whitechapel “no small Blemish to so famous a City”, while John Hollingshead, in Ragged London (1861), described how, in “taking the broad road from Aldgate Church to old Whitechapel Church…you may pass on either side about 20 narrow avenues, leading to thousands of closely packed nests, full to overflowing with dirt, and misery, and rags”. In 1889, Margaret Harkness, in her novel In Darkest London, asked her readers, “What shall we say of the woman, or man, maimed by misfortune, who must come there or die in the street?”
In the late 19th century Whitechapel served as the home of Joseph Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, as well as the stomping ground of Jack the Ripper. Even today, tourists who venture into this part of the East End are more often interested in retracing the steps of London’s most famous serial killer than in the area’s shops and restaurants, or for that matter its historical landmarks, graveyards and public art.
The same conditions that repulsed respectable Victorians drew the attention of radicals and reformers. William Booth launched his Christian Revival Society in Whitechapel in 1865; George Bernard Shaw’s Fabian Society regularly met there; and exiled revolutionists such as Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky all spent time in the area.
Whitechapel also become a focal point for the country’s fledgling anarchist movement. According to the historian Barbara Tuchman, “London’s anarchists at this time were mostly Russians, Poles, Italians and other exiles who centred around the ‘Autonomie’, an anarchist club, and a second group among Jewish immigrants who lived and worked in desperate poverty in the East End”.
The authorities sought to ban openair anarchist meetings in 1894, and in 1910 four Latvian anarchists staged a violent shoot-out with the police after a botched burglary — the Siege of Sidney Street. Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary, helped co-ordinate the police response on-site and stuck so close to the action that a bullet reportedly passed through his top hat.
Whitechapel has changed over the years, of course. The Luftwaffe bombed the area during the Battle of Britain, and after the war it attracted sizeable numbers of South Asians. Prostitution has largely migrated indoors, and crime is far lower than it was a century ago. Yet there is still an anarchist presence in Whitechapel, thanks to an organisation called Freedom, which maintains the world’s oldest anarchist bookshop and publishing company.
While the group’s official address is 84b Whitechapel High Street, the bookshop is actually located down Angel Alley, just off the High Street. The alleyway is nestled between an art gallery and a Kentucky Fried Chicken takeaway.
There is currently talk of turning Angel Alley into a “pocket park”, replete with plantings, furniture and better lighting.
The Freedom group was founded in 1886 by a small circle of English and foreign-born anarchists, including the Russian writer Peter Kropotkin. From the outset the group drew a sharp line between their anti-authoritarian ideals and those of socialists, communists and other “statists”. Kropotkin himself advocated mutual aid and voluntary co-operation, writing in Modern Science and Anarchism (1903): “The economic and political liberation of man will have to create new forms for its expression in life, instead of those established by the State.”
This anti-statist perspective was also articulated by the Scottish-german author John Henry Mackay, who wrote in his book The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (1891), “Liberty of the individual? Today when we are living under a communism more complicated and brutal than ever before? Today when the individual, from the cradle to the grave, is placed under contribution to the State, to the community? Go to the ends of the world, and tell me where I can escape these obligations and be myself. I will go to this liberty that I have sought in vain all my life.”
Over the years Freedom Press has published books by Bertrand Russell, Lewis Mumford, William Morris, Emma Goldman, Colin Ward, Max Stirner, Alex Comfort, Pierre-joseph Proudhon, and of course Kropotkin, along with many others. They have sometimes paid a price for their rebelliousness. Two members of the group were imprisoned in 1916 due to their opposition to the war, and the homes of several editors were raided, along with their offices, in 1944.
A Freedom Defence Committee was subsequently established to “uphold the essential liberty of individuals and organisations, and to defend those who are persecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of speech, writing and action”. Committee members included Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, George Woodcock and Herbert Read. The bookshop was firebombed in 1993 and subjected to an arson attack in 2013. The arsonist smashed one of their windows, poured accelerant into the shop, and set books, pamphlets and newspaper back issues on fire. The case remains unsolved.
One of Freedom Press’s best-selling authors is the political cartoonist Donald Rooum, who was born in Bradford in 1928 and who continues to write and draw a comic strip called “Wildcat”. To date the Press has produced seven collections of Rooum’s visually appealing cartoons.
Freedom Press has published work by other cartoonists, including John Olday, an exceptionally interesting artist whose linework has an old-fashioned Disneyesque quality to it, and, more recently the underground “comix” creator Clifford Harper. Freedom also helped sponsor the outdoor portrait gallery of important anarchists, made of stainless steel, that adorns Angel Alley.
The novelist Colin Macinnes, author of Absolute Beginners (1959), wrote about the Freedom group for Queen magazine in 1962.
“From what I have read of anarchist lives, and observed of those I know,” he said, “they have also the peculiarity among political groups of behaving, in their private lives, according to their philosophical doctrine. They don’t love the masses from afar (which has always seemed to me a way of hating and fearing them) — in fact, they’re not interested in ‘the masses’, but in creating a mass movement based on selfpersuaded, not converted, individuals; and if they do like particular persons, they will work with them and for them.
“Temperamentally, they are informed, versatile and resourceful, indulgent of human weakness, but set high standards for themselves. Like all political groups they have sectarians and extremists, but fewer than other parties, because they nod kindly to these wayward brethren, and then get on with the business.” KENT WORCESTER