A House on Clerkenwell Green, by Andrew Rothstein, is a small book that covers over 300 years of history, through the story of a building, built in 1737/38, on Clerkenwell Green, as a charity school for local Welsh boys, children of migrant workers.
The Christian charity school movement behind it, the author suggests, was an effort to contain rather than solve the poverty of London. The coming Industrial Revolution failed to share new wealth, expanding slums and driving artisans into insecurity, reflected in the variety of trades that came and went from the House in the next hundred years.
The book’s accounts of the dire conditions of the Clerkenwell poor, including of Irish migrants, particularly, after the famine of the mid-1850s, are quite familiar from popular culture. Clerkenwell Green is where the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates introduce Oliver to pickpocketing in Dickens’ Oliver Twist.
Less familiar are the mass protest events described in the book, such as a meeting on Spa Fields on 15 November 1816, attended by 20,000 people, for the cause of distressed tradesmen, manufacturers and mariners, suffering from post-war unemployment and high corn prices.
On 15 February 1826, a large meeting was held on Clerkenwell Green, addressed by William Cobbett, in opposition to the Corn Laws. Six years later, crowds gathered on the Green to cheer the acquittal at the Old Sessions House of leaders of the National Union of the Working Classes, charged for organising a protest against the government’s decision to order a day of fasting as a response to cholera outbreak.
In 1842, Clerkenwell Green was one of the places in London where public meetings were banned at the height of the Chartist political movement. The Chartists called for democratic reform, including manhood suffrage and secret ballot. The Green is described as a battleground between Chartists and the police, with daily skirmishes. The book records that the first known records of labour unions in Clerkenwell date from this time amongst skilled tradesmen.
Around this time, the House on Clerkenwell Green, now divided as no. 37 and 38, was used as a coffee room and previously, a small tavern. The author identifies the larger local pubs in and around the Green that served as headquarters and meeting places for trade union and radical club organisers.
An organised working class movement at this time campaigned through large protests, particularly, for universal manhood suffrage; through agitation, often violently opposed, and also alliance with the Liberal Party, the Reform Act of 1867 was passed, which expanded male suffrage to leaseholders and rental tenants, though five million men remained disenfranchised, along with all women. New laws in 1875 also decriminalised trade union actions such as picketing.
The author shows that there was momentum for change, despite disappointment in the reach of the Reform Act, sometimes internationally minded, amongst Clerkenwell’s working class and radical movements, including for Irish home rule, republicanism (including support for the 1871 Paris Commune) and atheism.
The Clerkenwell-based ‘London Patriotic Club’ which agitated for such causes, was pushed out of its regular meeting place after a pub licence was suspended and, in 1872, moved into 37a, in the House on Clerkenwell Green. In its twenty-year stay, it supported a range of national and local causes, including women’s suffrage, anti-war causes and the Eight Hour Day for workers. It opposed a plan to enclose Clerkenwell Green with railings and education charges for London schools. Whilst associated with the Liberal Party, the author argues the Club played a role in the movements that formed the Independent Labour Party in 1893.
By the turn of the century, the Club had left the House on Clerkenwell Green, which was now taken by Twentieth Century Press, a publisher of the socialist organisation, the Social-Democratic Federation. During 1902-1903, Russian emigrants, including Lenin, worked with the SDF to print Iskra, a political newspaper, from the premises on the Green. WW1 brought splits over whether to support the war and a new pro-war National Socialist Party was created, headquartered at the House. Twentieth Century Press remained there until 1922.
After a spell of commercial use, in 1933, the eponymous House on Clerkenwell Green became the Marx Memorial Library. A coalition of political parties, trade unions and publishers set it up in the fiftieth anniversary year of the death of Karl Marx. As well as a library, it provided public lectures and evening courses on science, history, economics and politics, both in-person and by correspondence. It was badly damaged during WW2 and in the 1960s, local authorities proposed to demolish it. A campaign was launched by supporters to preserve it and the research for this book was conducted as part of this and first published in 1966. The campaign was successful and the Library remains to this day.