George Lansbury
Frederick Roberts | |
---|---|
Succeeded by | Herbert Morrison |
Member of Parliament for Bow and Bromley | |
In office 15 November 1922 – 7 May 1940 | |
Preceded by | Reginald Blair |
Succeeded by | Charles Key |
In office 3 December 1910 – 26 November 1912 | |
Preceded by | Alfred Du Cros |
Succeeded by | Reginald Blair |
Personal details | |
Born | 22 February 1859 Halesworth, Suffolk, England |
Died | 7 May 1940 North London, England | (aged 81)
Political party | Labour |
Spouse |
Bessie Brine
(m. 1880; died 1933) |
Children | 12, including Edgar, Dorothy and Daisy |
Relatives |
|
George Lansbury (22 February 1859 – 7 May 1940) was a British politician and
Originally a radical
In 1912, Lansbury helped to establish the
After his return to Parliament in 1922, Lansbury was denied office in the brief
Early life
East End upbringing
George Lansbury was born in
The essayist Ronald Blythe has described the East End of the 1860s and 1870s as "stridently English ... The smoke-blackened streets were packed with illiterate multitudes [who] stayed alive through sheer birdlike ebullience".[6] Interspersed with spells of work, Lansbury attended schools in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel. He then held a succession of manual jobs, including work as a coaling contractor in partnership with his elder brother, James, loading and unloading coal wagons. This was heavy and dangerous work, and led to at least one near-fatal accident.[7]
During his adolescence and early adulthood, Lansbury was a regular attender at the public gallery at the
George Lansbury senior died in 1875. That year young George met fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Brine, whose father Isaac Brine owned a local sawmill. The couple eventually married in 1880, at Whitechapel parish church, where the vicar, J. Franklin Kitto, had been Lansbury's spiritual guide and counsellor. Apart from a period of doubt in the 1890s when he temporarily rejected the Church, Lansbury remained a staunch Anglican until his death.[10]
Australia
In 1881 Lansbury was a railway contractor employing three men and living in Whitechapel with his wife Elizabeth and the first of twelve children, the new-born Bessie;[11] another daughter, Annie, followed in 1882. Seeking to improve his family's prospects, Lansbury decided that their best hopes of prosperity lay in emigrating to Australia. The London agent-general for Queensland depicted a land of boundless opportunities, with work for all; seduced by this appealing prospect, Lansbury and Bessie raised the necessary passage money, and in May 1884 set sail with their children for Brisbane.[9][12]
On the outward passage, the family experienced illness, discomfort and danger; on one occasion the ship came close to foundering during a monsoon.[12] On arrival at Brisbane in July 1884, Lansbury found that, contrary to the London agent's promises, there was a superfluity of labour and work was hard to come by. His first job, breaking stone, proved to be too physically punishing; he moved to a better-paid position as a van driver, but was sacked when, for religious reasons, he refused to work on Sundays.[13] He then contracted to work on a farm some 80 miles inland, to find upon arrival that his employer had misled him about living conditions and terms of employment.[14]
For several months, the Lansbury family lived in extreme squalor before Lansbury secured release from the contract. Back in Brisbane, he worked for a while at the newly built Brisbane cricket ground. As a keen follower of the game he hoped to see the visiting English touring team play but, as Lansbury's biographer Raymond Postgate records, "he learned that cricket watching was not a pleasure for workmen".[13][n 2]
Throughout his tenure in Australia, Lansbury sent letters home, revealing the truth about conditions facing immigrants.[13] To a friend he wrote in March 1885: "Mechanics are not wanted. Farm labourers are not wanted ... Hundreds of men and women are not able to get work ... The streets are foul day and night, and if I had a sister I would shoot her dead rather than see her brought out to this little hell on earth".[14] In May 1885, having received from his father-in-law Isaac Brine sufficient funds for a passage home, the Lansbury family left Australia for good and returned to London.[13]
Radical Liberal
First campaigns
On his return to London, Lansbury took a job in Brine's timber business. In his spare time he campaigned against the false prospectuses offered by colonial emigration agents. His speech at an emigration conference at King's College in London in April 1886 impressed delegates; shortly afterwards, the government established an Emigration Information Bureau under the Colonial Office. This body was required to provide accurate information on the state of labour markets in all the government's overseas possessions.[17]
Having joined the Liberal Party shortly after his return from Australia, Lansbury became first a ward secretary and then general secretary for the Bow and Bromley Liberal and Radical Association.[18] His effective campaigning skills had been noted by leading Liberals, including Samuel Montagu, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel, who persuaded the young activist to be his agent in the 1885 general election.[19] Lansbury's handling of this election campaign prompted Montagu to urge him to stand for parliament himself.[20] Lansbury declined this, partly on practical grounds (MPs were then unpaid and he had to provide for his family), and partly on principle; he was becoming increasingly convinced that his future lay not as a radical Liberal but as a socialist.[19] He continued to serve the Liberals, as an agent and local secretary, while expressing his socialism in a short-lived monthly radical journal, Coming Times, which he founded and co-edited with a fellow-dissident, William Hoffman.[21]
London County Council elections, 1889
In 1888 Lansbury agreed to act as election agent for
Lansbury was offended by his party's lukewarm support for women's rights. In a letter published in the
Socialist reformer
Social Democratic Federation
Lansbury's choice of the SDF, from several socialist organisations, reflected his admiration for Hyndman, whom he considered "one of the truly great ones".
In 1895 Lansbury fought two parliamentary elections for the SDF in
In the
Poor Law guardian
"You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" was the basis of policy where jobs and contracts were concerned ... the slum owner and agent could be depended upon to create the conditions which produce disease; the doctor would then get the job of attending the sick, the chemist would be needed to supply drugs, the parson to pray, and when, between them all, the victims died the undertaker was on hand to bury them.
(Lansbury, summarising the extent of cronyism and abuse in the Poor Law system.)[43]
In April 1893 Lansbury achieved his first elective office when he became a Poor Law guardian for the district of Poplar. In place of the traditionally harsh workhouse regime that was the norm, Lansbury proposed a programme of reform, whereby the workhouse became "an agency of help instead of a place of despair", and the stigma of poverty was removed.[44] Lansbury was one of a minority socialist bloc which was often able, through its energy and commitment, to win support for its plans.[45]
Education for the poor was one of Lansbury's major concerns. He helped to transform the Forest Gate District School, previously a punitive establishment run on quasi-military lines, into a proper place of education that became the Poplar Training School, and was still in existence more than half a century later.[46][n 6] At the 1897 annual Poor Law Conference Lansbury summarised his views on poor relief in his first published paper: "The Principles of the English Poor Law". His analysis offered a Marxist critique of capitalism: only the reorganisation of industry on collectivist lines would solve contemporary problems.[48]
Lansbury added to his public duties when, in 1903, he was elected to
In 1905 Lansbury was appointed to a Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, which deliberated for four years. Lansbury, together with Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society, argued for the complete abolition of the Poor Laws and their replacement by a system that incorporated old age pensions, a minimum wage, and national and local public works projects. These proposals were embodied at the commission's conclusion in a minority report signed by Lansbury and Webb; the majority report was, according to Postgate, "an ill-considered jumble of suggestions ... so preposterously inadequate that no attempts were ever made to implement it." Most of the minority's recommendations in time became national policy;[56] the Poor Laws were finally abolished by the Local Government Act 1929.[57]
National prominence
Campaigner for women's suffrage
In the general election of January 1906 Lansbury stood as an independent socialist candidate in Middlesbrough, on a strong "votes for women" platform. This was his first campaign based on women's rights since the LCC election of 1889. He had been recommended to the constituency by Joseph Fels, who agreed to meet his expenses. The local ILP leadership was committed by an electoral pact to support the Liberal candidate, and could not endorse Lansbury, who secured less than 9 per cent of the vote.[58] The campaign had been managed by Marion Coates Hansen, a prominent local suffragist. Under Hansen's influence Lansbury took up the cause of "votes for women";[59] he allied himself with the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the more militant of the main suffragist organisations, and became a close associate of Emmeline Pankhurst and her family.[60]
The Liberal government elected in 1906 with a large majority showed little interest in the issue of women's suffrage;[61] when they lost their parliamentary majority in the general election of January 1910 they were dependent on the votes of the 40-odd Labour members.[n 7] To Lansbury's dismay, Labour did not use this leverage to promote votes for women, instead giving the government virtually unqualified support to keep the Conservatives out of power.[63][64] Lansbury had failed to win election as Labour's candidate at Bow and Bromley in January 1910; however, the continuing political crisis which developed from David Lloyd George's controversial 1909 "People's Budget" led to another general election in December 1910. Lansbury again fought Bow and Bromley, and this time was successful.[65]
Lansbury found little support in his fight for women's suffrage from his parliamentary Labour colleagues, whom he dismissed as "a weak, flabby lot".[60] In parliament, he denounced the prime minister, H. H. Asquith, for the cruelties being inflicted on imprisoned suffragists: "You are beneath contempt ... you ought to be driven from public life". He was temporarily suspended from the House for "disorderly conduct".[66] In October 1912, aware of the unbridgeable gap between his own position and that of his Labour colleagues, Lansbury resigned his seat to fight a by-election in Bow and Bromley on the specific issue of women's suffrage.[67] The suffragettes sent Grace Roe to help with the campaign.[68] He lost to his Conservative opponent, who campaigned on the slogan "No Petticoat Government".[69] Commenting on the result, the Labour MP Will Thorne opined that no constituency could ever be won on the single question of votes for women.[70]
Out of parliament, on 26 April 1913 Lansbury addressed a WSPU rally at the
War, Daily Herald and Bolshevism
The Daily Herald began as a temporary bulletin during the London printers' strike of 1910–11. After the strike ended, Lansbury and others raised sufficient funds for the Herald to be relaunched in April 1912 as a socialist daily newspaper.[75] The paper attracted contributions from distinguished writers such as H. G. Wells, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, some of whom, Blythe notes, "weren't socialists at all but simply used [the paper] as a platform for their personal literary anarchy."[76] Lansbury contributed regularly in support of his various causes, in particular the militant suffrage campaign,[77] and early in 1914 assumed the paper's editorship.[78]
Before the outbreak of the
Lansbury used the pages of the Daily Herald to welcome the February 1917 revolution in Russia as "a new star of hope ... arisen over Europe".[83] At an Albert Hall rally on 18 March 1918 he hailed the spirit and enthusiasm of "this Russian movement", and urged his audience to "be ready to die, if necessary, for our faith".[84] When the war ended in November 1918, Lloyd George called an immediate general election, correctly calculating that victory euphoria would keep his coalition in power. In this triumphalist climate, candidates such as Lansbury who had opposed the war found themselves unpopular, and he failed to retake his Bow and Bromley seat.[85]
The Herald re-emerged as a daily paper in March 1919.
"Poplarism": the 1921 rates revolt
Throughout his national campaigns, Lansbury remained a Poplar borough councillor and Poor Law guardian, and between 1910 and 1913 served a three-year term as a London County Councillor.[4][91] In 1919 he became the first Labour mayor of Poplar.[92] Under the then-existing financial system for local government, boroughs were individually responsible for poor relief within their boundaries. This discriminated heavily against poorer councils such as Poplar, where rates revenues were low and poverty and unemployment, always severe, were exacerbated in times of economic recession.[n 10] Under this system, Postgate argues, "The wealthy West End boroughs were evading responsibility, as though the desolate and silent docks were the results of a failure by the Poplar Borough Council".[93] In addition to meeting the costs of its own obligations, the council was required to levy precepts to pay for services provided by bodies such as the London County Council and the Metropolitan Police.[94] Lansbury had long argued that a degree of rates equalisation across London was necessary, to share costs more fairly.[44]
At its meeting on 22 March 1921 the Poplar Council resolved not to make its precepts and to apply these revenues to the costs of local poor relief.[94] This illegal action created a sensation, and led to legal proceedings against the council. On 29 July the thirty councillors involved marched in procession from Bow to the High Court, headed by a brass band. Informed by the judge that they must apply the precepts, the councillors would not budge; early in September, Lansbury and 29 fellow-councillors were imprisoned for contempt of court. Among those sentenced were his son Edgar and Edgar's wife, Minnie.[93]
The defiance of the Poplar councillors generated widespread interest and sympathy, and the publicity embarrassed the government. Several other Labour-controlled councils (including Stepney whose mayor was the future Labour leader Clement Attlee) threatened similar policies.[95] After six weeks' incarceration the councillors were released, and a government conference was convened to resolve the matter. This conference brought a significant personal victory for Lansbury: the passage of the Local Authorities (Financial Provisions) Act, which equalised the poor relief burden across all the London boroughs. As a result, the rates in Poplar fell by a third, and additional revenues of £400,000 was gained by the borough.[93][95] Lansbury was hailed as a hero; in the 1922 general election he won the parliamentary seat of Bow and Bromley with a majority of nearly 7,000, and would hold it for the rest of his life. The term "Poplarism", always identified closely with Lansbury, became part of the political lexicon, applied generally to campaigns where local government stood against central government on behalf of the poor and least privileged of society.[4]
Parliament and national office
Labour backbencher
"A few centuries ago one King who stood up against the common people of that day lost his head—really lost it ... Since that day kings and queens had been what they ought to be if you had them. They never interfered with ordinary politics and George V would be well advised to keep his finger out of the pie now."
(Lansbury's warning to the King shortly before the first Labour government took office in January 1924)[96]
In May 1923 the Conservative prime minister, Bonar Law, resigned for health reasons. In December his successor, Stanley Baldwin, called another election in which the Conservatives lost their majority, with Labour in a strong second place. King George V advised Baldwin, as leader of the largest party, not to resign his office until defeated by a vote in the House of Commons. Defeat duly occurred on 21 January 1924, when the Liberals decided to throw in their lot with Labour. The king then asked Labour's leader, Ramsay MacDonald, to form a government.[97][98] Lansbury caused royal offence by publicly implying that the king had colluded with other parties to keep Labour out, and by his references to the fate of Charles I.[99] Despite his seniority, Lansbury was offered only a junior non-cabinet post in the new government, which he declined.[100] He believed that his exclusion from the cabinet followed pressure from the king.[100] At the 1923 Labour Party conference, while declaring himself a republican, Lansbury opposed two motions calling for the abolition of the monarchy, deeming the issue a "distraction". Social revolution, he said, would one day remove the monarchy.[101]
MacDonald's administration lasted less than a year before, in November 1924, the Liberals withdrew their support; Blythe comments that the first Labour government had been "neither exhilarating nor competent".[98] According to Shepherd, MacDonald's chief priority was to show that Labour was "fit to govern", and he had thus acted with conservative caution.[102] The December general election returned the Conservatives to power; Lansbury maintained that Labour's cause "marches forward irrespective of electoral results".[103] After the defeat Lansbury was briefly touted as an alternative party leader to MacDonald, a proposition he rejected.[104] In 1925, free from the Daily Herald, he founded and edited Lansbury's Labour Weekly, which became a mouthpiece for his personal creed of socialism, democracy and pacifism until it merged with the New Leader in 1927
.[105] Before the General Strike of May 1926, Lansbury used the Weekly to instruct the Trades Union Congress (TUC) on preparations for the coming struggle. However, when the strike came the TUC did not want his assistance;[106] among the reasons for their distrust was Lansbury's continuing advocacy of the right of communist organisations to affiliate to the Labour Party—he privately opined that British communists on their own "couldn't run a whelk-stall".[107]
Lansbury continued his private campaigns in parliament, saying "I intend on every occasion to ... hinder the progress of business".
Cabinet minister, 1929–31
In the
The years of MacDonald's second government were dominated by the economic depression that followed the
During August, in an atmosphere of financial panic and a run on the pound, the government debated the report. MacDonald and Snowden were prepared to implement it, but Lansbury and nine other cabinet ministers rejected the cut in unemployment benefit. Thus divided, the government could not continue; MacDonald, however, did not resign as prime minister. After discussions with the opposition leaders and the king he formed a national all-party coalition, with a "doctor's mandate" to tackle the economic crisis. The great majority of Labour MPs, including Lansbury, were opposed to this action; MacDonald and the few who followed him were expelled from the party, and Arthur Henderson became leader.[127] MacDonald's move was broadly welcomed in the country, however, and in the general election held in October 1931 the national government was returned with an enormous majority. Labour was reduced to 46 members; Lansbury was the only senior member of the Labour leadership to retain his seat.[123][n 13]
Party leader
Although defeated in the election, Henderson remained the party leader while Lansbury headed the Labour group in parliament—the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP). In October 1932 Henderson resigned and Lansbury succeeded him.[1] In most historians' reckonings, Lansbury led his small parliamentary force with skill and flair. He was also, says Shepherd, an inspiration to the dispirited Labour rank and file.[129] As leader he began the process of reforming the party's organisation and machinery, efforts which resulted in considerable by-election and municipal election successes—including control of the LCC under Herbert Morrison in 1934.[4][130] According to Blythe, Lansbury "represented political hope and decency to the three million unemployed."[131] During this period Lansbury published his political credo, My England (1934), which envisioned a future socialist state achieved by a mixture of revolutionary and evolutionary methods.[132]
I believe that force never has and never will bring permanent peace and goodwill in the world ... God intends us to live peacefully and quietly with one another. If some people do not allow us to do so, I am ready to stand as the early Christians did, and say, this is our faith, this is where we stand, and, if necessary, this is where we will die.
(From Lansbury's speech to the 1935 Labour Party conference)[133]
The small Labour group in parliament had little influence over economic policy; Lansbury's term as leader was dominated by foreign affairs and disarmament, and by policy disagreements within the Labour movement. The official party position was based on collective security through the
As fascism and militarism advanced in Europe, Lansbury's pacifist stance drew criticism from the trade union elements of his party—who controlled the majority of party conference votes.
Final years
[Hitler] appeared free of personal ambition ... wasn't ashamed of his humble start in life ... lived in the country rather than the town ... was a bachelor who liked children and old people ... and was obviously lonely. I wished that I could have gone to Berchtesgaden and stayed with him for a little while. I felt that Christianity in its purest sense might have had a chance with him.
(Lansbury's impressions after meeting Adolf Hitler in April 1937)[145]
Lansbury was 76 years old when he resigned the Labour leadership; he did not, however, retire from public life. In the
At home, Lansbury served a second term as Mayor of Poplar, in 1936–37. He argued against direct confrontation with Mosley's Blackshirts during the October 1936 demonstrations known as the Battle of Cable Street.[152] In October 1937 he became president of the Peace Pledge Union,[146] and a year later he welcomed the Munich Agreement as a step towards peace. During this period he worked on behalf of refugees from Nazi Germany, and was chairman of the Polish Refugee Fund which provided relief to displaced Jewish children.[151] On 3 September 1939, after Neville Chamberlain's announcement of war with Germany, Lansbury addressed the House of Commons. Observing that the cause to which he had dedicated his life was going down in ruins, he added: "I hope that out of this terrible calamity will arise a spirit that will compel people to give up the reliance on force."[153]
Early in 1940 Lansbury's health began to fail; although unaware, he was suffering from
Tributes and legacy
Most historical assessments of Lansbury have tended to stress his character and principles rather than his effectiveness as a party political leader. His biographer Jonathan Schneer writes:
Lansbury was a talented politician, speaker, and organizer. What made him remarkable was the stubbornness with which he clung to his principles... [He] became one of the best-loved and most-respected figures in the labour movement. Lansbury's legacy has been the adamantine insistence among an element within the Labour Party that Britain must stand for moral principles, must set the world a moral example. Concretely, this has meant demanding the total abolition of capitalism and unilateral disarmament, policies that Labour's leaders have usually thought utopian or worse.[156]
Historian A. J. P. Taylor labelled Lansbury as "the most lovable figure in modern politics" and the outstanding figure of the English revolutionary left in the 20th century,[157] while Kenneth O. Morgan, in his biography of a later Labour leader, Michael Foot, regards Lansbury as "an agitator of protest, not a politician of power".[158] Journalists commonly accused Lansbury of sentimentality, and party intellectuals accused him of lacking mental capacity.[159] Nevertheless, his speeches in the House of Commons were often flavoured with historical and literary allusions, and he left behind a considerable body of writing on socialist ideas; Morgan refers to him as a "prophet".[160] Foot, who as a young man met and was influenced by Lansbury, was particularly impressed by the older man's achievements in establishing the Daily Herald, given his complete lack of journalistic training.[161] Nevertheless, Foot felt that Lansbury's pacifism was unrealistic, and believed that Bevin's demolition at the 1935 conference was justified.[162]
There is much agreement among historians and analysts that Lansbury was never self-serving and, guided by his Christian socialist principles, was consistent in his efforts on behalf of the poorest in society.[4] Shepherd believes that "there could have been no better leader for the Labour Party at the collapse of its political fortunes in 1931 than Lansbury, a universally popular choice and a source of inspiration among Labour ranks".[129] In the House of Commons on 8 May 1940, the day following Lansbury's death, Chamberlain said of him: "There were not many hon. Members who felt convinced of the practicability of the methods which he advocated for the preservation of peace, but there was no one who did not realise his intense conviction, which arose out of his deep humanitarianism". Attlee also paid tribute to his former leader: "He hated cruelty, injustice and wrongs, and felt deeply for all who suffered ... [H]e was ever the champion of the weak, and ... to the end of his life he strove for that in which he believed".[163]
After the Second World War, a stained glass window designed by the Belgian artist Eugeen Yoors was placed in the Kingsley Hall community centre in Bow, as a memorial to Lansbury. His memory is further sustained by streets and housing developments named after him, most notably the Lansbury Estate in Poplar, completed in 1951.[159] A further enduring memorial, Attlee suggests, is the extent to which the then-revolutionary social policies that Lansbury began advocating before the turn of the 20th century had become accepted mainstream doctrine little more than a decade after his death.[164]
His name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the
Personal and family life
George Lansbury married Elizabeth Jane (Bessie) Brine on 22 May 1880 in Whitechapel, London. Four years later, in May 1884, he took his wife and their three young children to Australia as emigrants with high hopes based on British government propaganda, which suggested plentiful work and a rosy life there. The truth was otherwise, with paid work very hard to find, and terrible living conditions for many. By May 1885 they had had enough of Australia, and returned to London. Lansbury took up work in his father-in-law's Whitechapel sawmill and began his political career speaking about the harsh conditions in Australia.[168]
For most of their married life, George and Bessie Lansbury lived in Bow, originally in St Stephen's Road and from 1916 at 39 Bow Road, a house which, Shepherd records, became "a political haven" for those requiring assistance of any kind.[169] Bessie died in 1933, after 53 years of a marriage that had produced 12 children between 1881 and 1905.[170]
Of the 10 children who survived to adulthood,
Another daughter,
The Lansbury home at 39 Bow Road was destroyed by bombing during the London Blitz of 1940–41.[178] There is a small memorial stone dedicated to Lansbury in front of the current building, named George Lansbury House, which itself carries a memorial plaque. There is also a memorial to Lansbury in the nearby Bow Church, where Lansbury was a long-term member of the congregation and churchwarden.
Books by Lansbury
- Your Part in Poverty. London: Allen and Unwin. 1918. OCLC 251051169.
- These Things Shall Be. London: Swarthorne Press. 1920. OCLC 1109879.
- What I Saw in Russia. London: L. Parsons. 1920. OCLC 457509320.
- The Miracle of Fleet Street: The Story of the Daily Herald. London: Labour Publishing Company. 1925. OCLC 477300787.
- My Life. London: Constable & Co. 1928. OCLC 2150486.
- My England. London: Selwyn & Blount. 1934. OCLC 2175404.
- Looking Backwards and Forwards. London and Glasgow: Blackie and Son. 1935. OCLC 9072833.
- Labour's Way with the Commonwealth. London: Methuen. 1935. OCLC 574874665.
- The Price of Peace. London: OCLC 11084218.
- Why Pacifists Should Be Socialists. London: FACT. 1937. OCLC 826854352.
- My Quest for Peace. London: M. Joseph. 1938. OCLC 4051871.
- This Way to Peace. London: Rich and Cowan. 1940. OCLC 4024194.
See also
Notes
- ^ Lansbury's biographer Raymond Postgate gives the date and place of birth as 21 February, at the toll-house between Halesworth and Lowestoft, in the county of Suffolk. However, according to his birth certificate, Lansbury was born on 22 February 1859, at a house in Halesworth's "Thoroughfare" or High Street; a plaque provided by a local historical society in 1993 identifies the building as No. 14.[2][3]
- ^ The English team, managed by Alfred Shaw, was in Australia from November 1884 until the end of March 1885, playing one match in Brisbane at the end of January.[15][16]
- ^ At that time women, although denied votes in parliamentary elections, had limited rights to vote in municipal elections, although whether they could stand as candidates, or serve if elected, was not legally clear.[24]
- ^ There being no specific trade unions for sawmill workers Lansbury had, in 1889, joined the Gas-workers and General Labourers' Union. He remained a member for the remainder of his life, and for many years attended Labour Party conferences as a union rather than a local party delegate.[34]
- ^ In 1920 Lansbury published a rationale for his Christian beliefs, under the title These Things Shall Be.[42]
- ^ In 1907 the school moved to new buildings in Shenfield, Essex. By 1974 it had become an adult training centre; many of the original buildings were demolished and rebuilt in the 1980s.[47]
- Labour Representation Committee (LRC) had been formed to promote greater working class representation in parliament. In 1906 the LRC became a de facto political party, "the Labour Party", to which socialist bodies (SDF, ILP, trade unions) could affiliate; MPs elected under the LRC banner took the label "Labour". The party did not acquire its modern mass-membership nature until reforms under a new constitution were implemented in 1918.[62]
- Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913, allowed for the temporary release of hunger-striking prisoners when they were in danger of death from starvation, and their re-imprisonment when they had sufficiently recovered.[72]
- George Roberts.[81]
- ^ In 1921 the borough of Poplar, with a population of 161,000, has a rateable value of less than £1 million; the product of a penny rate was £3643. By contrast, the rateable value of the wealthy borough of Westminster, with a population of 141,000, was £8 million, and the product of a penny rate was £31,719.[93]
- ^ Mosley resigned from the government. He later left the Labour Party and formed the New Party, from which developed the British Union of Fascists.[124]
- ^ The May recommendations were for immediate savings of £120 million (a vast sum at the time), of which £24 million would come from increased taxation and £96 million by expenditure cuts of which the largest proportion would come from unemployment relief. The economist John Maynard Keynes called the May report "the most foolish document I ever had the misfortune to read".[126]
- ^ Taylor gives the 1931 election result as National Government 521 (Conservatives, National Labour and National Liberals); opposition: Labour 52, Liberal 33, Lloyd George family 4. The Labour total of 52 included 6 ILP members who disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932.[123][128]
Citations
- ^ a b Shepherd 2002, p. 282
- ^ a b Postgate, pp. 3–4
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 5–6
- ^ doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/34407. Retrieved 2 February 2013. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.) (subscription required)
- ^ Postgate, p. 5
- ^ Blythe, p. 272
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 8–9
- ^ Lansbury, pp. 40–43
- ^ a b Shepherd 2002, pp. 10–11
- ^ Postgate, pp. 13–20
- ^ 1881 England census
- ^ a b Postgate, pp. 22–23
- ^ a b c d Postgate, pp. 24–29
- ^ a b Shepherd 2002, pp. 13–15
- ^ "Brisbane v A Shaw's XI, 1884-85". CricketArchive. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
- ^ "Test Cricket Tours - England to Australia 1884-85". Test Cricket Tours. Retrieved 28 September 2020.
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 16–17
- ^ Postgate, p. 31
- ^ a b Shepherd 2002, pp. 19–20
- ^ Lansbury, p. 75
- ^ Schneer 1990, pp. 16–17
- ^ Schneer ("Politics and Feminism"), p. 67
- doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/38683. Retrieved 8 February 2013. (Subscription or UK public library membershiprequired.) (subscription required)
- ^ a b Schneer ("Politics and Feminism"), pp. 63–65
- ^ Schneer ("Politics and Feminism"), p. 68
- ^ Hollis, pp. 310–16
- ^ Schneer ("Politics and Feminism"), p. 75
- ^ Schneer ("Politics and Feminism"), p. 77
- ^ Schneer ("Politics and Feminism"), pp. 79–80
- ^ Lansbury article in Labour Leader, 17 May 1912, quoted in Shepherd 2002, p. 26
- ^ Shepherd 2002, p. 26
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 32–33
- ^ Lansbury, p. 2
- ^ Postgate, p. 41
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 40–41
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 44–45
- ^ Todmorden Advertiser and Hebden Bridge Newsletter report, 29 November 1895, quoted by Shepherd 2002, p. 47
- ^ Shepherd 2002, p. 48
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 78–81
- ^ Shepherd 2002, p. 77
- ^ Postgate, p. 55
- ^ Postgate, p. 60
- ^ Lansbury, pp. 134–35
- ^ a b Shepherd 2002, pp. 54–56
- ^ Postgate, p. 62
- ^ Postgate, pp. 67–68
- ^ Historic England. "Poplar Training School (1453837)". Research records (formerly PastScape). Retrieved 9 February 2013.
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 58–59
- ^ Shepherd 2002, p. 57
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 60–61
- ^ Schneer 1990, pp. 42–43
- ^ Shepherd 2002, p. 63
- ^ Postgate, p. 77
- ^ Schneer 1990, pp. 45–46
- ^ Postgate, pp. 79–87
- ^ Postgate, pp. 87–92
- ^ "Local Government Act 1929". The National Archives. Retrieved 10 February 2013.
- ^ Shepherd 2002, pp. 83–88
- ^ Shepherd 2002, p. 89
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Sources
- ISBN 978-0-8264-3224-7.
- OCLC 10971329.
- OCLC 956913.
- ISBN 978-0-521-89401-2.
- ISBN 0-19-822699-3.
- ISBN 0-7459-1574-4.
- Lansbury, George (1928). My Life. London: Constable and Co. OCLC 2150486.
- ISBN 978-0-00-717827-8.
- OCLC 562582750.
- OCLC 739654.
- Prasad, Devi (2005). War is a crime against humanity : the story of War Resisters' International. London, UK: War Resisters' International. ISBN 0903517205.
- Schneer, Jonathan (1990). George Lansbury: Lives of the Left. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-2170-7.
- Schneer, Jonathan (January 1991). "Politics and Feminism in 'Outcast London': George Lansbury and Jane Cobden's Campaign for the First London County Council". Journal of British Studies. 30 (1): 63–82. S2CID 155015712. (subscription required)
- Shepherd, John (2002). George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-820164-8.
- ISBN 0-14-021181-0.
- Vickers, Rhiannon (2003). The Labour Party and the World, Volume 1: The Evolution of Labour's Foreign Policy, 1900–51. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. ISBN 0-7190-6745-6.
External links
- UK: Leader of the Opposition, George Lansbury pleads for peace at League of Nations Clip from a Paramount Newsreel, circa 1935
- Catalogue of the Lansbury papers at the Archives Division of the London School of Economics.
- Newspaper clippings about George Lansbury in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
- Movietone footage of George Lansbury speaking about conditions in slums