London History

It may be produced in Wapping, but it’s hard to imagine any other connection between the Sun and legendary East End politician George Lansbury. Britain’s best-selling paper may have backed Tony Blair in recent years, but that hardly represents a commitment to the left.

Strange to think that The Sun started life as a ‘labour movement daily’, brainchild of Lansbury and Bethnal Green union man Ben Tillett. More ironic still (given the later war at Wapping between Murdoch and the print unions), this new paper sprung from a daily strike bulletin printed by the London Society of Compositors (LSC) - the printers trade union engaged in a bitter struggle to win a 48-hour working week.

Tillett was a leading figure in the London Dock Strike of 1889 and by the 1890s was one of the leaders of the Labour movement, pivotal in the founding of the Labour Party and president of the General Labourer’s Union.

In December 1910, London printers were locked out by the newspaper publishers for demanding a 48-hour week. The owners were hardly going to put the printers’ case on their pages, so Tillett, Lansbury and other Labour leaders produced a strike sheet, The World. An important recruit was Australian Will Dyson, arguably the best and most popular political cartoonist of the day. Dyson’s biting satire gave the new paper a unique flavour. The next month, the tyro publishers retitled their paper the Daily Herald. The first issue of 13,000 copies sold out straight away, and sales grew over the following weeks.

By April 1911, the strike was over, but Lansbury and Tillett were encouraged enough to believe there was a permanent market for a Labour paper. Funds were raised, and the Herald was relaunched on 15 April 1912. The shortlived launch editor was William H Seed and Dyson was given a full page to fill (occasionally even the front page). Eminent contributors included GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, causes supported by the paper include women’s suffrage, British rule in Ireland, and workers’ struggles everywhere. Sales nudged up to 230,000 a day.

The paper was democratic, with readers forming local branches of the ‘Daily Herald League’, with a say in the running of the paper, but all was not well between the Herald and its fathers. Dyson was attacking the Labour Party for being too conservative, and he mercilessly lampooned Ramsay McDonald in his cartoons. The Christian Lansbury was disturbed by Dyson’s representation of capitalists as ‘devils’, while the board felt the paper’s attacks on individuals (rather than systems and conditions) were far too personal. By late 1913, when Charles Lapworth was asked to resign, the paper had lost four editors.

By 1914, Lansbury was in control, but the First World War, which split the left, hurt the Daily Herald badly. The paper opposed Britain fighting, and sales (already between 50,000 and 150,000 a day) slumped further. It’s a hard job being an anti-war paper when many readers have elected to support the troops ‘right or wrong’. Will Dyson, meanwhile, had decided to do his bit, and had joined the Australian Army. The paper went weekly before returning to a daily sale in 1919. In 1922 the TUC took over publication, appointing Henry Hamilton Fyfe (a respected Fleet Street man) as editor. Fyfe recruited well, but never felt free of interference from his masters, opining that ‘the Herald never escaped entirely its first days as a strike sheet’ He resigned in 1926.

With new editor Frederic Salusbury in charge, the Herald was about to change yet again. In 1930, the TUC sold a 51 per cent share to the Odhams Press, publisher of The [Sunday] People. The synergy was obvious: the TUC needed a professional publisher to push their ailing paper, while the Sunday paper publisher was looking to employ its presses seven days a week. Odhams launched a huge promotional campaign and by 1933 the Herald was the world’s largest-selling daily paper, hitting 2m a day. That signalled war to the conservative opposition such as the Daily Express. Competition grew fierce and it was the Herald that suffered, limping through the forties and fifties losing money.

In 1961, Mirror Group bought Odhams, and found itself with an oddity - owning 51 per cent of a paper, the other ‘half’ of which was owned by the TUC. Until very recently the paper had been tied to supporting Labour Party policy … right or wrong. The paper did still sell 1.4m copies a day, but it didn’t make a profit, and the ageing, working class readership didn’t help the paper sell its ads. In 1964 the publishers went for broke, reformatting and relaunching the old Labour paper as The Sun, a mid-market, left-leaning daily. The obvious problem was that it was head to head with the Daily Mirror, and in 1969 the publishers (now reinvented as IPC) sold the title to Rupert Murdoch. Resized as a tabloid, taken downmarket and with the addition of Page 3, any vestigial links to its inky Labour past were finally broken. And, irony of ironies, the print unions, which had created the paper 60 years before, were largely supportive … the incoming owner had promised them their jobs were secure. The Wapping dispute was still 17 years away.

A curious ceremony marked the end of major building works at Bow Church last Sunday - when the Rector re-interred human remains from the churchyard, disturbed during the relaying of the drains.

At 11.30am last Sunday, 6 May, after the normal Communion Service, the Reverend Michael Peet conducted a short burial service to lay to rest once again the mortal remains of several local people who were originally buried here about 1800, when Bow was still a village in the Middlesex countryside east of London. In the spirit of the early 19th century, the Revd Peet used a Common Prayer Book that once belonged to the splendidly named Hamlet Harrison (Rector of St Mary’s in 1809). He also donned robes appropriate for that period.

The recent work on the roof, gutters and drains of the church, which has been supported by grants from English Heritage and the Historic Churches Preservation Trust, is the first step in a programme of restoration and refurbishment of the building in preparation for the 700th anniversary of the foundation of Bow Church in 2011 and for the Olympic Games the following year. When the games commence, St Mary’s will be a major sight on the ‘Olympic Boulevard’, which will run from the City to the Olympic site at Stratford.

Not everything turned up in the excavations was quite so venerable of course. The builders unearthed a small metal shield which first thoughts had down as a 17th century coffin plate. Scraping away the earth, they the inscription: ‘The public are requested to place waste paper and orange peel in this basket’. A rather charming relic of Victorian times (and manners), buried when the church tower was bombed in 1941.

Further reading:
* The Olympic Boulevard: www.towerhamlets.gov.uk
* The church’s history: www.stmarylebow.co.uk/?History.

London’s Science Museum hosts an exhibition charting the history of plastic … how did we ever live without this ubiquitous material in its myriad forms. More to the point, how can we get rid of the stuff that fills a thousand overflowing landfill sites?

Fire today ravaged the Cutty Sark, turning the 19th century tea clipper, permanently moored in south London and one of Britain’s most important maritime treasures, into a blackened wreck. Despite the apparent damage, however, experts who have been leading a broad restoration project on the 138-year-old ship said an initial inspection indicated a section of its structure remained intact and it could perhaps be restored.

The bones of 13 Australian Aborigines held for more than 100 years at a British museum will be sent home within days, ending a two-decade fight for their return, Australia’s government said on Friday. The bones were taken without permission in the 1880s in a case which has been called “Australia’s Elgin marbles”, a reference to the row between Britain and Greece over Parthenon sculptures held in the British Museum in London.

The tide is out in London, and in the midst of all the urban intensity, I’m beachcombing. Like kids on a scavenger hunt, David Tucker and I pick through the pebbles. I find a fragile, chalky white tube and hand it to David, who explains it’s no big deal, just the stem of a 19th century clay pipe.

Check out our piece on Mudlarks and Toshers … for some people this used to be a living!