A short history of SPGB outdoor speaking
When the name of the Socialist Party is
mentioned something that springs to mind
for many is outdoor public speaking. For
much of its political life the SPGB has relied on outdoor
meetings for a key part of its propaganda against the
capitalist system, these acting as crucial aids to
recruitment alongside the Socialist Standard, leaflets,
pamphlets, indoor meetings and debates. Indeed, the
proportion of Party members citing outdoor meetings as
the means by which they first came into contact with the
Party was significant until the 1950s when this form of
propaganda went into something of a decline.
During the first few years of the Party’s existence
propaganda was mostly indoor, outside speaking only
being undertaken in the summer months. In these early
years the Party was almost entirely confined to London
and its environs, with only Manchester in the provinces
holding regular meetings, and from early 1908 a yearround
London outdoor rota (the “Lecture List”) was
established. A range of stations were used across the
capital increasing to no less than 22 sites on Sundays
during the summer of 1914, before the outbreak of war.
Street corners, especially outside pubs, were the
favourite locations. Few of these sites were used
exclusively by the Party and some had been in
continuous use since the 1880s.
Sammy Cash
Sunday’s bestSammy Cash
Sunday was the most important day for outdoor
meetings, although on most other nights a Party speaker
would be on the stump somewhere in the capital. The
pre-war Sunday meeting was an integral part of working
class life. Typically the father would be evicted from the
house while the Sunday meal was prepared. Since the
pubs were closed he drifted around the streets looking
for anything to entertain him, which is what the street
meeting typically did. After his meal he might visit the
local during the afternoon for some liquid refreshment.
Afterwards speakers would again be on hand. The typical
starting times of the street meeting were therefore 11.30
a.m. and 7.30 p.m. Meetings in public parks were usually
held in the afternoon (3.30 or 4 pm), for a rather more
‘refined’ clientele taking their Sunday afternoon stroll.
The outdoor Party meeting was managed by the local
branch whose ‘turf’ the site was on and the duty of host
(meeting chairman) was highly competed for. In March,
1908, for example, a dispute arose over the ‘ownership’
of the Clapham Common meeting. Both Battersea and
the short-lived Clapham branch claimed the meeting and
tempers frayed so much that five Battersea members
went so far as to hand in their resignations.
The big names of the era, most notably Jack Fitzgerald
and Alex Anderson – whose main stamping grounds were
Battersea and Tottenham respectively – featured
prominently amongst the speakers but there was a wide
range of others, many now forgotten (as with the
membership generally there was a high degree of
turnover during these years). It was by no means
uncommon for a speaker to do two ‘shifts’, though three
talks in one day would have been very rare even for
Anderson.
While no record exists of what exactly was said at
outdoor meetings during this era it can be safely
assumed from accounts of the time that the
speechmaking was heavy on rhetoric, working perhaps
just as much on an emotional as an intellectual level, and
was most likely lengthy and littered with stock
quotations from key texts on political theory and
Marxian economics. The real importance of such
meetings lay not just in the speech itself but in the small
groups of young workers that gathered afterwards to
argue points raised. In this way outdoor speaking acted
as a valuable spur to working class intellectual self- development.
Harry Young
All this came to an end with the outbreak of the First
World War. Within a short time outdoor meetings
stopped as a result of harassment by pro-war ‘jingoes’.
The last Party listing published during this period
(December 1914) sarcastically noted that “Owing to
various circumstances, including the peculiarly British
sense of fair play of our opponents, the Party’s
Lecture List is considerably curtailed this month.” The following
month outdoor meetings ceased altogether.
In the summer of 1919 regular outdoor meetings
resumed in London, although with a much lower level of
activity than before the war. In August of that year there
were just six Sunday stations. Only four of these proved
to be of any long-term use: Clapham Common, Finsbury
Park, Victoria Park, and West Green Corner in
Tottenham. During the mid-1920s these were the only
locations in the capital operated by the Party but
towards the end of the decade a modest revival occurred
with a few pre-war venues, such as Prince of Wales,
Harrow Road, and several new sites, such as Beresford
Square, Woolwich, coming into use. It was not until after
the 1929 crash though that more widespread outdoor
activity returned. The early 1930s saw a multitude of sites
brought into use, the most important being the Cock
Hotel at East Ham, Whipps Cross at Leyton and
Brockwell Park. A peak was reached during this period in
July 1935 with twelve Sunday stations in use and a further
four on a Saturday. Interestingly, the latter part of the 1930s saw
something of a decrease in regular outdoor meetings. To
some extent this was due to increasing motor traffic,
which rendered certain street locations unusable but was
also due to a relative (though temporary) shortage of
outdoor speakers, this in part resulting from the
introduction of more stringent requirements for those
wishing to take the platform on behalf of the Party (the
introduction of the so-called ‘New Speakers Test’). At this
time the Party increasingly moved its attention to
propaganda in parks, the focus being on five open spaces:
Brockwell Park, Clapham Common, Finsbury Park, Hyde
Park and Victoria Park.
Of these Hyde Park was king. For the SPGB the rise
of Hyde Park was rapid as although meetings had briefly
been held here in pre-war days and in the late 1920s
these had not always been a huge success, and so it was
not until 1937 that Speakers’ Corner again entered the
Party’s itinerary. Hyde Park became fertile ground and by
the summer of 1939 three ‘shifts’ were operating on a
Sunday.
Prolific
The most prolific speakers of this era were Bob
Ambridge, the idiosyncratic Sammy Cash, Solomon
Goldstein (remembered by those in the Party as a
particularly able exponent of Marxian economics),
Clifford Groves, Sid Rubin and the grizzled old Canadian
orator Charlie Lestor – all of them hugely capable
outdoor speakers, though Tony Turner, with his deep
rasping voice and thunderous delivery, was the most
remarkable of all. Turner’s greatest moment was on the
day war broke out, when in Hyde Park he took and held
a crowd of ten thousand or more as he railed against the
impending imperialist slaughter.
continue next column
Bob Ambridge
to 1914 – did not bring an end to outdoor propaganda,
even if for a time it was severely curtailed as a result of
the ‘blackout’ and the Blitz. Until mid-war the parks
continued to be the main venues, though as the war
progressed street meetings resumed their importance. A
big explosion of meetings then came after the end of the
war and by 1949 the SPGB was holding over a thousand
outdoor meetings a year. During this period regular
Sunday meetings in London were held at:
Beresford Square, Woolwich
Clapham Common
Cock Hotel, East Ham
East Street, Walworth
Finsbury Park
Heron Court, Richmond
Hyde Park
Steve Coleman
Islip Street, Kentish Town
Regents Park
Warren Street station
West Green Corner, Tottenham
A further eight sites, including the long-lived Jolly
Butchers Hill venue, were used on Saturday with several
others – such as Trebovir Road, Earl’s Court – used on
week-nights. The most productive was always Hyde Park:
these meetings alone accounted for over 10 percent of
the Party’s new members during the 1940s. Most of the
orators who learnt to ply their trade in the Party during
the 1930s continued to be active, Turner remaining a star
turn, along with Wilmott, Dawe and a band of other
speakers who had joined in the years before the war and
who brought with them a characteristic platform style
distinguished by quick-wittedness, aggression and selfconfidence.
An important innovation around this time was the
popular weekday lunchtime meetings at Tower Hill,
Finsbury Pavement and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with the
latter being perhaps the most rewarding in terms of new
members. Outdoor speaking was a notable feature of
the election campaigns during the immediate post-war
era too. For the 1945 Paddington election, meetings were
held every night outside the Prince of Wales, Harrow
Road, and most nights at a selection of venues
throughout the area, supplementing the big indoor
meetings at the Metropolitan Theatre.
But if the 1940s saw continuous and rapid expansion
in the SPGB outdoor speaking scene, the 1950s saw just
as speedy a decline, especially in London, though Glasgow
and some other provincial venues bucked the trend for
longer. One by one the old haunts were shut down until
by the end of the decade just four Sunday venues
remained in the capital: Hyde Park, East Street in
Walworth, Beresford Square in Woolwich and Clapham
Common. In addition two Saturday stations, Rushcroft
Road in Brixton and Castle Street, Kingston, were
retained.
These last few outdoor speaking venues took a
surprising time to die off and it was not until 1967 that
the SPGB held its last regular street meeting in London.
This left occasional meetings at Earl’s Court, the regular
weekday City meetings – such as those at Tower Hill –
which lasted until 1979, and Hyde Park, where Harry
Young, Steve Coleman and others habitually mounted the
Party platform on Sundays and which still sees regular if
ad hoc use today.
Outside London
Outside the capital SPGB outdoor meetings have been a
feature at a large number of venues in towns and cities
across the UK – with a peak in the 30s and 40s. Glasgow
was a city where the Party’s outdoor speaking activities
were significant from the 1920s onwards, and they
continued to flourish much later than in London,
especially in The Barrows, West Regent Street,
Blythswood Street and Exchange Square. Glasgow branch
produced many fine outdoor orators but Alec Shaw was
truly outstanding.
Other regular provincial venues included Edinburgh
(where The Mound was a regular venue into the 1990s),
Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Southend and
even Welwyn Garden City for a time. A number of cities
in the Midlands and the North including Coventry and
Bradford saw periodic SPGB outdoor speaking activity,
with many others seeing flying visits from Party speakers
trying to drum-up interest. In the North of England
though, only Manchester proved to be really consistent
territory for speakers on the outdoor platform, with
Baritz, Maertens and others regularly holding forth at
Stevenson Square and Platt Fields.
Looking back, the reasons for the sad decline of
street-corner meetings are not hard to find. It is no
surprise that the start of the fall-off in these in the early
1950s, especially in London, coincides almost exactly with
the removal of petrol rationing and in one sense street
meetings during and immediately after the Second World
War were a revival of a form already under sentence of
death: as has been indicated they had been noticeably
curtailed in favour of both indoor meetings and meetings
in parks even in the late 1930s.
The decline of park meetings though is perhaps more
complex. Local authority pressure to ‘tidy up’ the open
spaces may well have been one reason and the related
decline of street meetings another, as people simply got
out of the habit of listening to – and interacting with –
outdoor orators on a daily or weekly basis. In terms of
entertainment, competition from radio, and later
television, was obviously another factor, as was – most
crucially of all – the role of passive receiver of
information foisted upon the working class by the entire
apparatus of the modern mass media.
KEITH SCHOLEY
Discussion meeting
Wednesday 23rd June 8pm
“The collapse of the
welfare state”
Terry Lawlor will open the discussion.
At Head Office, 52 Clapham High Street,
London
(nearest tube station Clapham North)
Contact:
Central London Branch Secretary
Wednesday 23rd June 8pm
“The collapse of the
welfare state”
Terry Lawlor will open the discussion.
At Head Office, 52 Clapham High Street,
London
(nearest tube station Clapham North)
Contact:
Central London Branch Secretary
52 Clapham High St London SW4 7UN
email: spgb@worldsocialism.org
phone: 020 7622 3811
Central London
email: spgb@worldsocialism.org
phone: 020 7622 3811
Central London