All riots start in Kennington?
Or, why a Common became a Park!
First of all, I’m absolutely thrilled that my subscriber list continues to grow…and has now reached the dizzying heights of 400 plus! Thank you to all of you who have signed up recently. I am aware that some of this may be attributed to the ‘Daisy Rae’ bounce, but I’m hoping that you won’t be too disappointed with the lack of baby photos going forward - I did say at the time that I was a bit ashamed to be promoting my substack with my first ever grandchild….and yes, she is doing brilliantly, and I adore her, so thank you for asking!
Anyway, for all the new subscribers wondering what they have got themselves into, and why this stack is called Advocating for the Ignorant, I should explain that something that started just over a year ago as a way of exploring the world of the Macmillan brothers, Victorian publishing pioneers, and as a slow build up to my book which came out last month, is now metamorphosing into a collection of study notes for my next project. This may, or may not, focus on the experiences of young British women between the wars, and how that changed the way they chose to live after the War.
Alexander Macmillan described himself as an Advocate for the Ignorant, which he meant in the nicest possible way: he believed that everyone, not just the wealthy and the Oxbridge-educated, had the right to share in the very best that literature can offer. It seems a good title for a Substack, whether I am writing about Lewis Carroll, Christina Rossetti and Charles Kingsley, or about Dorothy Whipple and Norman Collins.
But occasionally I am delighted to be able to link my two interests, into a neat little Venn diagram. And this week I’m going to do just that, with the London district of Kennington right in the middle.
Some of you will have read last week’s post. about a wonderful novel written in the 1940s by Norman Collins called London Belongs to Me. I did not spend a lot of time describing the plot - and I want to try to avoid too many spoilers now, if I can. But one of the principal dramatic incidents in the book occurs when a petition is organised by the residents of Dulcimer Street, Kennington, to overturn a death penalty. The collection of signatures is chugging along quite slowly until the Rev. Headlam Fynne takes charge.
The heading now read: A PETITION FOR CHRISTIAN CLEMENCY ADDRESSED BY THE OBEDIENT CITIZENS OF LONDON TO THE KING’S MOST GRACIOUS MAJESTY…had the Rev. Headlam Fynne been content with a prayer here and an amendment there, the petition would probably have gone the quiet unheeded way of most petitions. But he was not content. During the terrifyingly short time that remained, he forsook everything - Bible classes, teas and whist drives - and like the Good Shepherd, strove for the one strayed lamb. He lived the part and he dressed the part. In particular he dressed the part. He didn’t wear his lounge suit once. His flowing black robe and his buckle shoes were set out beside his bed each night and he emerged each morning in full habit. Not that it was vanity that prompted him…He knew from long experience that there is nothing that collects a crowd quicker than a clergyman in a habit. It awakens whole centuries of prejudice. But it was the scarlet cross that finally did the trick. Nearly eight feet tall and made of plywood….the sight of an athletic priest dressed like sonething out of the Inquisition and carrying an eight foot cross as bright as a pillar box, naturally caused a sensation.
We know from Collins’ perfect prose that the stage is set for a comic turn, even though the subject seems so deadly serious. Of course the petition acquires ‘a snowball momentum’ of its own across the country. ‘With paste and the help of six large sheets of brown paper’ the 22 foot long petition with some 4,000 signatures was made ready to be taken to the Home Office. Mr Josser, looking at the size of it, suggests taking a taxi, but the Rev. Fynne says they must march, pushing the petition in a pram. And so the procession sets off…
The more I thought about it this week, the more people marching from Kennington to petition the Government began to ring a bell. And I turned to Literature for the People, in fact to 1848, and another Kennington-based popular protest, but on a significantly larger scale: the Chartist Rally.
1848 was the Year of Revolutions. Britain had experienced many decades of increasing poverty and hardship among the working classes, to which neither the Reform Act of 1832 nor the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 had made any great difference. In February, just across the Channel in France, revolution broke out: by March it had spread to Berlin and Vienna. Against this backdrop, the authorities in England observed the rise of the Chartist movement, combining the voices of middle-class liberal intellectuals and the might of working-class protestors, and thought they saw the writing on the wall.
It should be remembered that the demands of the Chartists were pretty modest:
a vote for all men (over 21)
a secret ballot
no property qualification to become an MP
payment for MPs
electoral districts of equal size; and
annual elections for Parliament.
This was not exactly the storming of the Bastille or the abolition of the monarchy. Nevertheless, the authorities were rattled. Events came to a head on 10 April 1848, when a large demonstration was planned. The protestors would march through London to, yes you guessed it, Kennington Common, and then present a petition to Parliament supporting the Chartists’ demands. The Government, in a panic, sent the Royal Family to safety on the Isle of Wight, put the army on standby and swore in eighty-five thousand special constables, to stand alongside the four thousand police and seven thousand soldiers. Extraordinarily, there appears to be a photograph of the event.
So, you might ask, why have we never heard about this huge protest, the riots that followed, the massacre of innocent bystanders, the questions in the House, the Royal Commission and the introduction of placatory legislation? Well, because it wasn’t happening on the Continent: it was in England, and it started to rain. In fact, torrential rain stopped the twenty thousand Chartists’ march from gaining any traction, and the bedraggled protestors all went home again.
I cannot know for certain if Norman Collins had the Chartists in mind when the Rev. Headlam Fynne, Mr Josser, Uncle Henry, Connie, two lay evangelists from the Junior Guild of God and a pale elderly lady that none of them knew, set off for the Home Office. But when he came to describe what happened next, I can’t help but think he did.
Dark and overcast when they left Dulcimer Street, it was already drizzling by the time they reached the Oval…then the drizzle changed to rain without warning. At one moment they were walking through light filmy stuff like reduced spray and, at the next, the raindrops were beating on their faces. The Rev. Headlam Fynne kept shaking himself like a terrier and the elderly lady in the rear said, half to herself and half to Mr Josser: ‘It’s nothing. It’s just sent to try us.’ But the elderly lady was wrong. It was far from nothing. Almost as she said the words the real storm broke. The rain came pelting down monsoon fashion…Fynne turned and addressed his followers. ‘This is too much,’ he said. ‘We must…’ He did not finish his sentence because at that moment he was run into. Uncle Henry, head down, had been ploughing his way through the downpour, stopping for no-one. The front of the pram, the hard part, drove full into the leader. Indeed, it was only the plywood cross that saved him.
Needless to say, none of this rain does the pram, or the petition any good at all. Will the loyal few ever reach the Home Office? read the book to find out…
The Rally in 1848 might have ended in soggy anticlimax, but it had consequences, some of them with political significance. Up from his rectory in Hampshire to observe the fray and hoping to calm the violent tendencies of the crowd had come a little-known radical sympathizer, a twenty-nine-year-old parson and Cambridge graduate, Charles Kingsley, determined to address the marchers at Kennington Common. As a schoolboy at Clifton he had witnessed the Bristol Riots of 1831 and had been scarred by the spectacle. Kingsley was, like the Macmillan brothers, a disciple of the Reverend Frederick Maurice, and had recently been appointed to teach literature and history at Maurice’s Queen’s College for young women in London.
On his way to the Common Kingsley called on a radical young lawyer, John Ludlow, who was just back from observing the Paris riots. Kingsley held a letter of introduction from Maurice. For a while they sat and talked, sharing ideas and political ambitions. When they eventually set off for Kennington, they met the bedraggled protesters heading home. The two men returned to Maurice’s house in Queen Square to continue their discussions, and thus began the grouping which was to be the spearhead of the Christian Socialist Movement in England for the next ten years. Their passion for the cause was not dented by the sad turnout for the march, and Maurice, Kingsley and Ludlow vowed to wage a battle on behalf of the poor and disenfranchised through journalism and literature. Literacy and education for all must come before democracy could be achieved. The movement would need an enthusiastic publisher: luckily, Maurice was already well-acquainted with the Macmillan brothers and the rest is (publishing) history.
The other ‘consequence’ of the failed Chartist March is a particularly English reaction. The authorities considered the ‘close shave’ they had experienced, and determined to make sure nothing like it could happen again. So, they took it out on Kennington Common. Originally this was a large open area of land where local people exercised ‘rights of common’ such as grazing livestock. It had become a gathering place for demonstrations, protests and speeches, because it was outside the jurisdiction of the City of London. In 1852 the Common was enclosed, and under royal sponsorship recreated as a Public Park, which opened two years later. There could be no more demonstrations or ‘vulgar recreations’ without permission.
Kennington is very little distance from Westminster and the seat of Government, just a mile and a half across the river. It is now rather a lovely area, with pretty residential squares, and of course the Oval, the home of Surrey County Cricket since 1845. But just a mile and half can seem a very long way when you are trying to attract the attention of the politicians. There is a moment when the Kennington petition party are close to losing heart, standing on Westminster Bridge under ‘the sudden wide expanse of black heaven and the smooth sliding water underneath, isolating them. Even to themselves they seemed a pathetically small contingent to go challenging the State.’ In more recent times, Kennington Park has once again become a gathering point for political marches. There is a very active Friends of Kennington Park Society and the gardens are kept beautifully.
But my final illustration is this:
This beautiful memorial was unveiled in 2006: it commemorates the more than 50, may be more than 100, victims of the Blitz who were killed in October 1940 when a bomb destroyed an air-raid shelter in the Park. It takes the form of a rough slab of Caithness stone, and bears an inscription from poet Maya Angelou:
History despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived but if faced with courage need not be lived again.
The world seems a very scary place to me at the moment. I hope we will not let a little rain dampen our spirits in the months to come, but find the courage to face our future.
PS This week I wrote the Diary piece in the New Statesman, and again managed to combine the Macmillans with some current concerns close to my heart. Here is a link, but if you would like to read it and can’t get past the paywall, reply to this in the comments and I can send you a copy
https://www.newstatesman.com/diary/2024/06/opening-the-gates-of-oxbridge
So interesting! And that photo is amazing to see...
Such an interesting essay, thank you Sarah.