Karl Marx and his family lived some five years in what was then London's "German quarter" of Soho. This plaque marks the two rooms in 28 Dean Street where he lived -- now above a famous Italian restaurant.
Ho Chi Minh worked at the Cartlon Hotel
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Joseph Stalin lodged here in 1907 when he came to London to attend the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Tower House was one of six hostels built to provide cheap and clean accomodation for people who flocked to London looking for work.
Stalin paid sixpence a night for his fortnight's stay at Tower House -- described by the author Jack London as a "monster doss house" in People of the Abyss. Tower House is still standing in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel. The RSDLP Congress met across the road in Whitechapel Road.
Further info
Spoiler:
This block of luxury flats is called Tower House and is yet another example of the changing nature of the East End. Despite its modern look, originally this building was opened in the 1880's as a 'poor man's hotel' by philanthropist Lord Rowton. He built it to provide cheap and clean accommodation for thousands of working men who were flocking to London and were otherwise forced to live in disease-ridden lodging houses. This was the fifth 'Rowton House' to be built in London and was the largest, with 816 beds for men.
Tower House became temporary home to many immigrants arriving in the East End fleeing persecution or just trying to make a better life. For these men Tower House was an affordable first stop. According to Lord Rowton the building was 'fit for an archbishop'. However, the American author Jack London who wrote about his stay here in 1902 in his book 'People of the Abyss' disagreed, infamously christening Tower House the 'Great monster doss house'. Tellingly, whilst staying with some of the workingmen here he wondered 'what evil they had done to be punished so'.
Successive waves of immigration also brought many radicals and political activists to the East End and to Tower House too, to the horror of the establishment. The East End as they saw it was home to three great evils, the poor, immigrants and radicals. Russian revolutionaries were among the famous visitors to the East End. Members of the RSDLP (Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party), later to become the Bolsheviks, met in 1907 at Hoxton Church, just north of Brick Lane to discuss Bolshevik leadership. Although certainly no progressive, Stalin was one of the infamous guests who stayed here in Tower House.
Racial and religious boundaries blurred as left wing schools of thought flourished here from the 1880s onwards. Their internationalism stands out in contrast to the nationalism of the establishment at this time who, desperate to maintain the British Empire and stave off competitors were busy subjugating new peoples during their scramble to carve up Africa: people they saw as less than human. For the establishment, the East End was also a jungle of racially inferior stock and dangerous minds.
One immigrant provides an interesting example of how radical internationalist politics –in this instance of the anarchist variety – were not shaped by attitudes to race, religion or nationality. Rudolf Rocker was a German-born Catholic, and when he came to London in 1895 he was appalled by the poverty he witnessed in the predominantly Jewish East End. He joined the Jewish anarchist newspaper Arbeter Fraynd, (The Worker's Friend) and became a regular speaker at radical meetings. Rocker played a role in the garment workers' strike of 1906 against the desperate levels of pay and conditions. In 1912, when 13,000 mainly immigrant workers went on strike for better conditions, Jewish textile workers showed solidarity with the mainly Irish Catholic dockers who were also on strike for better pay. Jewish families took in the children of the dockers to provide them with the food, shelter and clothing their own families could ill afford.
These early forms of solidarity were dashed to some extent by a wave of nationalism when World War I broke out in 1914. Even so, the establishment found it hard to popularise ideas of fighting for king and country against a foreign foe; as for many the foe were their miserly employers here in Britain. The Government had to introduce conscription in January 1916 to get the numbers it needed to fight.
By the end of World War I Rocker had been deported, the Arbeter Fraynd suppressed by the government and anarchism had lost ground to Marxism with the success of the Russian Revolution in 1917. However, the influence of Stalin's policy of 'socialism within one country', and the spread of nationalism among left-wing groups more generally meant there were few prepared to argue for an internationalist perspective.
This was a period in which nationalism became more than just the thinking of the elite but it took the Second World War to really encourage people to get the flags out for a Britain under threat. Indeed by 1945, the Communist Party of Great Britain had become one of the most nationalist parties and a vocal supporter of immigration controls.
Tower House was recently redeveloped into these luxury flats by successful Cypriot migrant John Christodoulou, whose Yianis Group is the second largest freeholder at Canary Wharf, where its assets include the Four Seasons hotel. In all Christodoulou, now aged 40, is worth £750 million (according to the times rich list 2006). It is ironic that these flash apartments used to house the East End's desperate poor and shows what is possible. WORLDwrite would argue that today's progressives might do well to take a leaf out of the old internationalists' book and fight for more of these developments for all to enjoy.
Frederick Engels died on 5th August 1895 in London but his ashes were scattered into the sea by Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling on his instructions. Engels wanted only to be remembered for his partnership with Karl Marx and their practical and theorectical work to build the revolutionary socialist movement. His ashes were cast into the sea at Beachy Head, near Eastbourne, a favourite spot for both Marx and Engels.
Yusuf Dadoo South African apartheid fighter, also buried in HighGate
Radicalised in Edinburgh and London. In 1936 he completed his medical degree and returned to South Africa. Yusuf joined the Communist Party of South Africa (CPSA) in 1941.
In 1908, the National Party (NP) was elected at the all-White 1948 general election. The NP immediately began implementing a formal policy of apartheid. In 1949, they also introduced the Suppression of Communism Bill to ban the South African Communist Party, causing the CPSA to pre-emptively disband and go underground.[2] In 1950, Yusuf was elected president of the SAIC, which promptly joined with the ANC in organising a defiance campaign against unjust laws.[2] Yusuf was the deputy chair of the planning council, headed by Walter Sisulu, and the two were mainly responsible for the report around which the campaign was organised.[2]
By 1952, the government responded to the Defiance Campaign by introducing more oppressive legislation. Dadoo was banned from attending all gatherings and ordered to resign from the SAIC and the Defiance Campaign planning committee.[4] In 1953, Dadoo and others secretly reconstituted the CPSA as the South African Communist Party (SACP), with Yusuf serving as chairman of the central committee.[4] That same year, Yusuf was further banned from participating in fifteen protest organisations.[4] Under these bans, he was unable to openly participate on the Congress Alliance and the writing of the Freedom Charter, although he continued to be consulted in secret, his advice being greatly respected.[2] In 1957, he was explicitly banned from speaking to more than one person at a time.[4]
In 1960, the Sharpeville Massacre prompted the government to declare a state of national emergency and issue warrants for the arrest of most known leaders of protest organisations. Dadoo evaded arrest and operated underground for several months, until the SACP, in consultation with the SAIC, decided to smuggle him out of the country to act as an international spokesperson for the struggle. Dadoo strongly disagreed with the idea, but was overruled, and finally agreed to go into exile in London.
In 1972, the then-chairman of the SACP, J. B. Marks, died, and Dadoo was unanimously elected in his place.[2] He continued in this role, as chairman in exile, until his death.
Engels Lived here from 1870-1894 in Regents Park, London
Stalin Avenue located at ME5 0EY is in Chatham, Kent flanked by Churchill and Roosevelt Avenues.
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STALIN ROAD (CO2 8SW) in Colchester, Essex leading from the more grander sounding Roosevelt Way and Churchill Way.
This giant iron monument stands on a hill outside Langholm in the Scottish Lowlands. Hugh McDiarmid was the pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, communist, Scottish nationalist and arguably the greatest figure in 20th century Scottish literature. It is designed as an "open book" in tribute to McDiarmid's poetry and writings during his long life.
Christopher Murray Grieve, the son of a postman, was born in Langholm in 1892. He joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1908. He was a member of the Communist Party from 1934 until 1938 -- when he left over disagreements on the Scottish national question.
A founder member of the National Party of Scotland he rejoined the Communist Party in 1956 in support of the Soviet intervention to crush the counter-revolution in Hungary. He remained a member until his death on 9th September 1978.
Poem - On A Raised Beach
Spoiler:
All is lithogenesis—or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,
Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?
What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,
Pillar of creation engouled in me?
What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,
Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?
Deep conviction or preference can seldom
Find direct terms in which to express itself.
Today on this shingle shelf
I understand this pensive reluctance so well,
This not discommendable obstinacy,
These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,
These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be
Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred
Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago
But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion,
Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on the Earth.
I too lying here have dismissed all else.
Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,
From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight
Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight.
I would scorn to cry to any easier audience
Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response.
I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is;
I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does;
Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me
As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones.
I must begin with these stones as the world began.
Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran?
To a bird, and to myself, a man?
And what if I do, and further?
I shall only have gone a little way to go back again
And be like a fleeting deceit of development,
Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed
All but all of evolution, unmoved by it,
(Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?)
As the essential life of mankind in the mass
Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet.
International Brigade Memorial, London
Designed by Ian Walters and unveiled in 1985 the inscription reads : "In honour of over 2100 men and women volunteers who left these shores to fight side by side with the Spanish people in their heroic struggle against Fascism 1936-1939. Many were wounded and maimed, 526 were killed, their example inspired the world. "
The quotations read: "They went because their open eyes could see no other way" and "Yet Freedom! Yet thy banner, torn but flying, streams like the thunder-storm against the wind".
International Brigade Memorial, Glasgow
This statue is dedicated to Dolores Ibarruri the Spanish Basque communist leader known for her brilliant oratory during the Civil War. Born in 1895 joined the Spanish Socialist Party in 1917 and later was a founder of the Communist Party of Spain. She wrote for several communist newspapers uner the pen-name of "La Pasionaria" (Passion Flower) and was elected to the Spanish parliament in 1936. She lived in exile in Moscow until the death of the fascist dictator General Franco, coming home in 1977 and re-elected to parliament that year at the age of 81. She died in 1989.
Designed by Arthur Dooley and erected in 1977 the inscription reads: "The City of Glasgow and the British Labour Movement pay tribute to the courage of those men and women who went to Spain to fight Fascism 1936-1939.
2,100 Volunteers went from Britain, 534 were killed, 65 of whom came from Glasgow. https://www.theglasgowstory.com/images/TGSA00871_m.jpg
This commemorative red plaque is above 3-5 Dock St, just off Cable Street
Hundreds of thousands of anti-fascists took to the streets of London's East End on Sunday October 4th 1936 to stop Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts marching through a prodominently Jewish part of London. The Communist Party played a major part in the mobilisation along with the Independent Labour Party and the Jewish Ex-Servicemen's Association.
On the eve of the Mosley march the Daily Worker warned that "The fascists are pouring out unimaginable filth against the Jews. The attack on the Jews has been the well-known device of every bloodthirsty, reactionary, unpopular regime for centuries". The issue was "not merely a question of elementary human rights...the attack on the Jews is the beginning of the attack to wipe out the socialist movement, trade unionism and democracy in Britain".
On the day some 3,000 Blackshirts and thousands of police were met by a hostile crowd who had erected barricades to stop the fascists marching. After hours of clashes with the police and many arrests the police told Mosley the march would have to be abandoned. https://d2kdkfqxnvpuu9.cloudfront.net/i ... /49039.jpg
Ruth First and Joe Slovo
13 Lyme Street, Camden, London was the house where two prominent South African communists lived in London exile.
Two leading members of the South African communist party lived in London exile from 1966 to 1978. The couple were high-profile members of the African National Congress and their house in Camden became a centre for the anti-apartheid struggle.
In 1982 Ruth First was killed by a parcel bomb, sent by the racist South African regime, in Mozambique where she was teaching.
Joe Slovo became the first white member of the ANC national executive council in 1985 and he was elected general secretary of the South African Communist Party in 1986.
Slovo lived to see the end of apartheid, returning to South Africa in 1990 and elected to parliament in the first free elections of 1994. He was appointed Minister of Housing in the Mandela government, a post he held until his death in 1995
Guy Burgess died in Moscow in 1963.
The 1930s was the decade of the Great Slump. Millions of workers in Britain and the rest of the capitalist world lost their jobs and were driven to poverty. In Europe the rich were turning to open dictatorship and fascism to crush the communist and workers movements. A fascist dictatorship had already been established in Italy with the support of the monarchy in the Twenties. In 1933 Hitler's Nazis came to power. Three years later Spanish fascists and reactionaries tried to seize power plunging the country into terrible civil war.
In British universities, then largely the prerogative of the ruling class, some students embraced the communist ideal. Some joined the workers movement, others fought in Spain. And at Cambridge a group of students took the principled decision to struggle for peace by working as agents of the Soviet Union.
The story of Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt is well-known. What perhaps is not known is that two of them, Burgess and Maclean, now lie buried in their home country.
An assiduous networker, he embraced left-wing politics at Cambridge and joined the British Communist Party. He was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935, on the recommendation of the future double-agent Harold "Kim" Philby. After leaving Cambridge, Burgess worked for the BBC as a producer, briefly interrupted by a short period as a full-time MI6 intelligence officer, before joining the Foreign Office in 1944.
At the Foreign Office, Burgess acted as a confidential secretary to Hector McNeil, the deputy to Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary. This post gave Burgess access to secret information on all aspects of Britain's foreign policy during the critical post-1945 period, and it is estimated that he passed thousands of documents to his Soviet controllers. In 1950 he was appointed second secretary to the British Embassy in Washington, a post from which he was sent home after repeated misbehaviour. Although not at this stage under suspicion, Burgess nevertheless accompanied Maclean when the latter, on the point of being unmasked, fled to Moscow in May 1951.
Burgess's whereabouts were unknown in the West until 1956, when he appeared with Maclean at a brief press conference in Moscow, claiming that his motive had been to improve Soviet-West relations. He never left the Soviet Union; he was often visited by friends and journalists from Britain, most of whom reported on a lonely and empty existence. He remained unrepentant to the end of his life, rejecting the notion that his earlier activities represented treason.
Burgess was also responsible for revealing to the Soviets the existence of the Information Research Department (IRD), a secret wing of the Foreign Office which dealt with Cold War and pro-colonial propaganda, though Burgess was quickly fired from the IRD after being accused of coming into work drunk.[3]
Guy Burgess sunning himself on the Black Sea
Guy Burgess's final resting place St John Evangelist, West Meon, Hampshire
His ashes were returned to Britain for burial in his family's plot to the north of the church tower. The grave is marked by a cross erected in the memory of his father who died in 1924. On the side is the inscription "Guy Francis De Moncy Burgess,d.30 August 1963".
Donald Maclean
In 1934, his last year at Cambridge, Maclean became an agent of the Soviet Union's People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, abbreviated from the Russian as NKVD. He was then instructed to give up political activity and enter the Diplomatic Service.[7] He graduated with a first in Modern Languages. After spending a year preparing for the Civil Service examinations, Maclean passed with first-class honours.[8] At the Final Board, Maclean was asked by one of the panel interviewing him, whether he had favoured communism while a university student, ostensibly because the panel knew of a trip he had taken to Moscow in his second year at Cambridge. Maclean said: "At Cambridge, I was initially favourable to it but I am little by little getting disenchanted with it." His apparent sincerity satisfied members of the panel, which included a family friend, Lady Violet Bonham Carter.
On 24 September 1938, Maclean took up a post as Third Secretary at the British embassy in Paris. In the spring of 1939, an Anglo-French attempt was made to include the Soviet Union into the "peace front" that was intended to deter German aggression. Because of the French involvement in these Moscow negotiations, the telegrams passing between embassies allowed Maclean access to much information. Maclean kept Moscow informed in regard to relations between Germany and the British Empire, on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other, as the French foreign minister Georges Bonnet worked to end French security commitments in Eastern Europe. He also kept Moscow informed about the development of Anglo-French plans for intervention in the war between Finland and the Soviet Union.[11]
Maclean went to New York on a weekly basis.[19] Maclean was considered to be an exceptionally hard worker at the embassy as his fellow diplomat Robert Cecil remembered in 1989: "No task was too hard for him; no hours were too long. He gained the reputation of one who would always take over a tangled skein from a colleague who was sick, or going on leave, or simply less zealous. In this way he was able to manoeuvre himself into the hidden places that were of the most interest to the NKVD".[19]
Towards the end of that period Maclean acted as Secretary of the Combined Policy Committee on atomic energy matters.[19] He was Moscow's main source of information about US/UK/Canada atomic energy policy development. Although Maclean did not transmit technical data on the atom bomb, he reported on its development and progress, particularly the amount of plutonium (used in the Fat Man bombs) available to the United States. As the British representative on the American–British–Canadian Council on the sharing of atomic secrets, he was able to provide the Soviet Union with information from Council meetings. This gave Soviet scientists the ability to predict the number of bombs that could be built by the Americans. In addition to atomic energy matters, Maclean's responsibilities at the Washington embassy included civil aviation, bases, post-hostilities planning, Turkey and Greece, NATO and Berlin.
In 1948 Maclean was appointed Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Cairo. He was at that time the youngest Counsellor in the British Foreign Service. As soon as he arrived Maclean began to have problems with his KGB contact, who arranged their meetings in an unsatisfactory manner. Maclean suggested that Melinda should pass his information to the wife of the Soviet resident at the hairdresser's and Modin reported that "Melinda was quite prepared to do this."[20]
Cairo was an important post, the key to British power in the area and a central point in Anglo-American planning for pre-emptive war with the Soviet Union.[18] At this time Britain was the major power in the Middle East with troops in both the Canal Zone and nearby Palestine and airbases in the Canal Zone from which American atomic bombers could reach the Soviet Union. In regard to Egypt itself, British policy was one of laissez-faire or non-interference with the corruption surrounding King Farouk. Maclean disagreed strongly and felt that Britain should encourage reform which alone, in his opinion, could save the country from communism. "And, except to stress its dangers, that was all I ever heard Donald say about communism," recalled Geoffrey Hoare, the News Chronicle Cairo correspondent.[21]
Maclean was considered the key official in the Cairo Embassy, specifically responsible for coordinating US/UK war planning and, under the Ambassador, relations with the Egyptian government.[22] By now, his double life was beginning to affect Maclean. He began drinking, brawling and talking about his double life. After a drunken episode which resulted in the wrecking of an American embassy staffer's apartment, Melinda told the ambassador that Donald was ill and needed leave to see a London doctor.[21] It is possible that this series of events was contrived to provide a way for Maclean to return to England as American intelligence was getting close to identifying Maclean as a Soviet agent by means of the Venona messages. At this time Melinda Maclean was having an affair with an Egyptian aristocrat, with whom she travelled to Spain when Donald Maclean went to England.
After a few months' rest, Maclean recovered from the troubles of his Egyptian period and Melinda Maclean agreed to return to the marriage, immediately becoming pregnant. Maclean's career did not seem to suffer from the events in Egypt. He was promoted and made head of the American Department in the Foreign Office, perhaps its most important assignment for an officer at Maclean's level. This allowed him to continue to keep Moscow informed about Anglo-American relations and planning. The most important report Maclean sent to Moscow concerned the emergency summit in Washington in December 1950 between the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and U.S. President Harry S. Truman.[23] After China entered the Korean War, there were demands both outside and inside the U.S. government, most notably by General Douglas MacArthur, that the U.S attack China with nuclear weapons. The British were strongly opposed to both the use of nuclear weapons and escalating the war by attacking China, and Attlee had gone to Washington with the aim of stopping both. Truman reassured Attlee at the Washington summit that he would not allow the use of nuclear weapons or take the war outside of Korea.[23] Maclean provided a transcript of what was said at the Truman-Attlee summit to Yuri Modin, the "control" of the Cambridge spy ring.[23] Meanwhile, the American and British governments were concluding that Maclean was indeed a Soviet agent, a process carefully tracked by fellow Soviet operative Kim Philby in Washington.
Donald Duart Maclean died in Moscow in 1983. His ashes were laid to rest alongside the graves of his father and mother at Trinity Church, Penn. Their names are engraved on a granite Celtic cross.
