When Max Levitas Stormed The Savoy
Remembering Max Levitas who died last Friday at one hundred and three years old, we present Matthew Sweet’s account of when Max and a band of East End Communist revolutionaries occupied the Savoy Hotel in 1940 from his book The West End Front.
Max Levitas
There were forty of them. There were eighty. There were a hundred. They marched. They sauntered. They were angry. They were bewildered. They came with two dogs and they came with none. Theirs was a daring act that saved thousands of lives. Or it was a pretty piece of propaganda, gift-wrapped for the Führer. What happened beneath the Savoy Hotel on 14th September 1940, the eighth night of the Blitz, depended on the position of the observer: whether she or he was Red or anti-Red; East Ender or West Ender; dreaming of revolution or restoration.
That Saturday night, when those forty or eighty or a hundred arrived at the doors of the hotel – with their dogs, or dogless – a small army of journalists was on the premises for a briefing by the Ministry of Information. Few, however, wrote about their uninvited fellow guests until the war was safely over. The government also maintained a public silence on the story, despite the urgent Cabinet discussion held the following Monday morning – a discussion with sinister undertones. But old comrades, years later, made that West End outing into a famous victory, a second Battle of Cable Street. It worked its way into plays and novels, into the mythology of the British Left. And though no horses charged and no batons swung, the Savoy Hotel invasion was the most serious political demonstration of the war – and dramatic evidence that conflict with Germany did not bring the class war to an end.
Max Levitas has spent most of his long life on the front line of that conflict. He was part of the famous human barricade that halted the Blackshirts’ progress through the East End in October 1936. He stood his ground at Brady Mansions during a twenty-one-week rent strike – brought to an end only by the government’s decision to freeze rents for the duration of the war. He was one of the dozen Communist councillors elected to the Borough of Stepney in 1945, during that giddy moment when the electorate could still see the avuncular side of Joe Stalin.
He was there in 1991 when the Communist Party of Great Britain voted for dissolution and secured victory in the long war of attrition against itself. He was there, too, on that Blitz- struck Saturday night in 1940, shouldering the red banner of the Stepney Young Communist League as his group of demon- strators marched from the Embankment towards the silvered canopy of the Savoy. They marched for better air-raid shelters in the East End. They marched against the myth that the Luftwaffe had brought equality of suffering to Britain. And they received their marching orders from a series of urgent editorials in the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker: ‘If you live in the Savoy Hotel you are called by telephone when the sirens sound and then tucked into bed by servants in a luxury bomb-proof shelter,’ the newspaper asserted. ‘But if you live in Paradise Court you may find yourself without a refuge of any kind.’ And above these words, in thick bold print: ‘The people must act.’
Max Levitas nodded in agreement when I read the article back to him. ‘The surface shelters protected you from shrapnel, from flak, but not much else,’ he reflects. ‘If a bomb fell on one of those it would collapse and kill everybody in it. The Communist Party argued for deep shelters. But the National Government wouldn’t listen. They wouldn’t even open the Underground. It was easy to ignore that message if you were sitting in the basement of a very nice hotel. So we decided to march on one.’ I asked him why they chose the Savoy. Max Levitas smiled a tolerant smile. ‘It was the nearest.’
I met Max Levitas at the Idea Store, that gleaming cultural institution planted in the East End to compensate locals for the assimilation of their much-loved public library into the Whitechapel Art Gallery. He was a small, cloth-capped nonagenarian, wrapped tightly in a raincoat and muffler. Standing on the studded purple rubber floor of the foyer, he looked like a preserved fragment of the old Stepney. It was a chilling morning in February, and he could spare me an hour before he went for his Turkish bath – a weekly ritual since the 1920s, when his father took him to the long-vanished Schewik steam rooms on Brick Lane. We took the lift to the top-floor café, secured two cups of tea and a table with a view of the bristling City skyline, and he told the story of his association with the area: how his parents fled the Lithuanian pogroms in 1912 and made landfall in Dublin, where Max was born three years later; how his father took the family first to Glasgow, and finally to Stepney, where work could be found among a supportive community of Jewish exiles. History radicalised those members of the Levitas clan it did not destroy: Max’s Aunt Sara and her family were burned to death in the synagogue of the Lithuanian shtetl of Akmian; Max’s father became a leading member of the distinctly Semitic, distinctly Red-tinged International Tailors and Pressers’ Union; Max’s elder brother, Maurice, fought against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War; Max gave his youth to the Communist Party of Great Britain and was name-checked by Oswald Mosley in a speech denouncing the enemies of British Fascism.
The organisers of the Savoy invasion shared a similar ideological background: they were all revolutionaries. ‘And they’re all dead,’ Max sighed. ‘Some were clothing workers. Some were bootmakers. Some were dockers.’ It was an inventory of lost trades. The first names he sifted from his memory were two stevedores, Ted Jones and Jack Murphy, veterans of pre-war campaigns for unemployment relief. The rest comprised a knot of men from the Stepney Tenants’ Defence League, which organised rent strikes against slum landlords in the East End: George Rosen, its bullish secretary, known as ‘Tubby’; Solly Klotnick, a furrier and a veteran of the Battle of Cable Street; Solomon Frankel, a clothing worker who took a bullet in Spain that robbed him of the use of his right hand. Michael Shapiro, a wiry young academic from the London School of Economics. At the head of the group stood Phil Piratin, Communist councillor for Spitalfields, chief spokesperson of the invaders, and the author of the most widely read account of their night at the Savoy. His memoir Our Flag Stays Red (1948) puts seventy in the hotel lobby, among them a number of children and pregnant women.
Max’s memories were different. ‘There were forty of us,’ he affirmed. ‘I’m sure of that.’ I ask if there were any dogs. He shook his head. ‘No dogs,’ he said. ‘It was the Savoy.’
Portraits of Max Levitas copyright © Phil Maxwell
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Schrodinger Takes Charge
I shall be reading from THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY, A MEMOIR OF A FAVOURITE CAT at 7pm on Saturday 17th November as part of the Write Idea Festival at the Whitechapel Idea Store. Click here for free tickets
The sphinx
Over six months have passed since Schrodinger arrived in Spitalfields. These days, he comes and goes as he pleases through his cat flap, and knows how to open any door by leaping up and applying nimble pressure at just the right spot below the handle. Habitually now he settles down in the centre of the room or upon the arm of the sofa with his shoulders spread and his front legs extended in an expression of ownership. I call this familiar position ‘the sphinx.’
Like the sphinx Schrodinger retains his mystery, yet he opens his heart sometimes. If he discovers me at my desk, he delights to run and jump into the space between me and the back of the chair, rubbing himself against my spine and purring. There have been rare occasions when he has climbed around to sit upon my lap. Similarly, if he sees me lying upon the sofa with my head resting at one end against a cushion, he will leap onto the arm and rub himself against my hair, settling there snuggled against the back of my head. Sometimes he even climbs along the sofa to lie in the narrow space between me and the edge, before moving onto my stomach and cuddling there to feel the warmth of my body.
Yet Schrodinger’s personality has not softened. Like some latter day Joseph Merceron, he is subjugating the neighbourhood. I have become aware of fewer cats in the vicinity as he has extended his manor although – thankfully – he has made an exception for a neighbour’s pair of house cats, granting them free passage in his exclusion zone. Bare patches around Schrodinger’s neck and chest attest to his fights, where bites and scratches have formed red scabs and then taken off chunks of fur as he sheds the scabs before the fur grows again. It troubles me to wonder what injuries he inflicts on his combatants.
For some time, it was a matter of anxiety what might happen if Schrodinger were to confront a neighbour’s Staffordshire terrier, a lean and muscular young specimen. One day, I heard the sound of the confrontation that I dreaded and ran to the window fearing the worst. But I saw Schrodinger sitting alone in his sphinx position with his arms extended, eyes shining and his jaw clenched in an expression of ferocity. Indoors, I could hear the dog whimpering in fear and my neighbour comforting the poor creature. I realised that during Schrodinger’s years in Shoreditch, he had become familiar with the dogs belonging to the down-and-outs who frequented the church. Consequently, dogs prove no challenge to him. After that, I had to restrain Schrodinger physically twice by grabbing his back legs to prevent him climbing into the neighbour’s window to beat up their dog when they left it alone in the house.
In an attempt to encourage Schrodinger’s playful nature and educate him in the ways of house cats, I bought him six ping pong balls and left them on the carpet but he regarded them with disinterest. Yet I know he is happy because he always enters the house with his tail held up and runs to his dish of biscuits where he hunkers down to crunch enthusiastically until his hunger is satiated. Next he moves to his water dish and extends his long, lizard-like tongue, unfurling it down and lapping up the liquid in a quick repetitive gesture.
I have discovered the most effective means to puncture Schrodinger’s implacable nature is to brush him. It is by providing this service that I command his full attention. He has realised at last that I have a function. At first, I brush him gently on his head and then he stretches out his front legs as I brush his back. After I have brushed his chest and legs, he rolls onto his back so that I may brush his chest and belly. This inspires an abandoned frenzy of joy in which he rolls around on the carpet with his legs extended and his eyes gleaming in delight. He may even play with the ping pong balls afterwards, just so that I am not disappointed.
Thus Schrodinger has established his territory, his means of ingress and egress, his supply of food and water. He has company, he has grooming and a warm place to sleep. This is how Schrodinger took charge in Spitalfields.
You may like to read my earlier stories about Schrodinger
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Alice Pattullo’s Calendar
Favourite illustrator Alice Pattullo kindly sent me a copy of her modest concertina-fold pocket calendar for next year and I was entranced by the beauty of it, and by her inspired choices of flowers, fruit and vegetables for each month
Illustrations copyright © Alice Pattullo
Click here to buy a copy of Alice Pattullo’s IN THE GARDEN 2019 Calendar for £5
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So Long, Max Levitas
I report the passing of an East End hero and veteran of the Battle of Cable St, Max Levitas who died peacefully on Friday at the fine age of one hundred and three
Max Levitas became an East End hero when he was arrested in 1934, at the age of nineteen years old, for writing anti-Fascist slogans on Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. “There were two of us, we did it at midnight and we wrote ‘All out on September 9th to fight Fascism,’ ‘Down with Fascism’ and ‘Fight Fascism,’ on Nelson’s Column in whitewash,” he told me, his eyes shining with pleasure, still fired up with ebullience, “And afterwards we went to Lyons Corner House to have something to eat and wash our hands, but when we had finished our tea we decided to go back to see how good it looked, and we got arrested – the police saw the paint on our shoes.”
On September 9th, Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists, was due to speak at a rally in Hyde Park but – as Max was happy to remind me – he was drowned out by the people of London who converged to express their contempt. It was both fortuitous and timely that the Times reprinted Max’s slogans on September 7th, two days before the rally, in the account of his appearance at Bow St Magistrates Court, thereby spreading the message.
Yet this event was merely a precursor to the confrontation with Fascists that took place in the East End two years later in October 1936, which became known as the Battle of Cable St, and in which Max is proud to have played a part. It was a story he told as an inspirational example of social solidarity in the face of prejudice and hatred. One day, as we sat in a quiet corner of the Whitechapel Library, watching the rain fall upon the street market outside, he imparted the experience to me at first hand, as one of last left of those who were there.
Politics had always been personal for Max Levitas, based upon family experience of some of the ugliest events of the twentieth century. His father Harry fled from Lithuania and his mother Leah from Latvia in 1913, both escaping the anti-semitic pogroms of Tsarist Russia. They met in Dublin and married but, on the other side of Europe, Harry’s sister Sara was burned to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan, and Leah’s sister Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga.
“My father was a tailor and a trade unionist,” Max explained in the lively Dublin brogue that still coloured his speech even after more than eighty years in the East End. “He formed an Irish/Jewish trade union and then employers blacklisted him, making sure he could never get a job,” Max continued with a philosophical grin, “The only option was to leave Dublin and we lived in Glasgow from 1927 until 1930, but my father had two sisters in London, so we came here to Durward St in Whitechapel in 1931 and stayed ever since.”
With this background, you could appreciate the passionate concern of Max – when he was nineteen years old and secretary of the Mile End Young Communist League – at a time when the British Government was supporting the Fascist General Franco in the Spanish Civil War. “Even after Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1931, the British Government was developing arms with Germany,” Max informed me, widening his eyes in condemnation and bringing events into vivid reality that I had viewed only as history until he filled them with personal reality.
“I was working as a tailor’s presser in a small workshop in Commercial St at the time. Mosley wanted to march through Whitechapel because it was where a large number of Jewish people lived and worked, and I knew the only way to stop him was to have unity of the people. I approached a number of unions, Jewish organisations and the Communist League to band together against the Fascists but although they agreed what I was doing was right, they wouldn’t support me.
But I give credit to the huge number of members of the Jewish and Irish communities and others who turned out that day, October the fourth, 1936. There were thousands that came together in Aldgate, and when we heard that Mosley’s intention was to march along Cable St from Tower Hill into Whitechapel, large numbers of people went to Cable St and barricades were set up. The police attempted to clear Cable St with horses, so he march could go ahead, but the people of Cable St fought back and the police had to give in.
At three o’clock, we heard that police had decided that the march would not take place, because if it did a number of people would be killed. The Fascists were defeated by the ordinary people of Stepney, people who emptied buckets of water and chamber pots out of their houses, and marbles into the street. This was how they stopped Mosley marching through the East End of London. If he had been able to do so, more people would have joined him and he would have become stronger.”
Max Levitas spoke of being at the centre of a definitive moment in the history of the East End in 1936 when three hundred thousand people came together to form a human chain – in the face of three thousand fascists with an escort of ten thousand police – to assert the nature of the territory as a place where Fascism and racism are unacceptable. It was a watershed in resistance to Fascism in Europe and the slogan that echoed around Stepney and Whitechapel that day was “No paseran” – from the Spanish Civil War – “They shall not pass.”
After the war, Max became a highly respected Communist councillor in Stepney for fifteen years and, a natural orator, he remained eloquent about his politics.”It was never an issue to forge a Communist state like in the Soviet Union,” he informed me, just in case I got the wrong idea, “We wanted to ensure that the ordinary working people of England could lead decent lives – not to be unemployed, that people weren’t thrown out of their homes when they couldn’t pay their rent, that people weren’t homeless, as so many are today, living with their parents and crowded together in rooms.”
Max’s lifelong political drive was the manifestation of a tenacious spirit. When Max arrived to meet me in Whitechapel Library, I did not recognise him at first because he could pass for a man thirty years younger. And later, when I returned his photos to his flat nearby, I discovered he lived up five flights of stairs and it became obvious that he walked everywhere in the neighbourhood, living independently even at his astounding age. “I used to smoke,” Max admitted to me shyly, when I complimented him on his energy. “I stopped at eighty-four, when my wife died – until then I used to smoke about twenty cigarettes a day, plus a pipe and cigars.” Max confessed, permitting himself a reckless grin of nostalgia.
“My mother and father both died at sixty-five,” Max revealed, turning contemplative, “I put that down to the way they suffered and poverty. My father worked around the clock to keep the family going. He died two years after my mother. At that time there was no National Health Service, and I phoned the doctor when she was sick, asking him to come, and he said, ‘You owe me some money. Unless you pay me, I won’t come.’ I said, ‘You come and see my mother.’ He said, ‘You will have to pay me extra for coming plus what you owe.’ But she died before he came and I had to get an ambulance.”
It was a story that revealed the personal motivation for Max’s determination to fight for better conditions for the people of the East End – yet remarkably, in spite of the struggle of those around him and that he himself had known, Max was a happy man. “I’m always happy, because I can say that my life was worth living,” he declared to me without qualification.
Max Levitas wanted to live as long as possible to remind us of all the things he had seen. “I believe if racists marched through the East End today, people would stop them in the same way,” he assured me with the unique confidence granted only to those who have known one hundred and three years of life.
Max in 1945
Max campaigning in Stepney in the nineteen sixties
Max with his wife on a trip to Israel in the nineteen seventies
Max Levitas (1915- 2018) by Phil Maxwell
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The Friends Of Arnold Circus
All are welcome at the Friends of Arnold Circus AGM at Calvert 22 on Wednesday 7th November, which serves as an overture to an illustrated lecture by Adam Dant on his maps of Shoreditch entitled SHOREDITCH IN THE YEAR 3000. Click here for free tickets
Responsible for the spectacular renovation of the bandstand at Arnold Circus in recent years, the Friends now seeks to recruit more volunteers to participate in their work improving the Boundary Estate. If you can help email admin@foac.org.uk
Today Robin Hatton-Gore unravels the mystery of the origin of the mound at Arnold Circus.
The eight-sided bandstand at Arnold Circus has been a treasured landmark at the centre of the historic Boundary Estate for over a century. The only constant hereabouts is change and the bandstand has witnessed its fair share of changes.
There is an unusual energy in this location that is perhaps preternatural and the raised mound has generated apocryphal tales of ancient myth, suggesting it is on a ley line connected to St Martin the Fields. Other local legends stem from an earlier site called Friars’ Mount nearby, where “a set of fellows lived in laziness and luxury.” A vivid but scurrilous account by the anti-Papist author, George Borrows, in his 1874 Gypsy Dictionary fancifully attributes the name Friars’ Mount to a former friary, but it is more likely derived from a John Fryer who ‘farmed the field around a small hillock on Mount Street’ in the seventeen-twenties. This mound in even earlier times may have formed part of a military rampart – a link in ‘a chain of twenty-three fortifications’ – which Parliamentarians used to defend London against Royalist forces in the English Civil War.
Yet the truth is that the mound is of more recent origin and the historical reality is more interesting than the myth. The Housing of The Working Classes Act of 1890 heralded the dismantling of the Old Nichol, the notorious rookery which stood here before. Arthur Morrison wrote a fictional account of the Old Nichol in 1896 entitled The Child of the Jago. He derived ‘the Jago’ from the name of Rev Osborne Jay, a muscular Christianity with a boxing gym below his Church of Holy Trinity. Morrison had first been invited to the Old Nichol by Rev Jay and the novel was published only after the ramshackle structures of this most scandalous of slums had been razed.
In 1897, The British Architect reported, ‘The London County Council for some years past have been devoting the energies of their staff to the preparation of a grand scheme for the rehousing of the working classes. A site near Shoreditch Church was selected for this purpose, and the Boundary Street Working Class Housing Dwellings are well worth visiting now … the plan is that of a great circus, in the middle of which, on an elevated plateau there is to be a bandstand’.
Owen Fleming became the leader of the LCC’s new Housing of the Working Classes Branch, a group of young progressive architects tasked with the creation of the pioneering collection of buildings to raise the standard of housing for labourers and artisans in one of the poorest districts of the East End. This was to be the very first council housing estate. Social housing had existed previously, funded by charity, but the Boundary was the first financed by the taxpayer. Thomas Blashill, the LCC’s Superintendant Architect, entrusted this group of architects – who were inspired by the Arts & Craft movement – to create twenty-three domestic buildings, each subtly different.
In an inspired move, the architects rejected an already-approved grid for the scheme. Fleming fought “to be allowed to build the central raised garden with its bandstand, around which he had imagined the local courting couples strolling on a summer’s evening while the band played.” Seven streets radiated from the unifying hub of Arnold Circus like the spokes of a wheel and the architectural diversity of the buildings included details and features that were in contrast to the uniformity of style which had formerly marked the housing of the poor.
It was the rubble displaced in digging out the foundations was piled up to become Boundary Gardens, a fact confirmed by Museum of London Archaeology when they excavated in 2012 and discovered artefacts belonging to the former residents of the Old Nichol.
On the Boundary Estate, street names derive from the towns of Huguenot immigrants – Rochelle, Navarre and Montclare – Arnold Circus itself is named after Sir Arthur Arnold, a Liberal and chairman of the London County Council. The surrounding buildings are named after towns along the Thames – Cookham, Chertsey and Henley. The Architects Association Journal said “the central garden…is more than a piece of pattern-making by the architects, it is a strong unifying factor which does much to make of the scheme a community rather than a collection of model dwellings.”
Continuing in this ethos, between May and September of this year Andy Willoughy and the team of volunteer gardeners have been planting new flora in the sloping beds. They are home to a lively community of tiny bugs and insects, wildlife that quietly moves along a natural freeway to the subtle rhythm of seasonal changes. The Friends of Arnold Circus Biodiversity Project also includes the installation of new bird and bat boxes – social housing for our flighted neighbours.
Adam Dant’s Map of Shoreditch in the Year 3000
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The Gentle Author’s Dead Pubs Crawl
As the darkness closes in, it delights me to go on a dead pubs crawl around Spitalfields and beyond, paying my respects at former hostelries and listening for the clinking glasses of the phantom regulars. In recent years, The Well & Bucket and The Crown & Shuttle have returned to vibrant life, convincing resurrections long after I had given up hope – which permits me to believe there may still be the possibility of life after death for other lost pubs in the neighbourhood.
The Ship & Blue Ball, Boundary Passage, where they planned the Great Train Robbery (1851-1994)
The Frying Pan, Brick Lane (1805-1991)
The Crown, Bethnal Green Rd (1869-1922)
The Britannia, Chilton St (1861-2000)
The Laurel Tree, Brick Lane (1813-1983)
The Well & Bucket, Bethnal Green Rd (1861-1989 & resurrected in 2013)
The Dolphin, Redchurch St (1835-2002)
The Jolly Butchers, Brick Lane (1839- 1987)
Seven Stars, Brick Lane (1711-2002)
The Duke of Wellington, Toynbee St (1851-2018)
The Queen’s Head, Fashion St (1825-1936)
The Crown & Shuttle, Shoreditch High St (1861-2001 & resurrected in 2013)
Sir Robert Peel, Bishopsgate Without (1871-1957)
The Queen Victoria, Barnet Grove (1856-1993)
The Grave Maurice, Whitechapel Rd (1723-2010)
The Lord Napier, Whitechapel Rd (1878-1983)
The Black Bull, Whitechapel Rd (1812-2006)
The Ship, Bethnal Green Rd (1856-2000)
The Artichoke, Jubilee St (1847-2001)
Lord Nelson, Buross St (1869-2005)
Mackworth Arms, Commercial Rd (1858-1984)
Kinder Arms, Little Turner St (1839-1904)
The Crown & Dolphin, Cannon St Row (1851-2002)
The Old Rose, The Highway (1839-2007)
The Whitechapel Bell Foundry was a coaching inn called The Artichoke prior to 1738
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Norah Smyth, Suffragette Photographer
Carla Mitchell, Director of Four Corners, celebrates the photography of Norah Smyth as her work returns to the East End for the first time in over a century for a new exhibition
Sylvia Pankhurt paints ‘Votes For Women’ at 198 Bow Rd, 1912
At dawn on 13th July 1912, two women crouched by the wall of Nuneham House, Oxfordshire. They had arrived up the Thames by hired rowboat, aiming to set fire to the eighteenth century home of the vehemently anti-suffrage Lewis ‘Lulu’ Harcourt MP. Helen Craggs was arrested but the other woman escaped over the fields, her identity unknown. Years later, in the early sixties, Norah Smyth confided the truth to her nephew, former diplomat Kenneth Isolani Smyth. He expressed surprise, knowing her love of old paintings and antiques, but Smyth explained that she knew the east wing of the house was uninhabited. It was the only violent action that she undertook as a suffragette.
It is to this remarkable woman that we owe a debt of gratitude for her striking photographs of East London suffragettes, documenting an extraordinary moment in women’s social history. A unique exhibition of her work opens at Four Corners gallery this week, bringing these images back to East End for the first time in a hundred years, generously loaned from the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam.
Born Norah Veronica Lyle-Smyth in 1874, she was the daughter of a wealthy Liverpool grain merchant, one of eleven children. Her father was kind but overbearing and she did not leave home until after his death. Instead, she developed a talent as a sculptor, carving panels behind the altar in her local church and cutting her own gravestone, with the date left blank. She sometimes smoked a clay pipe and owned a pet monkey called Gnome. In 1911, she moved to London and joined Edith Craig’s Pioneer Players, known for its plays on the subject of women’s suffrage. She also worked as an unpaid chauffeur to Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading figure of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Here she met her daughter Sylvia Pankhurst and they shared a residence in Notting Hill, beginning a friendship that lasted over ten years.
In 1912 Pankhurst, Smyth and supporters set up an East London branch of the WSPU at a baker’s shop at 198 Bow Rd. Smyth took evocative photographs of Pankhurst painting ‘Votes for Women’ in gold letters on the shopfront. Another early photograph shows Pankhurst recovering from hunger strike at the house of Mr & Mrs Payne at 28 Ford Rd in Bow. Pankhurst was regularly imprisoned under the ‘Cat & Mouse’ Act, which allowed the authorities to release hunger striking suffragettes from prison and then re-arrest them once their health had recovered.
The suffragettes found a ready activism among East End women, which had existed since the Bryant & May Match Women’s strike of 1888. They supported George Lansbury, MP for Poplar & Bow, who staged a by-election on women’s suffrage and lost his seat as a result. Pankhurst argued that working-class women had the most to gain from winning the vote as part of the struggle for social reform. Alongside the vote, members called for better housing and working conditions and equal pay. This growing East End movement led to a break with the mainstream WSPU in 1914 and the formation of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes (ELFS).
Smyth’s photographs date from then, suggesting an active decision to promote the work of the new organisation. In particular she used her photographs for the ELFS weekly newspaper, The Woman’s Dreadnought. The name was ‘symbolic of the fact that the women who are fighting for freedom must fear nothing’. Newspapers were publishing photography for the first time and Smyth exploited this to great effect. She also used the hugely popular picture postcard format to disseminate her photographs, sent out through frequent daily postal services.
Pre-First World War photographs show the Women’s May Day procession from East India Dock Gates to Victoria Park, ‘Self Denial’ fundraising week, the weekly stall in Roman Rd and the deputation of East End women to meet Prime Minster Asquith in June 1914. An active ELFS organiser, Smyth was evidently self-effacing and rarely took part in public speeches or debates. Sylvia Pankhurst describes her preparing a march on a rainy day:
‘ “Of course we shall march!” she said, and bustled about fitting up banners, impetuously lifting and wrenching; doing more than any half-dozen men in the crowd.. In grey-black costume, short-skirted for those days, a small, black shovel hat surmounting her long pale face and tight-drawn hair, she dashed about, a slight, thick-shouldered, thin-legged figure, with a trace of elegance.’
The ELFS’ headquarters was the Women’s Hall at 400 Old Ford Rd, also home to Smyth, Pankhurst, and Mr & Mrs Payne. Here they hosted meetings, Sunday socials and a Junior Suffragette’s Club for girls aged fourteen to eighteen. Evidently the roof was the place for socialising in warm weather. Several photographs also show the Lansbury family helping to hoist the Suffragette flag and celebrate Sylvia’s thirty-second birthday.
The outbreak of war in August 1914 threw the East End into turmoil. Factories closed, unemployment and the inflation of food prices caused widespread distress. Desperate women called at The Women’s Hall, begging for help. The ELFS responded by setting up cheap restaurants, free mother and baby clinics, nurseries and a cooperative toy factory with crèche attached. 400 Old Ford Rd became a milk distribution centre for hungry babies, followed by others in Bow, Poplar, Canning Town and Stepney. A disused pub, the ‘Gunmaker’s Arms’, was reopened as a nursery, ‘The Mother’s Arms’, with an innovative Montessori school. Deeply affected by the poverty in East London that was made even worse by the war, Smyth spent her entire inheritance supporting this work.
Smyth’s photographs can be seen within a tradition of Victorian street photography that portrays East London through the eyes of outsiders. Crowds of children in Bow streets stare at the photographer with curious glances, reminiscent of images by John Thomson or John Galt. Yet other depictions differ, girls and boys in the cost price restaurant look at the photographer with an assertive immediacy. Groups of working mothers and their babies pose informally for the camera. Even the shockingly malnourished infant held by Nurse Hebbes or the sleeping child left alone at home are shown without drama or spectacle. Smyth’s intimate, familiar photographs reveal an everyday world of which she was a participant rather than an external observer.
The photographs vary in technique. Some are snapshots, taken perhaps with the Kodak Brownie camera available since 1900. Others suggest the use of older technology: faces blurred by long exposures impart a different quality of time and movement. There are numerous photographs of mothers and children, reflecting their importance within the ELFS’ activities. ‘The hope of the world lies with the children. Help to save the babies’, the Dreadnought’s July 31st 1915 edition headline read. During the war the East London suffragettes sustained their collective spirit, organising children’s festivals such as the New Year’s Pageant at Bow Baths Hall in January 1916. Smyth’s photograph shows a procession of young suffragettes dressed to personify Peace, Liberty and the Spirit of Spring, led by children wearing ‘red caps of liberty’.
In Spring 1916 a million soldiers were conscripted, many of whom did not have the right to vote. This changed the suffrage debate, and the ELFS began calling for universal adult suffrage and campaigning openly against the war. Smyth’s photographs cease around this time. It is possible that later images did not survive. Equally, it seems likely that the efforts of keeping the cost price restaurants, Mother’s Arms, Toy Factory and baby clinics going alongside the growing anti-war campaign meant that photography was put aside.
By the time some women finally gained the vote in 1918, the Russian Revolution had changed everything. The East London suffragettes were calling for international Socialism and trying to keep their vision of East End militancy alive. Yet political debates alongside financial hardships led to a dispersal of its members and the closure of the Dreadnought in 1924.
Smyth left for Florence where she worked for the British Institute, then joined the Times of Malta. In 1945, she went to live with her sister Una in County Donegal, leading a quiet rural life until her death in 1963. Her papers are lost, so we do not know whether she continued to take photographs later in life. One picture taken a few years before her death shows her with a box brownie camera.
The East End suffragettes fought not only for the right to vote but also for a radical transformation of British society. Through self-organised, community action across East London, working class women battled for social justice during the hardships of the First World War. Norah Smyth’s remarkable photography celebrates their history.
Norah Smyth in uniform as Emmeline Pankhurst’s chauffeur, 1913
‘Enjoying our Christmas number’- suffragettes selling The Woman’s Dreadnought, 1915
ELFS stall on Roman Rd, announcing a forthcoming demonstration in Canning Town, July 1914
‘The home they fought for’ – children come to play with Sylvia Pankhurst’s dog Jim c 1915
Hoisting the flag at 400 Old Ford Rd for Sylvia Pankhurst’s 32nd birthday. She is pointing at the camera. The little boy is the grandson of George Lansbury, MP for Poplar & Bow. May 1914
Gathering on the roof of 400 Old Ford Rd, 1914
Sylvia Pankhurst recovering from hunger strike at the home of Mr & Mrs Payne at 28 Ford Rd, Bow. 1913
ELFS demonstration on Women’s May day on the Old Ford Road, Bow, 30th May 1915
Outside the war relief clinic at 53 St Leonard’s St, Bromley
Mrs Schlette holding a cat outside the war relief clinic at 53 St Leonard’s St, Bromley
Nurse Hebbes with one of her ‘war sufferers’ at the Mother’s Arms, c1915
Children eating at the cost price restaurant at 20 Railway St, Poplar, 1914
Procession of children at New Year’s Pageant., January 1916
‘With some of our Poplar babies in the garden at 20 Railway St’ Mrs Schlette is on the left. 1914
Ranwell St, Bow, c 1914
Children in Bow, c 1914
Children in Bow. c 1914
Photographs courtesy International Institute for Social History
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