I have lived on the Long Ridings Estate, in Hutton Essex for
the last 10 years. The Estate consists
of purpose built social housing built andowned by Brentwood Borough Council. There
are a variety of blocks flats, but none are more than 3 storeys high. There are lot of standard 3 bedroom council houses and many
bungalows designed for the elderly on the estate. Many of the housing areas and roads are situated
around a central “Green” such as Hawksmoor Green and Corram Green near to where
I live. The Long Ridings Estate was constructed in the early 1980’s and the
majority of these properties are still rented to council tenants. This is in direct contrast to the large detached houses in privately accessed
roads which are owned by the more wealthy residents of Shenfield and Brentwood. The area directly surrounding the Estate also
includes a lot of natural woodland, and if you head off in the direction of
Chelmsford, past the Hutton Industrial
Estate, then you begin to get a few clues as to what may have
been here in the past. If you reach Arnolds
Farm Lane, then you will find yourself in narrow rural country lanes, surrounded by
hedgerows. There are Victorian farm houses and farm workers cottages stil standing here, along with various agricultural
buildings and barns and plenty of fertile fields sown with crops.
On Rayleigh Road heading back towards Shenfield Station, there is an Adult Education Centre which
is housed in a wonderful old large red brick building whose Architecture clearly
dates from the early 20th Century. I have often walked past it and
wondered what it was in a former life, so I decided to do some in-depth historical
research on Hutton in order to find out what the land was used for, before they
built the Long Ridings Estate here in the early 1980’s.
A lot of people, who now reside in this part of Essex, have
ancestors who once lived in the poorest parts of the East End of London. After the 2nd World War, many
families who had been bombed out during the Blitz were rehoused in Essex. My
own grandparents – originally from Bow and Canning Town - moved out to Chadwell
Heath just before the war began in 1939. However, Hutton’s links with the East
End – and with Poplar in particular – go back much further and are mainly down
to the actions of one man – George Lansbury.
If you are familiar with the film “Bed Knobs and Broomsticks” or the popular TV
Detective Series “Murder She Wrote” you will know that the veteran English Actress,
Angela Lansbury, starred in the Disney movie and became well-known for her
portrayal of Crime Sleuth Jessica Fletcher on TV. What you may not know is that
her Grandfather was the Socialist MP George Lansbury, who eventually became Leader
of the opposition Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. It was his pioneering social
reforms at the beginning of the 20th Century, which took many
working class children from the poverty stricken streets of East London, and
relocated them to the rural Essex.
George Lansbury was born in Halesworth, Suffolk on 22
February 1859. His father was a travelling railway worker, also named George
Lansbury, and his mother Anne, was a progressively-minded woman who introduced young
George to the works of great contemporary political reformers such as Gladstone,
at an early age. By the end of 1868 the family had moved into London's East
End, the district in which Lansbury would live and work for almost all his
life.
Lansbury attended schools in Bethnal Green and Whitechapel.
He then held a succession of manual jobs, including work as a coaling
contractor in partnership with his elder brother, James, loading and unloading
coal wagons, which was heavy and dangerous work. During his adolescence and
early manhood Lansbury was a regular attender at the public gallery at the
House of Commons, where he heard and remembered many of Gladstone's speeches.
He was present at the riots which erupted outside Gladstone's house on 24 February
1878 after a peace meeting in Hyde Park. It was Gladstone's Liberalism,
proclaiming liberty, freedom and community which left an indelible impression
on George Lansbury and would underpin most of his political principles.
In 1875 George met 14-year-old Elizabeth Brine, whose father
Isaac owned a local sawmill. The couple eventually married in 1880, at
Whitechapel parish church, where the vicar, J. Franklin Kitto, had been
Lansbury's spiritual guide and counsellor. Apart from a period of doubt in the
1890s when he temporarily rejected the Church, Lansbury remained a staunch
Anglican Christian until his death.
In 1881 the first of Lansbury's 12 children, Bessie, was
born, and another daughter, Annie, followed in 1882. Seeking to improve his
family's prospects, Lansbury decided that their best hopes of prosperity lay in
emigrating to Australia. The London agent-general for Queensland depicted a
land of boundless opportunities, with work for all. Seduced by this appeal, Lansbury and his wife raised
the necessary passage money, and in May 1884 they set sail with their children
for Brisbane.
On the outward passage the family experienced illness,
discomfort and danger - on one occasion the ship came close to foundering
during a monsoon. On arrival at Brisbane in July 1884, Lansbury found that
contrary to the London agent's promises, there was a superfluity of labour and
work was hard to find. His first job, breaking stone, proved to be far too
physically punishing. He moved to a better-paid position as a van driver, but
was sacked when, for religious reasons, he refused to work on Sundays. He was
then contracted to work on a farm some 80 miles inland, only to find on arrival
that his employer had misled him about his living conditions and the terms of
employment. For several months the family lived in extreme squalor and poverty
before Lansbury secured release from the contract. Back in Brisbane, he worked
for a while at the newly built Brisbane cricket ground.
Throughout his time in Australia Lansbury sent letters home,
revealing the real truth about the terrible conditions facing immigrants. To a
friend he wrote in March 1885:
"Mechanics
are not wanted. Farm labourers are not wanted ... Hundreds of men and women are
not able to get work ... The streets are foul day and night, and if I had a
sister I would shoot her dead rather than see her brought out to this little
hell on earth".
In May 1885,
after having received from Isaac Brine sufficient funds for a passage home, the
Lansbury’s left Australia to return to the East End of London.
Back in England, Lansbury took a job in his father-in-law’s
timber business. In his spare time he campaigned against the false prospectuses
offered by colonial emigration agents. His speech at an emigration conference
at King's College in London in April 1886 so impressed delegates that shortly
afterwards, the government established an Emigration Information Bureau under
the Colonial Office. This body was required to provide accurate information on
the state of labour markets in all the government's overseas possessions.
Having joined the Liberal Party shortly after his return
from Australia, Lansbury became a ward secretary and then general secretary for
the Bow and Bromley Liberal and Radical Association. His effective campaigning
skills had been noted by leading Liberals, and he was persuaded to become an
agent for the Montagu, the Liberal MP. in the 1885 general election. Lansbury's
handling of his election campaign prompted Montagu to urge George to stand for
parliament himself. Lansbury declined
this, partly on practical grounds (MPs were then unpaid and he had to provide
for his family), and partly on principle; he was becoming increasingly
convinced that his future lay not as a radical Liberal but as a socialist. He
continued to serve the Liberals, as an agent and local secretary, while
expressing his socialism in a short-lived monthly radical journal, Coming
Times, which he founded and co-edited with a fellow-dissident, William Hoffman.
In 1888 Lansbury agreed to act as election agent for Jane
Cobden, who was contesting the first elections for the newly formed London
County Council (LCC) as Liberal candidate for the Bow and Bromley division. Jane
Cobden was an early supporter of women's suffrage. The Society for Promoting Women as County
Councillors (SPWCC), a new women's rights group, had proposed Cobden as the
candidate for Bow and Bromley. Lansbury
counselled Cobden in the issues of greatest concern to the East End electorate:
housing for the poor, ending of sweated labour, rights of public assembly, and
control of the police. Specific questions of women's rights were largely avoided
during the campaign. In April 1891, after a series of legal actions, Cobden was
effectively neutered as a councillor by being prevented from voting on pain of
severe financial penalties. Lansbury urged her, during the hearings, to "go to prison and let the Council back
you up by refusing to declare your seat vacant" but Cobden did not
follow this path. A Bill introduced in the House of Commons in May 1891
permitting women to serve as county councillors found little support among MPs
of any party and women were not granted this right until 1907.
Lansbury was offended by his party's lukewarm support for
women's rights. In a letter published in the Pall Mall Gazette he made an open
call to Bow and Bromley's Liberals to:
"shake
themselves free of party feeling and throw the energy and ability they are now
wasting on minor questions into ... securing the full rights of citizenship to
every woman in the land".
He was also disillusioned by his party's
failure to endorse the eight-hour maximum working day.
Lansbury had formed the
view, expressed some years later that "Liberalism
would progress just as far as the great money bags of capitalism would allow it
to progress".
By 1892 the Liberals no longer felt like Lansbury's
political home; most of his current associates like William Morris and Eleanor
Marx were avowed socialists. Lansbury did not resign from the Liberals until he
had fulfilled a commitment to act as election agent for John Murray MacDonald,
the prospective Liberal candidate for Bow and Bromley. He saw his candidate
victorious in the July 1892 General Election; but as soon as the result was
declared, Lansbury resigned from the Liberal Party and joined the SDF. Lansbury
quickly became the Socialist Federation's most tireless propagandist,
travelling throughout Britain to address meetings or to demonstrate solidarity
with workers involved in industrial disputes. Around this time, Lansbury temporarily
set aside his Christian beliefs and became a member of the East London Ethical
Society. One factor in his disillusion with the Church was the local clergy's
unsympathetic approach to poor relief, and their opposition to collective
political action.
In 1895 Lansbury fought two parliamentary elections for the
SDF in Walworth, first a by-election on 14 May, then the 1895 general election
two months later. Despite his energetic campaigning he was heavily defeated on
each occasion, and only gained a tiny proportion of the vote. After these
dismal results, Lansbury was persuaded to give up his job at the saw mill and
become the SDF's full-time salaried national organiser. He preached a
straightforward revolutionary doctrine:
"The
time has arrived for the working classes to seize political power and use it to
overthrow the competitive system and establish in its place state
cooperation".
Lansbury's time as SDF national organiser did not last
long; in 1896, when Isaac Brine died suddenly, Lansbury thought that his family
duty required him to take charge of the sawmill, and he returned home to Bow.
In the general election of 1900 a pact with the Liberals in
the Bow and Bromley constituency gave Lansbury, the SDF candidate, a straight
fight against the Conservatives. Lansbury's cause was hindered by his public
opposition to the Boer War at a time when war fever was strong. Lansbury lost
the election, though his total of 2,258 votes was considered creditable by the
press. This campaign was Lansbury's last major effort on behalf of the SDF. He
became disenchanted by its inability to work with other socialist groups. He resigned
from the SDF to join the Independent Labour Party and also rediscovered his
Christian faith.
In April 1893 Lansbury achieved his first elective office
when he became a Poor Law guardian for the district of Poplar. In place of the
traditionally harsh workhouse regime that was the norm, Lansbury proposed a
programme of reform, whereby the workhouse became "an agency of help instead of a place of despair". Education
for the poor was one of Lansbury's major concerns. He helped to transform the
Forest Gate District School, previously a punitive establishment run on
quasi-military lines, into a proper place of education that became the Poplar
Training School, and was still in existence more than half a century later. At the 1897 annual Poor Law Conference
Lansbury summarised his views on poor relief in his first published paper:
"The Principles of the English Poor Law". His analysis offered a
Marxist critique of capitalism: only the reorganisation of industry on
collectivist lines would solve contemporary problems.
Lansbury added to his public duties when, in 1903, he was
elected to Poplar Borough Council. In the summer of that year he met Joseph
Fels, a rich American soap manufacturer with a penchant for social projects. Lansbury
persuaded Fels, to purchase a 100-acre farm at Laindon, in Essex, which was
converted into a labour colony that provided regular work for Poplar's
unemployed and destitute. The project was initially successful, but was
undermined after the election of a Liberal government in 1906. The new Local
Government minister, John Burns, was a firm opponent of socialism. Burns
encouraged a campaign of propaganda to discredit the principle of labour
colonies, which were presented as money-wasting ventures that pampered idlers
and scroungers. A formal enquiry revealed irregularities in the operation of
the scheme, though it exonerated Lansbury. He retained the confidence of his
electorate and was easily re-elected to the Board of Guardians in 1907.
In 1905 Lansbury was appointed to a Royal Commission on the
Poor Laws. . Lansbury, together with Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society,
argued for the complete abolition of the Poor Laws and their replacement by a
system that incorporated old age pensions, a minimum wage, and national and
local public works projects. These proposals were embodied at the Commission's
conclusion in a minority report signed by Lansbury and Webb. Most of the
minority's recommendations in time became national policy and the Poor Laws
were finally abolished by the Local Government Act 1929.
Lansbury summarised the extent of cronyism and abuse in the
Poor Law system by saying:
"'You scratch my
back and I'll scratch yours' was the basis of policy where jobs and contracts
were concerned ... the slum owner and agent could be depended upon to create
the conditions which produce disease; the doctor would then get the job of attending
the sick, the chemist would be needed to supply drugs, the parson to pray, and
when, between them all, the victims died the undertaker was on hand to bury
them."
The Borough of Poplar had always faced high poverty levels. Since
the turn of the century the workhouses and orphanages in the borough had been
trying to cope with significant overcrowding. George Lansbury now saw another
opportunity to expand The Board of Guardians operations into the Essex
countryside. This time he managed to convinced the Board to acquire 100 acres of
land for £10,100 situated between the Villages of Hutton and Shenfield on the
Rayleigh Road. A further £174,180 was spent on buildings, services and roads,
architects' fees and furniture - making a total cost of £184,280
In 1906 the Board
completed work on this self-contained community which had its own store, a school,
a farm, an indoor swimming pool and an array of ancillary buildings alongside
the living accommodation for the staff and the orphans. Hutton Poplars was the
name given to the Training School and Residential Home which was capable of
housing anything from 400 - 700 children at any one time.
The cost of the project caused uproar in the Houses of
Parliament when it first opened. Some MPs complained that with parquet flooring
and central heating, the buildings were more of the comfort levels of a public
school like Eton than for an East End orphan’s training school. However, once
operational, the project received recognition for its good work, with a
Governmental inspection in early 1914 rating the facilities as "among the best in Britain" with the
children "well cared for by an
efficient staff of specially selected teachers."
George Lansbury’s typically socialist
reaction to the high costs of building Hutton Poplars was “Hang the Rates”. He thought that this is where public money should
be spent – on improving the lives and conditions of the poor.
In February 1907 the very first children arrived at Shenfield
railway Station, accompanied by staff. Doreen Buttleman was one of the first
residents of Hutton Poplars:
“Nearly 700 babies and
children, along with staff walked from Shenfield station up the hill to their
new homes on a freezing February day in 1907. The site was like a small town
with separate houses for boys and girls, a school, laundry, kitchens,
infirmary, swimming pool, dining hall, a small farm with stables, orchards and
even shoe menders.”
The average cost of food per week per child was 2s.7d in
1907 but this had been reduced down to 1s.11d by 1910. An October 1911 report
confirms 697 children were being accommodated at the time out of a possible
maximum of 743.
Hutton Poplars was like a small town serving all the day to
day needs of the children. There was an administration building with the
swimming baths and Gymnasium set across from the central green and the school houses
situated on either side. The main hall of the school had a beautiful stained
glass window. There was a separate dining hall with some beautiful brickwork,
and nearby were the Porter's Lodge and the Kitchens. There was also a
gardener's shed and greenhouses, the Master's House, and the Matron's block
with needlework and laundry training rooms. There was a Bakery and
Workshops, the Infirmary and the Receiving Ward and some farm buildings.
The Boys' houses were home to 66 boys and each house had 6
members of staff. The Girl's houses were home to 36 girls and also had
accommodation for younger boys up to 8 years old. There was a separate house
for Babies' and toddlers and the children would usually be there up to the ages
of 14 or 15 years old – the legal age at which state schooling ended – and
would then leave, hopefully to find jobs in the areas for which they had received
training for during their time at the establishment.
There was an official Royal visit in 1918 by Queen Mary. She
came to inspect the premises and see some of the work that was being done at
Hutton Poplars – and she was accompanied by non-other than George Lansbury, who
was the Chairman of the Governors.
Not everyone was happy with having 700 East End children
suddenly being re-housed in Hutton. The placement of such an establishment was
controversial with the local villagers and the hostility continued for many
years, with the children constantly being referred to as "outsiders"
and thought best avoided by the local residents.
The administration of Hutton Poplars passed to the London
County Council in the 1920s and subsequently it opened its doors to children
from all parts of East and North London. Several thousand children passed
through its gates over the next six decades and the memoirs of a few former
residents give us a really good idea of what living there was really like.
James Chalkley attended the Hutton Residential School from
1930 to 1939 and has distinct memories of the Dining Hall:
“We had a big dining
hall where all the boys had their meals but it was more like the “Food,
Glorious Food” scene from the film, Oliver. The Headmaster and his cronies
would sit above us on a stage eating roast chicken & roast potatoes while
we ate whatever they dished up to us.”
James also recalls a regular Saturday tradition:
“On Saturday we got a
penny pocket money. We would rush down to Musgrove’s Shop and buy four golliwog
bars for a penny - they were one farthing each back then. The shop would be
packed with us boys spending our pocket money. The older boys would pinch a big
bar of chocolate; then pass it to one of the smaller boys who would run out of
the shop. The big boy would then leave the shop run up the hill and snatch the
bar back from us before we had a chance to break a square off for ourselves.”
John Wilson was evacuated from East London and stayed at
Hutton Poplars from 1939 to 1949. He remembers using the swimming pool for the
very first time:
“During my three and a
half years there I learned a lot and we had some exciting times. The ones I
remember most were our swimming lessons. I had never been allowed into a
swimming pool before and the first time we went, those who could swim had to
race across the pool, and the last one out was supposed to go back to the class
room. Those who could not swim were meant to wade across - and again - the last
out had to go back to the school. As I
was one of the taller ones I was nearly half way down the pool when I slipped
and went into a hypoglycemic coma due to being a diabetic. At first the other
kids thought I was lying when I told them that I had never been in a swimming
pool before! I was doing somersaults and
cartwheels in the water and it was only when I reached the side that they
realised I was really unwell! After that I was never allowed in the pool again
and all the other diabetics had an extra slice of bread on swimming days, both
boys and girls.”
John also recalls the chores and jobs that the young
residents were required to undertake.
“The girls and also
boys up to seven years old were in Block 1 and boys seven years and older were
in Block 2. Each week we had a job allocated to us such as scrubbing the
corridors and washrooms, polishing the dormitory floors, and also the playroom
and dining room floors and stairs. In addition we had to do the washing up and
lay the tables. The best job of all was buttering the bread. Each slice was the
weight of two pennies in old money, some with makeweights trimmed from those
too heavy, the ‘butter’ consisted of two thirds margarine and one third butter
mixed together in a bowl. When the Sister in charge of weighing the slices was
not looking, we pinched the makeweights to eat on the way to school or to feed
to the pet rabbits. When you had done all the jobs on the list (a week at a
time) you had a week off.”
Although the main emphasis was on education and training for
employment, the children did get some leisure time too:
In our free time,
after school and when chores had finished, we investigated the woods and
surroundings area. The school buildings were in a large circle with the
Headmasters house, and the Assembly & Dining Hall on one side, Blocks 1 –
10 were opposite. The Store, and the block for Girls training to go into
service were at one end. The Woodwork, Gym, Swimming Pool, Laundry, and Engineers
room went across the middle and the Infirmary and Staff Quarters were at the
other end near the big woods. During
Our first Autumn/Winter there in 1939 we use to go out in the blackout and help
ourselves to apples stored in a shed on the floor.”
John remembers a couple of other painful moments too:
“The Training Block
girls were somewhat spiteful. We all played ‘kiss chase’ but when they caught
one of us lads, after kissing us, they used to throw us in the bed of stinging
nettles. I also learned that daffodils did not grow wild. I picked some to send
to my Mum but we were caught by the school caretaker who took us to the
Headmaster. He gave us both six of the best, and we never picked daffodils
again.”
John also recalls an incident during an air raid in the early1940's:
One night, because of
an air raid, we were all sleeping in the corridor downstairs; there were five
children to a mattress, all lying across it sideways. A bomb took away the bathroom
guttering and landed outside the kitchen. We had to run up to Blocks 9 and 10
(the babies blocks) carrying our mattresses, pillow, and blankets. Thankfully the
bomb turned out to be a dud! Some nights we slept in the air raid shelter with
just a blanket between you and the concrete floor, not too bad on the smooth
part of the floor but not so comfortable on the ridged part.”
John recalls having to walk to Brentwood on a Sunday morning
in order to attend Church:
Going to Mass on a
Sunday, I took my friend Johnny Russell with me on the two and a half mile uphill walk
to Brentwood Cathedral. We weren’t allowed to travel by city coach – they were
being reserved for adult war workers. We had to go back one Sunday afternoon
because Johnny Russell had left his gas mask there.”
A resident who was there after the war and into the 1950’s recalls
some of the staff members:
“The Head master then
was Mr Higdon, Teacher of woodwork and my house master was Mr McFadon. There
was also a Governor called Mr Reilly, and I remeber Mr. & Mrs. Creasy, and Mr Banister. I
left there in 1953 to take up an apprenticeship with the London Electricity
Board as an electrical tradesman. I then emigrated to Australia. One thing that
always sticks out in my mind is seeing the end of 'sugar rationing' whilst I
was living at Hutton Poplars.”
Another former resident has more memories of Hutton Poplars
in the late 1960’s:
“I remember living in
a large austere Edwardian mansion called Windermere, which was across the field
from Serota House, which was a more modern building. Windermere had a large
winding staircase and in the playroom there was a rocking horse. I remember playing
in the garden where there was an old car, and when they were smashing down the
old buildings we were surrounded by bricks. When my mother died in 1969 I was
there for a very long time.”
The children were encouraged to spend lots of time outside
in the fresh air:
“We had to play out every day and we were just
on the edge of woodland that would be smothered with bluebells. Across the way
was a beautiful swing park with a maypole surrounded by rose bushes. I went to
Bishops Hill and used to roll down the hill and across the road that was
surrounded by tall poplars. There were lots of cherry trees and oak trees too. Every
day we had to go out to play unless it rained. I used to love it when it rained
because I hated the cold and I could stay in and draw and paint and play games
instead.”
Dinner times and bedtimes all had a strict routine’s right
up to the end of the 1960’s:
“I remember the wash
room for clothes next door to the kitchen and the rules of having to wash
dishes and sweep the floors after dinner. At the dinner table we were made to
keep our hands on the edge of the table after we had finished eating. The
kitchen entry was the main entrance to the house that led into a large hallway.
To the left of the hallway was the dining room and living room with a little
black and white TV in the back of the room. There was a hatch to the left where
we would have to push the plates through after eating. At bedtime the rule was
to go to the toilet first before going up to the rooms to get ready for bath.
Bedtime was at 6-7pm. The girl’s quarter was to the right and the boys to the
left with the bathroom situated to the middle.”
Some children were adopted and others who were not orphans were
allowed to go back to their parents when their home situation improved:
" I remember at dinner times the guardians would
announce somebody going home or being adopted. My heart would beat to hear my
name being called. I spent a lot of time screaming and crying for my mother,
because at this time I had no idea where she was, so I would find myself
looking for her whenever we went out. I remember constantly walking into lamp
posts along Raleigh Road whilst looking for her. After 7 years, at the age of 10
my name was called and I remember crying my heart out as we pulled away from
Serota House to start my new life back in London. I vowed at that moment at that on my 18th
Birthday I would go back to Serota House – and I did on the exact day. The
house was derelict like all the rest of the buildings surrounding it. I was
just about to go up the wide stairs to where I used to sleep when I heard a
movement. I was with a friend at the time. We got scared and ran out with our
hearts in our mouth and I never returned.”
The creation of the Greater London Council in 1966 replacing
the London County Council resulted in the London Borough of Hackney taking
administrative control of Hutton Poplars. Charged with emptying it of non -
Hackney residents and ultimately selling it off to property developers, children
began leaving for smaller establishments in and around London. Hackney
continued to house its children there until 1982. A teacher who taught at the
school in the 1970s for the last few years before it eventually closed had this
to say:
"I recall the
numbers being gradually reduced in the home but local children were also being
taught at the school. The aim was to be firm but fair but it was not always
easy for all teachers to be fair all the time. I remember only too well how
traumatised some of the resident children were from their early childhood and
that I feared that some would never adjust to normal life. Sadly, with so many
children in each house, the house mother could not give the degree of love and
attention that some children needed but that nonetheless they were clearly
better cared for than they had been at home. In consequence, I still remember
individual children well and by name and some would call at my house in
Shenfield knowing they would be welcomed with a glass of lemonade”.
After the school closed in the late 1970’s, the buildings
then witnessed various fates under Essex County Council. Some were demolished but the swimming pool was left standing. Brentwood
Swimming Club used the pool for training sessions on Saturday mornings and it remained
open until 1982 when it too was demolished - despite local resident’s pleas for
it to become a facility for the wider community. The school hall, known as
Bishops Hill, was maintained as an educational facility and became an Adult
Community Learning centre for the Essex Adult Community College. Hutton Poplars
Hall was deemed a listed building. It
was restored in 1991 and may now be hired from Brentwood Borough Council for
weddings, conferences and other events. The Essex Dining Hall still remains as a
traditional village hall.
In 1982 the
development of the new Long Ridings residential estate began. The new housing development on
the old site was modelled largely on the original layout with houses forming an
oval around central open green spaces. Some back gardens in Colet Road still retain the
original fruit trees that grew in the Orchard at Hutton Poplars.
Being a life- long Socialist, whose maternal grandparents both
grew up in Bow and Poplar in the 1900’s, I feel a distinct link to the past,
knowing that the area I now live in, was once the site of a home and school for
some of the very poorest children from those areas. What George Lansbury achieved in the early of
the 20th Century by building Hutton Poplars, may now be seen over a
hundred years later as an archaic type of institution, but at the time it was
built it provided safe homes a good education and led to better work opportunities
for many thousands of deprived and under privileged working class children.
During the Second World War many more children’s lives were saved by evacuating
them out to Essex, and in the post war years, lots of children who had lost
parents or had family problems could come to Hutton Poplars and be cared for in
a safe environment.
Centenary celebrations took place in 2006 and Whit Monday is
traditionally a reunion day when any former residents are encouraged to visit
for the annual open fete day. This now takes place in the Essex dining hall
every year.
So what became of George Lansbury and his children?
He remained a staunch
socialist and pacifist for the rest of his life and was also one of the few
male politicians who openly supported the Women's Suffragette movement. He was elected to parliament in 1910, but
resigned his seat in 1912 to campaign for women's suffrage, and was briefly
imprisoned after publicly supporting militant action.
In 1912 Lansbury helped to establish the Daily Herald
newspaper and became its editor. Throughout the First World War the paper
maintained a strongly pacifist stance, and supported the October 1917 Russian
Revolution. These positions contributed to Lansbury's failure to be elected to
parliament in 1918. He devoted himself to local politics in his home borough of
Poplar, and went to prison with 30 fellow-councillors for his part in the
Poplar "rates revolt" of 1921.
After his return to parliament in 1922, Lansbury was denied
office in the brief Labour government of 1924, although he served as First
Commissioner of Works in the Labour government of 1929–31.
After the political
and economic crisis of August 1931 Lansbury did not follow his leader, Ramsay
MacDonald, into the National Government, but stayed with the Labour Party. As
the most senior of the small contingent of Labour MPs that survived the 1931
general election, Lansbury became the party's leader. His pacifism and his
opposition to rearmament in the face of rising European fascism put him at odds
with his party, and when his position was rejected at the 1935 party conference
he resigned the leadership. He spent his final years travelling through the
United States and Europe in the cause of peace and disarmament.
Lansbury’s wife had died in 1933, after 53 years of a marriage
that had produced 12 children between 1881 and 1905. Of the 10 who survived to
adulthood, Edgar Lansbury followed his father into local political activism as
a Poplar councillor in 1912, serving as the borough's mayor in 1924–25. He was
for a time also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. After the
death of his first wife Minnie in 1922, Edgar married an actress from Belfast;
and their daughter Dame Angela Lansbury who was born in 1925, became a famous
stage and screen actress. George Lansbury's youngest daughter Violet was an
active CPGB member in the 1920s. She lived and worked in Moscow for many years
and married Clemens Palme Dutt, the brother of the prominent Marxist
intellectual Rajani Palme Dutt.
Another of George Lansbury’s daughters, Dorothy, was a
women's rights activist and later a campaigner for contraceptive and abortion
rights. She married Ernest Thurtle, the Labour MP for Shoreditch, and was
herself a member of Shoreditch council, serving as mayor in 1936. She and her
husband also founded the Workers' Birth Control Group in 1924. Her younger
sister Daisy served as George Lansbury's secretary for 20 years. In 1913 she
helped Sylvia Pankhurst to evade police capture by disguising herself as
Pankhurst. She was married to Raymond Postgate, the left-wing writer and
historian, who was Lansbury's first biographer and founder of The Good Food
Guide. Their son, Oliver Postgate, was a successful writer, animator and
producer for children's television.
The Lansbury home at 39 Bow Road was destroyed by bombing
during the London Blitz of 1940–41 but there is a small memorial stone
dedicated to Lansbury in front of the current building, appropriately named
George Lansbury House, which itself carries a memorial plaque. There is also a
memorial to Lansbury in the nearby St Mary & Holy Trinity Church, known as
‘Bow Church’, where Lansbury was a long-term member of the congregation and
churchwarden.
