Pirates, planes & the Post Office Tower Unusual milestones in Tony Benn’s career include arguing with the Queen about removing her head from stamps, battling pirate radio, fighting for Concorde and building the Post Office Tower. see below History Political giant, democrat and honorary East Ender Retiring from the House of Commons after 50 years, Benn puckishly observed that he “wanted to spend more time with politics”. Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com BY JOHN RENNIE THE death of Tony Benn last week saw the departure of one of the big figures of post-War British politics. Benn was a unique figure. A titled peer who fought (and changed) the law to retake his seat in the Commons. A Labour secretary of state who, unusually, moved to the left rather than the right during his lifetime. And one who turned his back on the comfortable if frustrating seat of backbench politics to go back to the campaigning stump in his last years. The complex history of Tony Benn interweaves over and again with the East End, and a fusion of politics and religion. The East End story of the Benns begins with Tony’s great-grandfather Julius, a congregationalist minister who, in 1851, began working with his wife, Ann, at the London City Mission in Stepney. The couple eventually opened the Home in the East, an institute for homeless boys. Disastrous investments saw the minister nearly bankrupted, and with Julius now working as a missionary with the East London Congregational Evangelistic Association (on a yearly wage of £100 and with eight children to support), it took him 17 years to pay off his debts. The story of Julius moves into tragedy with the mental disintegration of his son William, who in 1883 suffered a breakdown shortly after his marriage and spent six weeks in the Bethnal House Asylum. Julius, now pastor of the Gravel Lane Congregational Meeting House in Wapping, took his son for a holiday to Derbyshire. One night, as Julius slept, his son killed him with a single blow to the head. William was committed to Broadmoor, re-emerging some years later into family life as William Rutherford… and fathering the much-loved film actress Margaret Rutherford, Tony Benn’s first cousin once removed. William’s brother John (Tony’s grandfather) was educated at home in the East End by Julius and Ann, perhaps as much by financial necessity as anything else. Born in 1850, he first worked as a furniture designer before moving into publishing with the launch of The Cabinet Maker magazine, the foundation of what became the Benn Brothers publishing house. John had seen the misery poverty could cause, and became involved in East End politics, joining the new Progressive Party which put forward candidates for the new London County Council in 1889, alongside Will Crooks and Ben Tillett. William Wedgwood Benn (Tony’s father) later remembered Tom Mann, John Burns and other strike leaders meeting in the Benn house during the London Dock Strike. But in those pre-Labour days, it was the Liberal Party to which John eventually rallied, being elected MP for Wapping in the general election of 1892. He lost the seat in 1896, but won Devonport in 1904, and was joined in the House by his 28-year-old son, William, in the 1906 general election – the young Benn winning back Wapping for the Liberals and in the process becoming the country’s youngest MP. William’s precociousness set a family trend –his son Tony would enter Parliament at just 25; he was the ‘baby of the house’ for just one day. The Second Viscount Stansgate (later Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and eventually Tony Benn) would probably have enjoyed an unbroken 50 years in Parliament had it not been for his unwilling inheritance of that title on the death of his father in 1960 (he fought a three-year battle to change the rules… and won), or for the dissolution of his constituency in 1983 (he bounced back with a new seat in 1984). As it was, in a varied career in cabinet (arguing with the Queen about removing her head from the stamps, battling pirate radio, fighting for Concorde and building the Post Office Tower) he managed to make his mark while infuriating leaders including Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan. It became fashionable to pigeonhole Benn as a zealous evangelist of wacky ideas, but his gradual drift to the left showed a genuine concern for working class people. And for veteran Tower Hamlets councillor Belle Harris, who saw her share of Labour infighting during her years representing Bow, one thing has been omitted in the outpouring of eulogies for Benn. “The thing that’s been missed is that he was a democrat,” she told me. “He was criticised for arguing against the expulsion of Militant members from local parties. It wasn’t that he was a supporter of Militant – that misses the point – it was that he thought that, right or wrong, they deserved their say and you couldn’t just kick them out.” But Benn, as few post-War politicians, massively divides opinion. Belle considers it bizarre to call on Shirley Williams, who famously defected from Labour to form the SDP in the Limehouse Declaration of 1981, to comment on a man who stuck with the Labour Party. But there are many other Labour grandees of the time who refused to speak about Benn at all – still angry about his apparent role in keeping the party from office for 18 years. When Benn decided not to seek re-election as MP for Chesterfield in 1991, retiring from the House of Commons after 50 years as an MP, he puckishly observed that he “wanted to spend more time with politics”. It was a wry observation on the centralisation of power that had accelerated under New Labour, with cabinet marginalised as a presidential style of premiership developed, and debate in the Commons becoming all but irrelevant to politics. For Benn, who considered Parliament the peak of democracy, the fruit of “a radical way of thinking that went from the early Christians, via the Levellers and so to the Labour party”, the neutering of the Commons was a tragedy. And so the former Viscount Stansgate, returned to speaking in communities all over the country, convinced that real politics lies in argument, debate and sometimes conflict. Whether addressing meetings on the wars in Iraq and Afganistan or the inequities of income distribution, he relished encountering audiences diverse in age, culture and belief. Benn always had a particular affection for the East End and, despite being born into the aristocracy, always felt at home. When questioned on his class origins in an interview with the New Internationalist magazine, he said: “My grandfather went to work at the age of eleven as an office boy and ended up as a member of the London County Council. “My dad was born in the East End and was made a peer at the end of his life, after being in the House of Commons for years. I came up with a middle-class background. “In a sense, origins don’t matter. It’s who you work for, who you support. That’s what it’s all about.” Tony Benn’s father was born in the East End and he always felt at home here 24 – 30 MARCH 2014 N E W S F R O M TOWER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 11
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