Minnie Baldock's active suffragette life in letters and photos

This article is published on International Women's Day, one hundred years after women first achieved the parliamentary vote in Britain. It brings together a small collection of photos and papers, held by the Museum of London, concerning prominent Forest Gate suffragette, Minnie Baldock.

We have written before about Minnie and her role in the local suffragette movement here and here.

These documents and photos, many published for the first time today, give a glimpse of the involvement of Minnie in not only suffragette politics in London, but also in the wider sphere of radical Edwardian politics, in the early years of the twentieth century.

She was at her most active, politically between 1905 and 1911, when the onset of cancer enforced her early retirement from campaigning political life.

Below, we provide a short synopsis of her life, accompanied by relevantly dated photos, letters and other material related to it.

c 1864 - born in Polar, later to become a shirt maker

1889 - married Harry Baldock, a general labourer, also of Poplar

1890 - birth of oldest son, also Harry - who later is employed in the ship-building trade

1891 - census - living at 23 Oak Crescent, Canning Town - now an unbuilt upon grass area - see photo

Oak Crescent, Canning Town today

1896 - birth of second son, John Francis Baldock (known as Jack), who also was later employed in shipbuilding industry

1890's - became a member, along with her husband, Harry, of the recently formed Independent Labour Party (ILP) and a comrade of local MP, Kier Hardie

1901 - 1907 - husband, Harry, becomes ILP councillor for Tidal Basin of West Ham Council

1903 - Minnie, with Kier Hardie organised political meetings in Canning Town about low pay for women in the area

1905 - joins Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and becomes active in demonstrations

1905 - successfully contests election to become a Guardian of West Ham Workhouse

Minnie's leaflet for her
successful campaign as ILP
 candidate for West Ham
 Board of Guardians, 1905

1905 - December, heckles Chancellor of the Exchequer Herbert Asquith at a meeting in Queen's Hall, Langham Place

1906 - leading suffragette, Annie Kenney lodges with the Baldocks in Canning Town, when she moves to London

Late 1900's - moves to 447 Green Street (see envelope address, and the house as it is today)

447 Green Street address of Minnie

 Baldock in late 1900's

The house, today

1906 - July 4, Minnie speaks at WSPU rally in Hyde Park, in support of Teresa Billingham. She and Minnie had led a demonstration to Chancellor of the Exchequer Herbert Asquith's home, in Cavendish Square. The resulting altercation with the police lead to several suffragette arrests, including Teresa Billingham. The subsequent conviction became the first occasion on which 

a London suffragette was sent to prison. She received the longest sentence available - two months in Holloway - although an anonymous donor later paid her fine and she was released 

Handbill for a demonstration in Hyde Park,
organised in support of arrested suffragette
Teresa Billingham. 

1906 - July 15, Minnie speaks at WSPU rally in Victoria Park. The meeting was provoked by the arrest of  Adelaide Knight, Mrs Sparboro and Annie 

Kenney on 19 June 1906 for protesting outside Asquith's home.

 The leaflet announcing Minnie as a speaker.
The reverse (below) of the leaflet
spells out the WSPU's case against 
"Squiffy"  and for Votes for Women

1906 - November, imprisoned in Holloway, for the first time. We have no details of the incident surrounding the imprisonment, but a fragment of a letter from Minnie to her husband survives, in which she shows herself to be a loving wife and devoted mother, clearly greatly upset at the separation imprisonment had caused the family. See text and copy, below

Prison letter

Minnie's prison letter to her
 husband - transcript below

From: Lucy M Baldock, Holloway Prison Nov 6 1906

My dear husband and comrade,

I wanted to say a great deal to you.  But am reminded of the fact that all letters will be seen by someone before you receive them.

Therefore, I cannot say quite credibly what I would like.

As your opinions we cannot blame anyone for that, only those who make these rules. The first time for 18 years dear that anything has come between the sacredness of our married life. Not to kiss each other, or shake each other by the hand for even a few times seemed to me very hard indeed. But I must not complain, I have seen you and that is something to make me glad and know that things are going alright is a great blessing. You understand how much I miss you and Jack. 

But I cannot mention this. The xxxx have xxx the great cause of the Emancipation of Women. A Miss Robinson, a lady from America visited us the other day and promised she would write to Jack. Tell him  (document fades) ... Tell him that ... I know he misses.  Tell him I will make it up ... (the text fades, but clearly displays a great concern for the welfare of her younger son, Jack - by now aged 10).

1906 - December

Leading members of the WSPU, including
 Flora Drummond and Minnie Baldock

Suffragette leaders Christabel Pankhurst,
 Minnie Baldock, Edith New

1907 - January, Minnie protests at a meeting in Baldock (sic) in Hertfordshire.

The Luton Times and Advertiser of 11 January 1907 reported that Minnie and fellow suffragette, Mrs Flora Drummond of Manchester:

"made matters rather hot for the Honourable Member (ed: Julius Bertram, MP for North Hertfordshire), the complaint against him being that he was responsible for killing the Women's Suffrage Bill, when it was before Parliament."

Mrs Drummond was ejected from the meeting.

"Then Mrs Baldock tried to speak, but she was instantly put into the street. After the exciting struggle, the meeting proceeded on its normal course."

1907 - photo of Minnie handing out leaflets in Nottingham

Minnie handing out leaflets in Nottingham

1908 - no exact date, but Minnie becomes a paid organiser for the WSPU in Forest Gate

Minnie in 1908

1908 - 13 February, with nine others, arrested in demonstration outside Parliament and convicted for obstructing the police. The demonstration occurred on the day that it was discovered that there was no mention of women's suffrage in the King's Speech. 

Given the choice of a £5 fine, or a month in prison (for the second time). She, like the other suffragette demonstrators, chose imprisonment in Holloway, to gain publicity for their cause.

Arrest of Emmiline Pankhurst, accompanied
 by Minnie Baldock and Gladice Keevil.
Emmiline was sentenced to six weeks in
Holloway for the part she played in the
demonstration

Suffragette leaders Christabel Pankhurst,
accompanied by Annie Kenney and Minnie
Baldock leads delegation to Parliament,
 the outcome of which was Minnie's arrest

Press reports at the time, described her as a WSPU organiser of West Ham.  The Daily Mirror said that she went round: 

"with a megaphone and shouted 'Votes for Women' as far up the stairs of the St Stephen's entrance (of Parliament)as the megaphone could send the words."

Bound over letter

Bound over letter - transcript below

Metropolitan Police

A Division, 

Cannon Row station

Take notice that you, Minnie Baldock are bound in the sum of two pounds to appear at Westminster Police Court, situated at Rochester Row at ten o'clock a.m. on the 14th day of February, to answer the charge of wilfully obstructing Police in the lawful execution of their duty at Victoria Street 13.2.08. and unless you appear there further proceedings will be taken.

Dated this 13th day of February One thousand nine hundred and eight.

Signed  Officer on Duty.

Holloway discharge letter

Discharge from Holloway letter
transcript below

HM Prison Holloway

7th March 1908

14327

Minnie Baldock will be discharged from this prison at 8.30 a.m. on 13th March and I shall be glad to hear whether you intend to meet her at the prison gate. She wishes you to know that she is in good health.

Signed

Governor

1909 - Involved in recruiting for the WSPU in the West of England

While there, Minnie has a letter published in the Western Daily Press, see below, suggesting that the WSPU views of women Members of Parliament, at this time, were not very demanding, as per the last sentence in the letter: "We are today fighting for the vote, and we are not asking for seats in Parliament."

Western Daily Press May 29 1909

Transcript:

A Correction

 Sir, I wish to contradict a statement which you made in reporting my speech at Roke yesterday afternoon.

You stated that I should say it was when they had a Parliament composed of men and women they would have perfectly fair and just administration, instead of which I stated it is only when women as well as men could send their representatives to Parliament that we should have perfectly fair and just administration.

 We are to-day fighting for the vote, and we are not asking for seats in Parliament.

 Yours truly

 Minnie Baldock

Minnie in 1909

1911 - contracted cancer and was treated, successfully in the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital in Euston. This effectively signalled the end of her active political life.

One of a series of postcards produced by
 the WSPU, of their organisers and leaders (undated)

1911 - census, the family were living at 490 Barking Road. (see photo, below).

490 Barking Road, today

Minnie was not present on the night of the census, but her husband and younger son, Jack were. She could either have been away from home campaigning for the suffragettes, or possibly have been confined to hospital with the cancer that she contracted that year.  After the operation, she went to Brighton for a time, for convalescence.

1911 - recovery from cancer

One of the surviving letters in the archives, suggests that she had recovered from the cancer operation by August that year. The letter and text are shown, below.

p1

p2

p3

Recovery from  operation letter

From: C d Mountford, 

22 Elmhurst Ave, 

Forest Gate, 

August

My dear Mrs Baldock,

I am so pleased to hear the operation was successful. I have just received the news from Mr Balcock, who ??? is is pleased to think you are on the road to recovery.

What a brick you are, dear. I wish I had your courage.

You will be sorry to hear that I have been laid up with my old complaint and still in bed, so will not be able to come to see you tomorrow, but will come as soon as I can.

How we have all prayed and thought of you. My sister sends her love and hopes to see you soon.

I have to go out tomorrow so will be able to come and see you very soon.

And that God may soon restore you to perfect health is the sincerest prayer.

Yours very sincerely,

C d Mountford

1911 - evidence of reputation of effective trade union organiser and promoter of women's rights at work.

Two remarkable letters survive in the archives testifying to Minnie Baldock's reputation as fearless and effective organiser around Women's rights. The first is from J Hopkins,  of Tower Hamlets Road, Forest Gate,  the parent of a laundry worker at the Forest Gate Sanitary Steam Laundry in Upton Lane (see photos, below). In it, s/he explains the parental concern for the daughter, the author of the second letter, below. The two letters make pretty grim reading of conditions in the laundry, at the time.

Women's Union organiser - Forest Gate steam laundry (1)

Letter, from the parent, accompanying letter, of "a laundry girl", below

33 Tower Hamlets Road

Forest Gate

18 August 1911

Dear madame,

The reason my daughter is writing the enclosed letter to you is this. Yesterday I was discussing with a friend the conditions under which laundry girls worked and on them not being able to get anyone to take up their cause. The remark he made was you want a lady like Mrs Baldock to take it up, if she could not, I have no doubt she would be able to let you know of someone who would. I asked for your address, but he could not give it to me. He told me if I wrote to Mansfield House, no doubt it would find you.

If you could in any way help the laundry girls, I would be very thankful indeed. I am sending you my name and address, which for the moment I am asking you to keep private, for we know if it reaches the firm, who it is agitating, it means being discharged at once.

Trusting I am not taking a liberty in writing to you.

Yours respectfully

J Hopkins

Trade Union organiser - Forest Gate steam laundry (2)

Above and below, letter from "a laundry girl" asking for Minnie's help in organising the women to fight the dreadful conditions at the Forest Gate Sanitary Steam laundry, Upton Lane

15/8/11

Dear Madam,

I am writing to ask you if you can help us laundry girls of West Ham get more money and fairness to all. Most of the girls are willing to do something, but they are unable to as they have no leader or anyone to speak for them, so I thought of you, who I know would help us if it were possible.

The girls from other laundries say they will do something when "The Forest Gate Steam Laundry of Upton Lane" start because that is the largest and I thought I would be doing no harm in writing to ask you to help us.

Our grievance is we want more money. In one laundry there is a class of girls called Packers and because they are a little more refined, they are allowed every privilege, they do the easiest work, they work in the coolest part of the building, they are allowed a week's holiday and paid for it and at the end of the year they are given a Christmas Box, while the girls in the machine room who are in the steam all day long (most of whom only earn 5/- (ed: 25p today) a week, the rate of 1d per hour (ed: 1d = less than half a penny). They have to do there (sic) dirty work and if they ask for a day off (that means they are the loser) they are refused and if they take it off they get the sack, or else a lecture.

Why should there be so much difference made when we are all working girls(?) Other factories have come out and got what they want, why can't we(?).

We have not our grievances before our mistress yet because nobody seems to have the courage enough. I thought if they heard someone who could put things in a proper manner, they would find the courage to speak up for there (sic) rights.

I hope you will excuse me writing. Thanking you in the hope of you being able to send someone to help us.

Yours,

a laundry girl

1902 photograph of the Forest Gate Sanitary Steam
 Laundry, Upton Lane - to which the letters, above, refer

Forest Gate artists, Eric Dawson's depiction of 
the laundry, which eventually closed in 1964.It 
was located between Studley and Whyteville Roads.
  The site is now occupied by a fuel service station

1913 - Minnie with her husband, Harry, moved to Southampton - the home town of her mother. She later moved to Poole in Dorset

Postcard of Minnie holding a baby girl. On
 the reverse, handwritten in pencil:
"Two suffragettes come to wish you a happy
 time this Xmas and always.
 Lucy Minnie Baldock. Her name Millicent
 Mary Lucy Baldock" c 1916.

The photograph above seems likely to be Minnie and her grand-daughter, Millicent. Ancestry records show that a Millicent Mary Lucy Baldock was born on 14 October 1915 in Southampton. This is the only person of that name recorded in Ancestry's 2 billion records.  The location accords with what we know of Minnie moving to her mother's home town soon after leaving West Ham. 

Presumably Millicent was the daughter of one of Minnie's sons, Harry or Jack. She married George Ernest Pomery in 1939 and died in Swindon in 1986. Whether she ever knew the part her grandmother played in the women's suffrage movement is unknown.

1954 - died in Poole, aged 90. National Probate Records show:

Lucy Minnie Baldock of 73 Lake Road, Hamworthy, Poole, widow, died 10 December 1954. her estate was valued at £1,810 8/8d. The executor was Emily Clark, spinster

Evidence from Jean Bodie who knew her towards the end of her life, as recorded in comments in this blog (see here), suggest that she was feared by local youngsters, because of the long black dresses she wore  and they thought her to be a witch. Sarah Downing, who has also written to this blog (see above) was one of her great grand-daughters.  She believed that Minnie left her land to the Local Labour Party.

Minnie, aged 90

2011 - Poole museum, produce a short video, celebrating her active political life (see here)

Still from Poole Museum's video of Minnie

Charles Mowbray - anarchist revolutionary and Forest Gate-unemployed champion

Charles Mowbray (1856 - 1910) can lay claim to fame to be one of Forest Gate's most controversial political figures. He was an anarchist, who mixed with the Who's Who of the British political left in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and married the daughter of a Paris communard. 

He was imprisoned for inciting riots and spent some time politically agitating in America, from where he was deported. He ended up in Forest Gate, with his third wife and children, working on Tariff Reform for the Tory party. This is his story.

Charles Wilfred Mowbray was born at Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham in  late 1856 and as a young man served in the Durham Light Infantry. He worked most of his life as a tailor. He married Mary, with whom he had five children (Charles, John, Richard, Grace and Frederick) in 1878.  Mary Mowbray turns out to be a minor political celebrity, being the daughter of the French Communist Joseph Benoit, who'd been active in both the 1848 revolution and the 1871 Paris Commune. She ended up with a huge funeral, locally at Manor Park cemetery - see later.

Charles Mowbray  didn't leave much record of his first contacts with revolutionary ideas, although his obituary in the Shoreditch Observer in December 1910 sheds some light. It described him as:

Once a sinewy, athletic black-haired determined man with the blazing eyes of a fanatic and a tempestuous eloquence that stirred many an open-air meeting. He became a socialist nearly thirty years ago, and joined the Socialist League.

He read widely and moved to London, living in the notorious Boundary Street (the Old Nicol) slum in Whitechapel, in the 1880's. It is there his revolutionary politics began to flourish, as he came into contact with socialists, anarchists and communists living in the area, greatly politicised by many of the Jewish immigrants who had fled the pogroms in Russia and were determined to organise politically - from afar.

 As his obituary mentions, he joined the Socialist League at its foundation in 1884 - the organisation most closely associated with Walthamstow-born William Morris - and he described himself as an "anarchist/communist". He became a prominent street corner speaker/political agitator, calling for rent strikes and fairer treatment of workers. He was popular with fellow tailors in the area, and has been called: "One of the greatest working class orators who ever spoke in public".

Walthamstow's William Morris, with
 whom Mowbray joined political
 forces with in the 1880's

When the police began to harass open-air meetings in 1885, he was one of those involved in a major agitation in Dod Street and Burdett Road in Limehouse in September of that year. 

On 20 September, following this meeting, he was beaten by the police there and arrested for obstruction along with other speakers.

William Morris felt that Mowbray "had done the most" but he was set free. The publicity and outrage created by the arrests meant that 50,000 people turned out in support at Dod Street the following Sunday.

A court sketch of Mowbray,
 at one of his trials

He was again arrested at a free speech rally in Trafalgar Square on 14 June 1886 and was fined £1 with costs.

Mowbray upped the rhetoric of his message. A poster advertising one of his meetings later that year had the following message:

MURDER! Workmen, why allow yourselves, your wives and children to be daily murdered by the foulness of the dens in which you are forced to live?

It is time the slow murder of the poor, who are poisoned by thousands in the foul unhealthy slums, from which robber landlords extract monstrous rents, was stopped.

You have paid rent the value over and over again of the rotten dens in which you are forced to dwell. Government has failed to help you.The time has come to help yourselves. PAY NO RENT. to land-thieves and house-farmers who flourish on your misery, starvation and degradation.

 In 1886 he moved, briefly, to East Anglia, as Britain's first self-styled "anarchist-communist"

He organised a number of unemployed meetings in Norwich in 1886 and became secretary of the local Socialist League branch. He was arrested again on 14 January 1887 after the "Battle of Ham Run", when a bank was damaged and shops looted. For his part in this, he received nine months on the treadmill in Norwich Castle prison, for "riot with force, injuring buildings and assault". 

1887 Norwich court records, showing
 Mowbray sentenced to 9 months
 hard labour for "Riot with force,
 injuring buildings and assault"

Before the sentence he had been a passionate opponent of capitalism, but now he was consumed with hatred against it. He emerged from jail "gaunt, emaciated and embittered", talking wildly of dynamite and urging "Gatlings, hand grenades, strychnine and lead ... everywhere there are signs of bloody conflict which is about to take place between workers and their masters."

He took part in annual Paris Commune and Chicago Martyrs meetings, speaking with famous anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin, and Louise Michel.
  
In 1889 he was elected onto a tailors' strike committee of 17 in London. The three-week strike brought out both West End and East End tailors and was successful. Mowbray developed warm relations with Jewish workers in the East End, and often spoke at the anarchist Club in Berner Street, off of the Commercial Road.

Prince Peter Kropotkin, the famous Russian
 anarchist - one of the many late 19th
century political radicals that
Mowbray shared a platform with.

Mowbray was now talking about dynamite and individual propaganda by deed. 

In an 1890 article in Commonweal (the paper founded by William Morris) he wrote: 

I feel confident that a few determined men…who are prepared to do or die in the attempt could paralyse the forces of our masters providing they were acquainted with the power which nineteenth century science has placed within their reach. 

This sort of talk had been the final straw for Morris, who subsequently left the Socialist League, most associated with him and abandoned the Commonweal, which he had, to date largely funded and which most famously had first published his News from Nowhere, in serial form.  Mowbray began to take a more active editorial role in the paper, which increasingly came to display anarchist leanings.

Mast head for The Commonweal, founded
 and financed by William Morris, in which
 Mowbray was to play a key role

In 1891 Mowbray was involved in intensive anti-militarist propaganda. His son, also Charles, had been imprisoned and discharged from the army for carrying out anti-militarist propaganda. Mowbray visited the barracks at Rochester, Colchester and Chatham, distributing thousands of leaflets and copies of Commonweal containing an Address to the Army.

Morris's News from Nowhere,
first published in the Commonweal

They reminded soldiers of their working class origins and urged them to refuse to fire on the people if ordered to do so. A No-Rent agitation was also carried on in the Boundary Street slum where Mowbray lived. He spoke alongside Louise Michel at the August tea party to keep the Jewish anarchist paper Arbeiter Fraint (Workers' Friend) going in 1892.

Later, after the Walsall Anarchist trial in 1892, the Commonweal editorialised Are These Men Fit To Live?  referring to the Home Secretary and the policemen and judge who had been involved in arresting and sentencing the martyrs. Mowbray was not present at the editorial meeting where the article was written (he was nursing his dying wife) and would have vetoed its inclusion.

Nonetheless, he was arrested and charged with incitement to murder.
When the police came to arrest him, his wife Mary was dead of consumption, or TB,  a few hours before, in a room upstairs. He was taken away and children left alone in the house with their dead mother. Mowbray was remanded in custody, and the judge reluctantly let him attend his wife's funeral he was put on bail, with surety of £500, provided by William Morris.

Annie Besant, the woman most associated with organising and publicising the plight of the Bryant and May Matchgirls/women  of Bow in 1888 is said to have offered to take care of Mowbray's children after he was widowed. She may have done briefly, but In the event, he soon remarried (see below) and he and his second wife continued to bring them up.

Annie Besant, best known as
publicist/organiser for 1888 Matchgirls/women's
 strike, offered to foster Mowbary's children
 after the death of his first wife, Mary

Anarchists at the Berners Street Club took charge of the funeral and it became a show of defiance, with thousands marching in the cortege and 20 anarchist banners flying. It was a huge demonstration, complete with a brass band and anarchist songs sung in Yiddish, in the company of a single policeman.

One of the principal mourners was ex-Paris Communard Louise Michel (a station in the Paris Metro was named after here in 1937!), who, according to Wikipedia was an:

Important figure in the Paris Commune. She often used the pseudonym Clémence and was also known as the red virgin of Montmartre. Journalist, Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Yale historian John Merriman said: "She embraced the cause of women's rights, proclaiming that one could not separate 'the caste of women from humanity".

Ex Paris Communard/anarchist,
 Louise Michel, prominent in the
 funeral procession of Mary
 Mowbray, Charles' first wife.

The burial (with no religious ceremony) took place in Manor Park cemetery. The grave, sadly, has been subsequently built over.

The Commonweal's report on the funeral said, that for some years:

No such sight has been in East London as that which was witnessed last Saturday afternoon. Long before the time named for the procession to start large crowds of people lined Commercial Road and literally packed Berners Street from end to end.

Mowbray was finally acquitted at the Central Criminal Court on 2 May of "encouraging people to murder". In summer 1893 he and other anarchists were excluded from the Zurich Congress of the socialist Second International. They then held their own congress of protest. 

Old Bailey records, showing Mowbray's
 acquittal of "encouraging people to murder"

As a result,  anarchists turned to agitation in the workplace. Mowbray wrote an article Trades Unionism and the Unemployed where he called for unity of employed and unemployed, an overtime ban, an eight hour day, the abolition of piecework, and a rejection of political lobbying.

In 1894 he, with others, attended scores of meetings in the East End, attended, according to the anarchist Freedom newspaper: "both Trade Union and unemployed, at which they have done a remarkable amount of good".

The Socialist League had finally disappeared in 1894. At around this time, Mowbray married for a second time, to Charlotte Smith, of Shadwell.

Mowbray then went on a speaking tour of the United States, and addressed many meetings on the East Coast, denouncing reformist trade unionism and calling for revolutionary action. The tour was highly successful, pulling in large crowds. But he was arrested in Philadelphia, charged with incitement to riot and sedition against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Mowbray moved to Boston, where he started work as a tailor and he brought his family over in April 1895. He and Charlotte soon had a daughter, Mabel, in New York. He went on another speaking tour in summer 1895, speaking in St. Louis and Chicago, where police attacked the meetings.

He  continued his intensive activity on the East Coast and was involved with the establishment of an anarchist-communist group in Boston. Mowbray became secretary of the Union Cooperative Society of Journeymen Tailors and orientated it in an anarchist direction. In 1895 Mowbray and Harry Kelly set up the paper The Rebel – a Monthly Journal devoted to the exposition of anarchist communism. 

He continued his speaking tours, and brought out another anarchist paper with Kelly called The Match, only two issues of which appeared. A few months later he moved back  to New York and then Hoboken (very much later, home to both Frank Sinatra and Bruce Springsteen!), on the opposite bank  of the Hudson River, in New Jersey. Here he opened a saloon and developed a taste for heavy drinking.

He returned from the USA, arriving in Liverpool on 25 February 1900, on the Etruria, allegedly expelled because of his anarchist agitation in the country. By the time of the census, a year later, he was living, with his wife Charlotte and their children, inexplicably at 31 Eve Road Plaistow.

Eve Road, Plaistow today - no 31
was towards the end of the street and
 has subsequently been demolished

In 1904 Mowbray was involved in the general strike activity propagated by Arbeter Fraint. He chaired a mass meeting at The Wonderland, Whitechapel where all 5,000 seats were taken and many had to be turned away. The Jewish Bakers Union came out for improved hours and working conditions.

Mowbray reappeared on the very local political scene in 1905, as the unemployment crisis in West Ham reached its height. Poverty in West Ham grew rapidly with the expanding population at the turn of the twentieth century, for a number of reasons. 

Not only the docks, but also many of the increasing number of factories, particularly in and around Stratford, employed large number of casual workers, and any downturn in the economy had an immediate impact. The expansion of housing in West Ham also involved large numbers of casual workers, and as house-building began to tail off in the 1900s, many of these lost work. 

The numbers receiving “indoor relief” (that is, in the workhouse)  rose from just over 1,800 to over 3,500 in the decade between 1895 and 1905, while in the same period outdoor relief went up from 7,600 to over 16,000. After 1905 the numbers tailed off, partly because of a slight economic recovery, and partly because rules were tightened over who could receive poor relief.

Mowbray became chairman of the West Ham Unemployed Committee, with G.W. Shreeve as secretary. Throughout that summer Mowbray campaigned on behalf of the unemployed in the borough. In August he presented a petition to the chairman of the local magistrates, asking for sympathy in dealing with potential evictions of those who fell behind with their rent. The magistrate expressed sympathy, but declared that he ‘had no power to interfere with the ordinary course of the law’.

Mowbray’s own approach was ambivalent; to the police he declared that the unemployed would confine themselves to peaceful protest, but at a meeting of the unemployed at Stratford Town Hall his tone was rather different. ‘They had been told that if they used violence they would lose sympathy’ he declared. ‘They had been quiet – where was the sympathy?’ A voice called out, ‘there is none’, to which Mowbray replied, ‘they were nearly tired of begging for something’.  (Essex Newsman 26 August 1905).

A heavy police presence at this and other meetings and demonstrations indicated that the nervousness of the authorities. Awareness of the revolutionary outbreak in Russia was strong, and one news report of a demonstration outside Stratford town hall in October 1905 described how ‘the brilliantly lit Broadway presented a strange spectacle, suggestive almost of an unquiet Russian town’.  (Essex Newsman 8 April 1905).

Again there was a heavy police presence, but, despite the failure of Mowbray to persuade the Council to accept a petition for the initiation of public works, there was no trouble.

Mowbray was also active in local politics, and stood for election on at least two occasions. In April 1905 he and Shreeve stood for election to the Board of Guardians, who oversaw the operations of the local workhouse. Neither was elected for the Tidal Basin and Custom House ward, the poorest area among the parishes of the West Ham Poor Law Union. 

One of those elected for the ward (representing the Independent Labour Party) was Minnie Baldock, the women’s suffrage activist who lived in Canning Town (see here for details of Minnie, who became organiser for Forest Gate suffragettes).

Minnie Baldock in 1908, two years
 after defeating Mowbray in West
 Ham Poor Law Union election

Already active amongst out-of–work women, in January 1906 Minnie Baldock was to become the first chairwoman of the newly-formed Unemployed Women of South West Ham, convened to put pressure on the local Distress Committee regarding the plight of local women without work. This division in the ranks of those representing the unemployed in the borough may indicate differing political goals, especially as the unemployed women were being urged at the time to join the campaign for the vote.

Unemployment was not a problem limited to east London, and in 1905 the Liberal government renewed the Unemployed Workmen Act, first passed by the Conservatives in 1903. The Act enabled Councils to establish Distress Committees to give grants to businesses or local authorities to enable them to hire more workers. 

At a lively West Ham Council meeting in September 1905 it was agreed to establish a Distress Committee, though Labour members protested that the Act was simply a means of shelving government responsibility. Mowbray attended and spoke of the need for government action rather than continued charity handouts, and a motion was put forward for immediate cash for public works.

However, not all agreed that the unemployment problem in the borough was severe; a letter from the Forest Gate Ratepayers’ Association declared that there was an epidemic of spongers in West Ham, to which a Labour councillor responded by calling the Association’s members ‘a set of lying reptiles’. (Chelmsford Chronicle 22 September 1909) His refusal to withdraw the remark led to the meeting’s adjournment in confusion.

Mowbray continued to keep up the pressure on the Council and the workhouse Guardians with meetings and marches. In October 1905 he led a march of 1,000 to the West Ham Union workhouse (which was actually in Leytonstone, just north of Cann Hall Road). On arrival Mowbray pointed out that the Unemployed Workmen’s Act excluded from assistance any man who had received Poor Relief in the previous 12 months. 

There were over 2,500 such cases in West Ham, and Mowbray asked for support for them from the parish, either in the workhouse or ‘outdoor relief’.

Confusion then arose when some of the men who had admittance orders for the workhouse went in, expecting the others to demand admittance also.

When nobody followed them it seemed that there would be trouble between the protestors, but Mowbray managed to persuade all of the marchers to leave peacefully.

Mowbray was right to draw attention to the shortcomings of the Act, which local officials also admitted meant that many in need were not being helped.

Discontent continued to grow in West Ham, and the following summer Mowbray was involved in a short-lived attempt by local unemployed to occupy and cultivate a piece of waste ground in Plaistow, an occupation which ended as quickly as it began.

His wife, Charlotte died in 1906, aged just 37. Mowbray very soon afterwards married, for a third time -to Eliza, who already had a Forest Gate-born daughter. The family then moved to Forest Gate - the reasons aren't clear, but it may have been to be closer to Eliza's family.

The address given for them is 15 Chestnut Grove. The street no longer exists under that name, but survives, renamed as Curwen Avenue, just off Woodgrange Road. Its name was changed, presumably to distinguish it from the much larger Chestnut Avenue, at the behest of either the Post Office or Fire Brigade. The new name is, of course, associated with the Forest Gate music teacher and innovator John Curwen (see here, for details).

Chestnut Grove in 1897 OS map,
 where Curwen Avenue is today

In November 1906 Mowbray tried again to get elected, this time for the Council. He stood in Broadway ward, Stratford, but was again defeated. His lack of party affiliation may have worked against him, in a borough already dominated by two political coalitions, the Municipal Alliance, made up of ratepayers’ representatives, and the Labour party and their allies.

These failures to make any headway on behalf of the poor and unemployed in east London may have contributed to a shift in Mowbray’s political perspective from 1907. By the end of that year, Mowbray was travelling the country campaigning on behalf of a shadowy organisation called the ‘National Freedom Defence League’ against the government’s Licensing Bill. 

The League claimed widespread trade union support, but socialist newspapers declared it a front for brewery companies. 

A photo of Mowbray in his latter days (?).
 This photo is from Ancestry, but there
is no independent verification of its provenance

Sarah Wise, in her book The Blackest Streets, describes Mowbray's Forest Gate days as:

Still active, still inflammatory, but seemingly to have abandoned anarchism altogether. Affected by the jingoism of these years, Mowbray embraced "Fair Trade", or "Tariff Reform" as a way of protecting the Englishman's income and employment prospects.

Tariff Reform was called Protectionism by its opponents and sought to limit .... Britain from the increasingly successful producers around the world."

Mowbray had come a long way from 'Workers of the World Unite'; the internationalism and fraternalism of his earlier political life had given way to fear of the foreigner and romanticism of the English labouring man. The speaking tours he undertook in his final years were funded by the Conservative Party enthusiasts of Tariff Reform. 

He died in a hotel bedroom in Bridlington on Friday 9 December 1910, the night before he was due to urge locals to vote for the anti-socialist, anti-Irish Home Rule candidate at that week's general election. The sitting MP, Sir Luke White of the Liberal Party was also the local coroner and oversaw Mowbray's autopsy.

The strange journey of Charles Mowbray was one not unfamiliar for a number of radicals of the left over the years. Indeed, in reporting his death the Shoreditch Observer noted that a number of Socialists had joined the Tariff Reform movement; perhaps Mowbray believed that by  ‘denouncing the causes he once advocated’, he could better protect the jobs of British workers.

Whatever the reason, it was an ignominious end for one of east London’s great firebrand leaders of the late nineteenth century.

15 Chestnut Grove/Curwen
 Avenue, today

He was buried in West Ham cemetery. His grave, like his first wife, Mary's, has been subsequently been built over.

Footnote. This lengthy post was inspired by a casual question posed to the Twitter account of this blog. It set local historian, Mark Gorman, and this site's editor on an exciting journey to answer the simple question: Who was Charles Mowbray, and what of his local connection?