On the stump
W
A short history of SPGB outdoor speaking
hen the name of the Socialist Party is mentioned something that springs to mind for many is outdoor public speaking. For much of its political life the SPGB has relied on outdoor meetings for a key part of its propaganda against the capitalist system, these acting as crucial aids to recruitment alongside the Socialist Standard, leaflets, pamphlets, indoor meetings and debates. Indeed, the proportion of Party members citing outdoor meetings as the means by which they first came into contact with the Party was significant until the 1950s when this form of propaganda went into something of a decline. During the first few years of the Party’s existence propaganda was mostly indoor, outside speaking only being undertaken in the summer months. In these early years the Party was almost entirely confined to London and its environs, with only Manchester in the provinces holding regular meetings, and from early 1908 a yearround London outdoor rota (the “Lecture List”) was established. A range of stations were used across the capital increasing to no less than 22 sites on Sundays during the summer of 1914, before the outbreak of war. Street corners, especially outside pubs, were the favourite locations. Few of these sites were used exclusively by the Party and some had been in
Sammy Cash
continuous use since the 1880s. Sunday’s best Sunday was the most important day for outdoor meetings, although on most other nights a Party speaker would be on the stump somewhere in the capital. The pre-war Sunday meeting was an integral part of working class life. Typically the father would be evicted from the house while the Sunday meal was prepared. Since the pubs were closed he drifted around the streets looking
16
Ambridge
for anything to entertain him, which is what the street meeting typically did. After his meal he might visit the local during the afternoon for some liquid refreshment. Afterwards speakers would again be on hand. The typical starting times of the street meeting were therefore 11.30 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. Meetings in public parks were usually held in the afternoon (3.30 or 4 pm), for a rather more ‘refined’ clientele taking their Sunday afternoon stroll. The outdoor Party meeting was managed by the local branch whose ‘turf’ the site was on and the duty of host (meeting chairman) was highly competed for. In March, 1908, for example, a dispute arose over the ‘ownership’ of the Clapham Common meeting. Both Battersea and the short-lived Clapham branch claimed the meeting and tempers frayed so much that five Battersea members went so far as to hand in their resignations. The big names of the era, most notably Jack Fitzgerald and Alex Anderson – whose main stamping grounds were Battersea and Tottenham respectively – featured prominently amongst the speakers but there was a wide range of others, many now forgotten (as with the membership generally there was a high degree of turnover during these years). It was by no means uncommon for a speaker to do two ‘shifts’, though three talks in one day would have been very rare even for Anderson. While no record exists of what exactly was said at outdoor meetings during this era it can be safely assumed from accounts of the time that the speechmaking was heavy on rhetoric, working perhaps just as much on an emotional as an intellectual level, and was most likely lengthy and littered with stock quotations from key texts on political theory and Marxian economics. The real importance of such meetings lay not just in the speech itself but in the small groups of young workers that gathered afterwards to argue points raised. In this way outdoor speaking acted as a valuable spur to working class intellectual self-
Socialist Standard June 2004
