Talk given by David Rosenberg at Four Corners Gallery, on 31 August 2023 on “Struggles for better housing in the East End and the Stepney Rent Strikes” (part of a series of events accompanying an exhibition “Conditions of Living: Home and Homelessness in London’s East End”, that ends today (2 September).

II want to start my talk with quotes from two 19^th century journalists about London as a whole. The first is from John Hollingshead who, in 1861, published a book called Ragged London. It  consisted of articles about the terrible housing conditions in different London locations that he had written in the Morning Post newspaper over the previous year. They are painful to read. He describes New Court, near Spitalfields Market:

“…a nest of thieves, filled with thick-lipped, broad-featured, rough haired ragged women and hulking, leering men who stand in knots… The houses present every conceivable aspect of filth and wretchedness; the broken windows are plastered with paper, which rise and fall  when the doors of the room are opened… The faces that peer out of the narrow windows are yellow and repulsive; some are the faces of Jews, some of Irishwomen, and some of sickly looking infants… ashes lie in front of the houses; drainage is thrown out of the windows to swell the heap… There may be as many families as there are rooms… 40 people perhaps huddled together in a small dwelling”

He wrote Ragged London just as major developments in the railways were encouraging the rapid creation of many more industries and London’s outward expansion. He warned, though: “The spreading limbs of a great city may be healthy while its heart is choked up and decayed.”

London’s population grew quickly especially after the 1850s. People came from outside London and outside Britain seeking work and prosperity. Housing infrastructure lagged far behind population growth. Many new or old Londoners worked for starvation wages, living in overcrowded slums, ruled by slum landlords.   

Hollingshead described Victorian inner-London in 5 words: “poverty, ignorance, dirt, immorality and crime”. (You can see why he was a journalist and not an estate agent!)

Two decades later Annie Besant wrote powerful articles for the small but growing readership of a socialist publication, Our Corner. In 1885 she described London as a city mired in conflict between the powerful and the marginalised, the exploiters and the exploited, and she decried the brazen sense of entitlement by those who were ravaging the lives of an underclass.

London was a city “with its unjustly rich and its unjustly poor, with its palaces and its slums, its millionaires and its paupers”. Unlike Hollingshead, her writing encouraged active resistance. She continued:

“Be it ours to declare that health, comfort, leisure, culture, plenty for every individual are far more desirable than the breathless struggle for existence, the furious trampling down of the weak by the strong.”

In the 1880s Annie Besant’s path crossed frequently with Charles Mowbray’s: an anarchist who came to London from the north east of England and settled with his family in one of London’s most impoverished slums – the Old Nichol. During that decade Mowbray and his close comrades put out a call in support of a “No Rent Campaign” – this leaflet explained this demand

There was plenty of interest but people feared failure – and eviction as punishment. Mowbray and his comrades couldn’t garner sufficient support.

But in August 1889 in the context of a wider struggle, a mass strike by East London’s dockers that spread to many dock-related factories, workshops and warehouses, there was a successful temporary rent strike action. Dockers’ wives organised rent strikes during the Dock Strike. As the strike entered its third week, the Evening News & Post reported under the heading “Raising the No Rent Banner”:

RAISING THE NO RENT BANNER
The weekly rents fall due today for the labourers, but it is expected there will be some difficulty in collecting them. a white banner is stretched from Hungerford Street Commercial Road… ‘As we are on strike landlords need not call’. A similar banner hags at the top of Star Street, Commercial Road…
‘Our husbands are on strike; for the wives it is not honey, And we all think it is right not to pay the landlords money, Everyone is on strike so landlords do not be offended; the rent that’s due we’ll pay you when the strike is ended.’ (Evening News & Post 26 August 1889.)

A few months into 1914 a rent strike was being planned in the East End in the context of another campaign, the struggle by local suffragettes. Some of the earliest branches of London’s suffragette movement were formed by working class women in in Bow, Bethnal Green, Poplar, Canning Town, West Ham. Increasingly after 1912, and with one of the handful of better known middle class suffrage activists, Sylvia Pankhurst, playing a very significant role in East London, the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS) were looking for new ways to make their demands hit home.

In central London, suffragettes extended their stone throwing actions beyond government buildings to private shops aiming to grab headlines and create situations where government faced chaos. The ELFS were gathering a commitment from tenants to go on a rent strike (against their landlords) unless the government gave votes to women – an indirect but potentially explosive campaign. But as they built and publicised their plan through their weekly newspaper, Woman’s Dreadnought, WW1 broke out and the strike never materialised. (It would have been interesting to see how that would have panned out.)

In the early months of the war, food prices shot up and unemployment rose. Many businesses closed down as men volunteered for the war.  Employers  didn’t cotton on immediately that they could employ women in workplaces where only men had been employed before. Meanwhile unscrupulous landlords were trying to squeeze more rent money from tenants. (I should add here that a number of these local landlords enriching themselves were small fry compared with the big landlords in London. An octopus graphic published in 1909 showed a map of London with an octopus superimposed which had tentacles enclosing large parcels of land from which a set of named Lords and other aristocrats drew huge amounts in rents)

During 1914-1915 there were rent strikes in a several cities in Britain – especially Glasgow – but also Leeds and Sheffield – and a year before the war in Wolverhampton.

In the face of growing voices of protest, and to shore up working class support for the war, in 1915, the government legislated to prohibit landlords from imposing rent increases during the war. It was originally intended for just 6 months but lasted much longer. But by 1920 this began to be repealed.  Landlords were allowed to increase rents up to 40% above pre-war rents.

More joy for landlords with the Rent Act 1923 which permitted landlords, when they gained control of a home for the first time, to evict existing tenants and charge what they wished to the next ones. But as the 1929 economic depression and unemployment hit families hard, voices of protest at injustices towards tenants grew louder. There was some pushback by government. The 1933 Rent Act stopped further decontrol of rents in a good deal of working class housing. but homes built after the war were exempted from restrictions.

Here is a description of one East End district in the mid 1930s:

“The narrow streets of Bethnal Green straggle across East London, hidden like a shameful secret behind the city’s facade of wealth. The tiny box-like houses were hastily put up years ago, without thought, without plan, without consideration for beauty or regard to health, to accommodate the unhappy population which manufactures the city’s goods.”

I’ll tell you who said that a bit later.

Eventually, in the late 1930s, a mass grassroots-based movement took up the cause that Mowbray had proclaimed 50 years earlier. It was called the Stepney Tenants Defence League (STDL). Formally inaugurated in autumn 1937, it grew out of local tenants’ committees in the East End that were being formed in blocks of private housing from the mid-1930s, especially by Communist Party activists, who had already led some sporadic and short lived rent strike actions, especially to try and stop evictions. By 1939 the STDL had more than 10,000 members whose weekly dues paid for office space for the campaign, legal support, and a number of full-time organisers.

The urgency of organising tenants was had been prompted especially by a different pressing concern locally – the growth of the fascist movement and the physical threat to the working-class Jewish community of the East End.

In a situation of mass unemployment and grinding poverty, the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley attempted to make the East End its London working-class power base. By 1936 it had established four large branches in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Bow and Limehouse, which formed a horseshoe around the Jewish enclave between Aldgate and Whitechapel.

From autumn 1934, Mosley’s central message on every social, economic and political problem was that it was the fault of the Jews. The fascists made a special pitch to win support from the Irish Catholic community telling them that their community were suffering when it came to housing and jobs because of the Jews. here is a quote from local Jewish anti-fascist activist, Solly Kaye:

“The fascists had their strongholds in places which were on the edge of Stepney where the large Jewish population lived… they would involve people on the basis of envy and fear by saying ‘over there the Jews, they’ve got your houses, over there the Jews, they’ve got your jobs’, even though we were living in bloody poverty with bugs crawling all over us in the night.”

In truth, both Jewish and Irish communities suffered great poverty and hardship and a crisis of housing, as they lived in overcrowded sub-standard dwellings.

So who wrote those perceptive comments I read out earlier about box-like housing in Bethnal Green? It was Anne Cutmore, a leading propagandist of the British Union of Fascists, and drama critic for their weekly newspaper, The Blackshirt. The fascists understood well how housing issues impacted on people’s consciousness.

The clashes between fascist and anti-fascism came to a head in an iconic confrontation in October 1936 which went down in history as the Battle of Cable Street. And although the fascists recruited a segment of supporters/members from the local irish communities, on that day many Irish helped Jews build barricades in Cable Street to repel the fascists. It was an enormous setback for the fascists, but they still had lots of supporters locally. It was in the battles to bring communities together over housing against the common enemy of slum landlordism that the victory over the fascists was cemented, and cemented in a way that really benefited both of the biggest minorities of the East End – Jews and Irish.

It was anti-fascists (especially those involved in the Communist Party, plus some Labour Party members and supporters) who created and broadened the STDL. This included a significant number of politically radicalised Jews. The STDL deliberately targeted its work on estates on the borders of the Jewish/non-Jewish areas where you could find Jews and Irish in the same housing blocks.

Activists came to these buildings to talk to the tenants and ask them what problems they faced with their housing. The tenants told them: rent hikes, repairs not done, lighting, hygiene, damp, vermin… and more. They encouraged tenants to form a committee and shared with them information about tenants’ rights. As a tenants’ committees grew in confidence they reached a point where they could collectively put demands to the landlord.

When they felt strong enough they could call a rent strike until their demands were met. They would collect the rent themselves and store it with a trusted member of the committee, then tell the landlord that the rent is ready to be paid once the changes have been made. In the course of these struggles around housing, the communities that the fascists were trying to set against each other – the Irish and the Jews – were united against a common enemy, their landlords. Sometimes the landlords were Jews sometimes non-Jews but the tenants understood that the enemy was landlordism, not the religion/ethnicity of the landlord. The more these communities worked together, the more these blocks of housing were immunised from the propagandist lies of the fascists.

Between 1938-39, 18 rent strikes took place. They wiped out arrears, got evictions halted, got repairs done and commitments to further repairs. When landlords tried to evict “trouble makers” they met solid resistance from tenants barricading the estate to bailiffs and police.

I want to focus on a few of these rent actions and some of the individuals involved, such as Phil Piratin, born into a Ukrainian Jewish family. As a child he had an ambition to become an architect and won a place at a sought-after school locally, but was withdrawn by his family at 14 to work in the struggling family business. He never became an architect but did became involved in the struggle for better housing!

He joined the antifascist movement and then the Communist Party in 1934, and was the most significant local anti-fascist strategist. He understood early on that people in poor communities in the East End were flocking to the fascists for inspiration and help because nobody seemed to be standing up for them. Piratin identified two spheres crucial to undermining the attraction to fascism: work and housing. If people could see the anti-fascist forces making progress for ordinary people in these spheres they would be less likely to look towards the fascists.

He was centrally involved in what happened in June 1937 on a tenement block called Paragon mansions (between Whitechapel and Stepney Green) and wrote about it in his book published in 1948: Our Flag Stays Red.

“A tenants committee had already been formed and it was learnt that two families [one with 5 children , one with 6] were about to be evicted. Piratin went along to see them:

I was curious to know why the people themselves had done nothing in the matter, and why they had not referred the matter to the Tenants Committee. I discovered that in both cases they were members of the British Union of Fascists and obviously wanted no truck with us. One family would have nothing to do with us whatsoever that evening. The other was prepared to listen.

The only way to stop the eviction was to fight. The BUF was not prepared to do anything to help their own members, despite their ‘radical’ rhetoric. A defence was organised, and after a battle with the bailiffs and the police the notice to quit was withdrawn. It was a small victory, but it showed what could be done

The lessons did not require to be pressed home. BUF membership cards were destroyed voluntarily and in disgust … We were now supplementing our propaganda with positive action. The kind of people who would never come to our meetings, and had strange ideas about Communists and Jews, learned the facts overnight and learned the real meaning of the class struggle.”

More local to where we are this evening was the housing struggle in Quinn Square, on Russia Lane, (half a mile from here), in 1938.

Quinn Square was a block of 246 flats 6 stories high built in 1882, with one water tap per four families. one lavatory per two families. Originally there was a large courtyard between the buildings in which children could play. That was filled with more flats leaving only a narrow pathway around the buildings. By 1938 the flats were in great need of repairs – broken steps and handrails, lavatory doors with no locks, wash-houses on the roof so dilapidated that no one could uses them. The conditions inside included falling ceilings and damp walls.

Of the 246 flats, 90 had controlled rents on an agreed scale, the rest were uncontrolled. Those tenants suffered random rent hikes. In June 1938 there was an attempted eviction. The landlord said she owed arrears, but an investigation by her neighbours found she was on a controlled rent and landlord had been overcharging her. There was another attempted eviction, of an unemployed worker. The tenants rallied round. Local Communist activist, Bob Graves appealed for help, and together tenants prevented the landlord’s agent and bailiffs accompanied by a caretaker and five policemen from carrying out the eviction.

A few days later, a meeting at nearby Oxford Hall, Victoria Park Square, elected a tenants committee. They found out that 70 of the 90 controlled rents households were being overcharged, and families on decontrolled rents were paying a third more than those with controlled rents for similar housing. The Tenants Association put to the property owners a suggested maximum scale of rent.

In response to this level of organisation the landlord’s agent ran round the building reducing rents on the spot by a small amount, but it wasn’t enough, and the tenants organised a rent strike.

When the landlord’s agent next came to collect the rent, no one paid. and there were people holding placards: “We refuse to pay high rents”; “Our landlord has made a huge fortune at our expense”; “Quinn Square wants a fair deal”; “less rent, more repairs”. As well as picketing the flats, women marched around the borough with these placards.  

Meetings were held every day and the Estate Office picketed from morning till night. When the Landlord’s agent tried to collect rent he was followed round by a huge crowd of women and children and booed.

the tenants were supported by the local Labour MP, local Labour councillors, plus some communist activists. Within two weeks the tenants recorded a complete victory.

There was only one group of people who could be recruited to help the landlord – the local branch of the British Union of Fascists. They tried to break up the tenants’ meetings by hooliganism, but the pamphlet written after the rent strike confirms: “…local tenants showed the fascists they were not wanted in Russia Lane”!

What did the Quinn Square residents win?

• Recognition by the landlord of their association

• An understanding that necessary repairs will be carried out

• No legal or other action again tenants without consulting the Tenant’s Association

• A scale of maximum rents beyond which the landlord cannot charge

•Cases of overpayment by controlled tenants will be taken up individually.

The majority of the East End rent strikes in 1938/39 were in Stepney rather than Bethnal Green, and followed similar patterns around similar goals helping tenants to organise, giving them advice and information to determine their legal rights, and developing ways of fighting landlords in a collective, disciplined and effective manner. Tenants’ committees were usually headed by women representing a block of flats or a street

When the STDL started, its moving force was Michael Shapiro. He was later replaced as by another activist ‘Tubby’ Rosen and two full time organisers Ella Donovan and Harry Conn. Its honorary president was Father Groser, a radical churchman, supporter of the labour Party, and close friend of Labour MP George Lansbury.  Groser settled in the East End in the mid-1920s, and was experienced in helping many people individually with their housing and employment problems.

Piratin writes of the grassroots structure of the organisation in his memoir and notes it was the women who did most of the picketing – including in the rent strike at Brunswick Buildings in February 1939. The strike there lasted for eleven weeks during a severely cold winter. Fires were lit in the streets to keep the women warm.

A Canadian historian, Henry Srebrnik, has done the most extensive writing about this campaign, and also focuses on women’s involvement, which he finds particularly striking, as less than 20% of the key organisation involved – the Communist party – were women. He describes the STDL as a “gender-integrated, mass movement of social protest… these strikes nonetheless exemplified in particular the organized political activity of Jewish women at the neighbourhood level. Women chaired most of the tenants’ committees formed in specific tenement blocks, organized opposition to eviction attempts, were in the forefront of demonstrations, and even picketed shoppers in the West End of London to draw attention to the plight of east London slum-dwellers at the mercy of ‘slumlords’.”

And although the rent strikes brought Jewish and Irish women together in joint activity Srebrnik felt that numerically the Jewish women were more strongly involved.

Nevertheless, in March 1939 a conference took place in St Georges Town Hall called “Better housing in Stepney”, looking to the future. The Town Hall was located halfway down Cable Street. Today the Cable Street mural adorns its side wall. Keynote speakers that day were Michael Shapiro and Ella Dononvan respectively from Jewish and Irish backgrounds, symbolic of the alliance that was being created in an area where Mosley’s fascists had sought to turn communities against each other.

In April 1939 rent strikes were taking place in nine locations in Stepney. The STDL called a march on 30 April to Stepney Green just before May Day. 10,000 tenants converged on Stepney Green from five feeder marches. There were bands, and singing of songs created through the League’s activities

In February that year Brady Street Mansions (located between Whitechapel Road and Bethnal Green Road) and Langdale Mansions (located between Commercial Road and Cable Street) simultaneously began rent strikes. These turned out to be the longest running of all the rent strikes – 21 weeks, against the landlords that owned both estates: two clothing manufacturers who rejoiced in the names Craps and Gold. During that dispute the strikers took the struggle directly to them, parading with placards outside their private homes in north west London.

One day In late June, 84 police broke through barricades at Langdale Street – there were accusations of police brutality. A mass demonstration of 15,000 people took place that same night. At the end of that week the landlords reached an agreement with the tenants that met the tenants’ key demands.

And like Shapiro and Donovan at the housing conference, one couple in Langdale Mansions very involved in the strike were an Irish tailoring worker, Frank Whipple, who worked for a Jewish-owned workshop, and his Jewish wife, a banjo player and dancer called Lily Kosky.

Two of the key organisers in Brady Street Mansions were Max Levitas and Hetty Donnelly. If you think I am going to point out another instance of Jewish and Irish people working in harmony – it’s more complex – Max Levitas, whose Jewish parents were born in Lithuania, grew up in Dublin! He came to the East End in 1931.

Father Groser stepped down from the presidency of the STDL later in 1939 – he had had something of a falling out over some decisions that he was not part of, and other disagreements, but looking back on what the STDL achieved he said that he remained “astonished at the speed with which people came together, organised, and threw up their own leaders”. He commented particularly on the deep sense of solidarity, and how even those on controlled rents took risks in “coming out to defend those on uncontrolled rents at the mercy of the landlords”.

Together, he said: “we have beaten back the landlords who have for years sucked the lifeblood of the people of Stepney.”

When war broke out  in 1939 the government froze rents and incorporated into law the lower rents the tenants had won in the East End through collective action.

Those collective struggles for better housing, for affordable housing that I’ve highlighted, especially in the 1930s, should inspire us today. These were people from different communities, different backgrounds, of many different opinions, but coming together in the most practical ways – unity in action.

And the gains they made were cemented by the push for more council housing that, post WW2, significantly shifted the balance between public and private housing.

I was especially touched to see some new council housing erected in Tower Hamlets for 24 families in 2020, given the name “Max Levitas House”. Max was an anti-fascist, STDL activist, clothing machinist, local councillor, a lifelong fighter for social justice, whom I was privileged to know and share speaking platforms with, who died in 2018 at the age of 103.

But look at the agenda of housing issues facing people right now in London and many cities beyond evictions, demolitions, disrepair, homelessness, dangerous cladding, overcrowding, slumlords, privatisation, corruption, broken planning, unaffordable rents, Grenfell, empty homes, gentrification, food-banks, poverty, ill-health… you realise how much we need to do. One umbrella campaign – Homes For All – demands: “Housing for all, in the homes we need”.

We are in a situation where the leaders of the largest political parties nationally, promise dreams of more home ownership, but seem incapable of saying the words: “council housing” – the issue that actually affects the bulk of the population, and especially its most impoverished sectors.

The pressure for comfortable, secure, safe, truly affordable, good quality housing will have to come from below, from grassroots campaigns, that can follow in the footsteps of the ordinary, yet extraordinary, people I have been speaking to you about this evening.