A Place to Go (1963)

 

The Chinese Detective by Michael Hardwick (BBC Books 1981)

It was the main hall of one of the East End of London's Victorian-built breweries. The big ones - Charrington's, Watney's, Truman's - still prospered, almost the only remaining relics left of East End industry. This smaller one, on the corner of Milsom Street and Warner Street, would produce no more sustenance for the workers and solace for the unemployed. It was as deserted as the docks nearby, the brewing towers already partly dismantled, the rest of the building to go soon.

The young man's body was slight, but when he moved again there was a hint of great energy and purpose about him. His short hair was dark and his features boyish. An onlooker from down the length of the hall would have thought he was a local kid, looking for something to nick or smash.

They would have been only partly right. He was local. At twenty-two he was little more than a youth. A closer inspection of his good-looking features would have revealed them to be of Chinese cast. But a look at the identification card he carried would have revealed him to be Detective Sergeant John Ho, Metropolitan Police.

'To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth Century British Literature edited by H.Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (University of Wales Press 2005)

Anarchism, Litvinoff recalls, in his lovely East End picaresque autobiography Journey Through a Small Planet, was in his blood, was of the very atmosphere in the streets where he lived, in the whole quarter. He never forgot childhood stories of anarchist leaflet campaigns against the imperialist First World War, of followers of Tolstoy and Kropotkin chasing army recruiters away from Bloom’s corner at the end of Brick Lane – men who met to argue about the wisdom of political bombing at the Jubilee Street Arbeter Fraint house, the socialist/anarchist club for Jewish immigrants. In his autobiography he would go on to write marvellous, nostalgic stories about his childhood among Yiddish-speaking immigrant leftists in the broad church of radical East End politics (people like Mendel Shaffer’s atheist father, who joined the Anarchists and the Communists and the Buddhists and the Socialist Zionists); stories of his own youthful scuffles with Oswald Mosley’s fascists on their incursions into the East End in the early Thirties; and about his craving for the ‘female nood’ which took him to the art classes at the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute, in company with his vegetarian friend Morry Spitzer, who worked in his his father’s kosher butcher shop (an aesthetic pursuit, says Litvinoff, that was all part of being a ‘boisterous guerilla’), and about his profound distress over the unwanted pregnancy of Fanya Ziegelbaum, lovely seamstress, whom he kissed under the Whitechapel railway arches (dark place of dybbuk talk and rumours about Jack the Ripper): Fanny Ziegelbaum, deserted by Herschel Rosenheim of the New York Yiddish Theatre, who was playing Hamlet at the Whitechapel Pavilion – Rosenheim, red-haired, Chicago-gangster-voiced, his Yiddish Hamlet a far cry from that of Mr Parker, Litvinoff’s English teacher.

From Valentine Cunningham's 'Litvinoff’s Room: East End Anarchism'.

Time Machine

The 50 Years Ago column in this month's Socialist Standard has an excerpt of a canny article from a Mr R. Coster - a/k/a Robert Barltrop - author of the 'The Monument - the Story of the Socialist Party of Great Britain'.

Yep, this post qualifies as a space filler whilst I'm listening to an mp3 of a John Peel Show from 13th May 1981. Just played the brilliant 'Dear John' by the Au Pairs, but what's this shite following it? Discharge? Christ on a frigging bike.

Further Reading: Robert Barltrop's weekly column in the Newham Recorder. Interesting to have a quick glance through these columns, because obviously there are occasions when he refers to past SPGBers in what is, in the main, an apolitical column. The 'H' he mentions in his most recent column was this bloke. Happy hunting for all you SPGB anoraks out there.