Rose Street Club
The Rose Street Club was a far-left, anarchist organisation based in what is now Manette Street, London. Originally centred around London's German community, and acting as a meeting point for new immigrants, it became one of the leading radical clubs of Victorian London in the late-nineteenth century. Although its roots went back to the 1840s, it was properly formed in 1877 by members of a German émigré workers' education group, which soon became frequented by London radicals, and within a few years had led to the formation of similar clubs, sometimes in support and sometimes in rivalry. The Rose Street Club provided a platform for the radical speakers and agitators of the day and produced its own paper, Freiheit —which was distributed over Europe, and especially Germany—and pamphlets for other groups and individuals. Although radical, the club initially focused as much on providing a social service to its members as on activism. With the arrival of the anarchist Johann Most in London in the early 1880s, and his increasing influence within the club, it became increasingly aligned with anarchism.
Background
The late-19th century saw the growth of several political organisations in London, many of which formed themselves into clubs. For a while, the literary critic Robert Sampson said, the city was the epicentre of European radicalism during the last decades of the period. At the same time, radicals were being expelled from European cities, particularly in Germany, in what the modern historian Faith Hillis has termed "a tsunami of illiberalism". London, partly due to Britain having a fairly wide freedom of the press, became an attractive place of exile for many of them. Thus clubs such as Rose Street were often majoritively composed of refugees, yet they also attracted English adherents.Rose Street itself was a poor area of London in the mid-19th century and was occupied by brothels and frequently infected by cholera outbreaks. A contemporary, George Godwin, reported that the locality was "thickly inhabited by a poor, and in some instances bad class of people". This half-square mile area contained one of the highest concentrations of foreign immigrants than any other part of London. According to Davide Turcato, "anarchist cosmopolitanism was markedly international", yet blended into a local tradition of club life. The street also housed many artisan workers, which reflected the mixed demographic make-up of what Stan Shipley has termed "metropolitan clubland". The club was very near to the Eclectic Hall on Charing Cross Road, and was both the headquarters for a multitude of London political organisations. The economic historian George Cole has argued that, by the 1870s, clubs such as these were the "only definitely socialist organisations" in the country, with Rose Street being chief among them. The historian Sarah Wise wrote that the clubs "provided a popular platform for various other reform-minded and progressive groups and individuals". Similar clubs were based in Fitzrovia, at the Autonomie Club, the Berner Street Club, and the Jubilee Street Club on Commercial Road. The clubs were primarily hubs for organised social networks, but they performed other roles. For example, they linked immigrant politics with domestic English radicalism beneath the clubs' roofs. The latter ranged from national organisations such as the O'Brienite Nationalists to local London groups, including the Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club.
The origins of the Rose Street Club lay in the late-19th century European reaction to radical ideas. Particularly formative were the German Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, and, more broadly, the Paris Commune of 1871 and the collapse of the First International. Anarchists, persecuted by authoritarian states in continental Europe, especially Imperial Germany, fled to Britain and many settled in London. However, Jonathan Moses has suggested that "their political ideals – the destruction of hierarchy, collective decision making, hostility to the state and capitalism, atheism and free love – did little to ingratiate them to Victorian England." In order to overcome the political isolation of these immigrants, they formed clubs such as the Rose Street Club.
The Rose Street Club succeeded from the 1840s German Communist League. Founded in 1877, the Rose Street Club was a section of the CABV, which split into three connected groups in 1879. Apart from Rose Street—the First Section—there was one based in nearby Tottenham Street, and another in Whitechapel. The CABV then merged with the Blue Post group, and the resultant merge was to create the Rose Street Club. Originally founded by members of the German diaspora—for which reason it was called the German society by contemporary Londoners—membership swelled during German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's repression of social democracy with a wave of younger exiles from Germany. In London, radical clubs such as in Rose Street were a predecessor to the plethora of Marxist clubs that developed later in the 1880s, a period that Wise described as being between "the death of Chartism and the rise of the 'New Socialism'". Although Marx himself died in 1883, his close compatriot and co-author Friedrich Engels waxed somewhat sardonic about the new radical clubs. In a letter to Karl Kautsky he described them as
Although Engels called them "very motley" societies, in keeping with the tendency of the time to propagandize the existence of political organisations by bestowing them with "high-sounding titles which the old guard employed in the hope of attracting public interest", in the words of E. P. Thompson, the Club was occasionally known as the "Local Rights Association for Rental and Sanitary Reform".
Name
Originally based in Great Windmill Street, and called The Great Windmill Street Club as a result, the club took its eventual name in July 1878 when it moved to number six Rose Street, in Soho, which was just off the Charing Cross Road in Soho Square West. This had previously been occupied by the St James and Soho Working Men's Club, although the building by now was almost derelict. They were much larger premises, however, and membership increased proportionately, while at the same time the umbrella organisation were diminishing in popularity. Therefore, working-class leftists formed or joined local clubs.Origins, organisation and activities
The Rose Street Club was an umbrella term for a number of individual societies. Although originally formed within London's German community, it expanded to include a variety of socialist, social-democratic, and radical groups. It also expanded into other languages, and by the time it arrived in Rose Street the club had several distinct language sections: English, French, German, Polish and Russian, reflecting the main countries from which the refugees were arriving. The club—described by Tom Goyens as a "storehouse of revolutionary ideas"—became a model for other clubs for political exiles, in its provision for both refugees and their political organisations, and the most important of them. The Rose Street Club was a firm backer of the radical, anarchist German-language newspaper Freiheit and its political position. The paper was published on the Rose Street premises, which also housed the editorial and composition offices, and was the heart of a complex smuggling operation for European-wide distribution. This political allegiance position was shared by the Whitechapel club, but not by that in Tottenham Street, which by 1880 had become an offshoot of the Rose Street Club for those members who leant towards Marxism rather than anarchism, which, under the leadership of Johann Most, Rose Street was realigning towards. This was as a result of a bitter internal factional struggle. The political scientist, Mark Bevir, has argued thatThe Rose Street Club was not only a political organisation for gatherings of like-minded people, but a social one which provided succour for newly arrived refugees. Originally dedicated to political propaganda, Frank Kitz later recalled how the Rose Street Club gave hospitality, food, shelter, and advice on what the near future might bring their newly arrived compatriots. According to Mark Bevir, the club was a mixture of "fun, education and politics"; for example, at Rose Street, members may arrive to listen to a lecture on Percy Shelley, but end up discussing his politics and that of his circle. Between 14 and 20 July 1881, the Rose Street club was the setting for a series of conferences organised by a chapter of the International Working People's Association, the International Workingman's Association, although the IWA's activities were very little increased by these meetings. Other speakers and organisations that visited the Club included brothers Charles and James Murray, who led a discussion of the poetry of Shelley, with reference to his views on the Irish, and Henry Hyndman. At one point, Hyndman expressed interest in the Rose Street Club forming the basis of an official Democratic Party, and a meeting to discuss that proposal was held on 2 March 1881, which comprised a significant cross-section of radical thinkers of the age. Although a resolution was passed which emphasised the importance of forming of a new, broader, party, the proposal came to nothing, and no minutes or other records of how the discussions proceeded have survived. Also in regular attendance at the club were the members of the Manhood Suffrage League, from which the London clubs drew many members. Membership was often symbiotic, and in this way, as Kitz later said, the MSL "were the chief actors in bringing about the revival of socialism" in the new clubs. In 1882 the French Section of the Rose Street Club split off and moved to new premises. In 1881 the Club held a joint mass-meeting with the Labour Emancipation League on Mile End Waste condemning the government's policy of providing financial assistance to encourage the unemployed to emigrate. In July 1883, it was a signatory to the Manifesto of the World, issued by the Social Democratic club. The club also organised, and became the headquarters of, the defence committee—called the English Revolutionary Society—supporting Johann Most against his prosecution in April 1881, led by radicals F. W. Soutter and Dr G. B. Clark. The committee New-York Tribune described how Most had been "locked up promptly at the time of his arrest", and had subsequently been charged with publishing what they called "a scandalous, malicious and immoral libel, justifying assassination and murder, inciting persons to conspire against the lives of the sovereigns and rulers of Europe". Although the campaign failed and Most imprisoned, it has been identified as the catalyst for the swift spread of anarchist ideas in Britain, and the growth of organised anarchist groups.
The Rose Street Club published John Sketchley's pamphlet Principles of Social Democracy in 1879.