Frock-Coated Communist

by Hunt, Tristram

  7

  ‘The Grand Lama of the Regent's Park Road’

  Acclimatizing to London life was not easy for Engels. ‘One accustoms oneself only with difficulty to the gloomy atmosphere and the mostly melancholy people, to the seclusion, the class divisions in social affairs, to the life in closed rooms that the climate prescribes.’ What is more, ‘one has to tone down somewhat the spirit of life brought over from the Continent, to let the barometer of zest for life drop from 760 to 750 millimetres until one gradually begins to feel at home’. Yet this low-skied, pea-souped capital had its benefits, as ‘one finds oneself slowly blending in and discovers that it has its good side, that the people generally are more straightforward and trustworthy than elsewhere, that for scholarly work no city is so suitable as London, and that the absence of annoyances from the police compensates for a great deal’.1

  In fact, London proved a perfect home for Engels as he settled back into his favoured role as Marx's adviser and all-purpose propagandist. Immediately elected on to the General Council of the International Working Men's Association (commonly known as the International), Engels got to work behind the scenes enforcing the doctrine of Das Kapital and stamping out ideological deviation. As the International's corresponding secretary for Belgium, then Italy, Spain, Portugal and Denmark, Engels was placed in de facto charge of co-ordinating the proletarian struggle across the continent. His passion for low politics, dark skills at organization and rapid ability to churn out a barbed polemic made him the ideal choice to keep the European Left's warring factions in order. In the words of the Austrian communist Victor Adler, he proved himself the ‘greatest tactician’ of international socialism.

  What was more, he masterminded this messy, hydra-headed machine all from his study at No. 122 Regent's Park Road, in the now exceptionally expensive north London village of Primrose Hill. It had all been arranged for Engels by Jenny Marx. Sounding a little like Margaret Schlegel on first encountering Howards End, an excited Mrs Marx had written to Engels in Manchester in July 1870, ‘I have now found a house, which charms all of us because of its wonderful open situation.’ She knew exactly what Engels would need for his move south: four, ideally five bedrooms; a study; two living rooms; a kitchen; and nothing on too steep a gradient given Lizzy's asthma. ‘It is next to Primrose Hill, so all the front rooms have the finest and openest view and air. And round about, in the side streets, there are shops of all sorts, so your wife will be able to buy everything herself.’ The interior of the house boasted an impressive kitchen and a ‘very spacious bathroom with large bathtub’. Jenny, who had clearly not yet abandoned her bourgeois predilection for property, thought it best ‘if your wife came with you right away and saw for herself. You know we shall be very happy to have her with us.’2

  Ensconced in Regent's Park Road, Engels was back where he wanted to be, openly living with Lizzy (now that the social mores of bourgeois Manchester were of no concern) and a good ten-minute walk from Marx and his family. Close, but not too close. Above all, Engels had returned to the political firmament, side by side with his lifelong collaborator fighting for the communist cause. As their ideas circulated through the rapidly industrializing regions of Europe and socialist parties formed where the authorities allowed, the opinions of ‘the old Londoners’ or ‘the two spiritual fathers’, as they became known, proved ever more influential.

  ‘Every day, every post, brought to his house newspapers and letters in every European language,’ recalled Paul Lafargue, ‘and it was astonishing how he found time, with all his other work, to look through, keep in order, and remember the chief contents of them all.’ Engels's extraordinary linguistic ability – from Russian to Portuguese to Romanian (as well as regional dialects such as Provencal and Catalan) – meant that as corresponding secretary of the International he made it a point of honour to reply in the tongue in which he had been addressed. In addition, Engels was in charge of editing and authorizing the official imprints of the Marxian canon. ‘When anything of his writings, or of Marx's writings, was to be translated into other languages, the translator always sent the translations to him for supervision and correction…’ Alongside the correspondence came the familiar flotsam and jetsam of émigrés, exiles, chancers and acolytes to whom Engels unfailing opened his door. ‘It was like a little Tower of Babel business,’ according to Tussy's lover Edward Aveling. ‘For not only those of us that were really of his family were present, but the Socialists from other countries made 122 Regent's Park Road their Mecca.’3

  Primrose Hill had been subject during the preceding thirty years to exactly the kind of class-based urban planning Engels had chronicled in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Previously a secluded district of cottages and farms on the edges of London, it had gained a rough, seedy reputation thanks to its proximity to Chalk Farm Tavern – a notorious heavy drinking, whoring and fighting shop. But gentrification called in the mid-nineteenth century as Lord Southampton and the Eton College estate started to lay out a model village, transforming open fields into a descending array of detached and semi-detached villas followed by a series of terraced streets. Plans to build to the top of Primrose Hill itself were only foiled when the Crown Estate purchased the plot and transformed it from an open grazing pasture to an ordered, paved and planted space for respectable middle-class recreation. With blue-chip developers and a well-tended park (where the primroses still bloomed), it was no wonder the area quickly became ‘a pleasantly leafy, prosperous but not ostentatious, middle-class district’.4

  Alongside the developers, the railway had also been at work shaping Engels's new neighbourhood. In Manchester, it had been the land grab of the Leeds–Liverpool line which dictated the contours of the city; in Primrose Hill it was London–Birmingham. The track from Euston station (named after a Suffolk village on one of Lord Southampton's estates) to Birmingham New Street created a northern and eastern boundary which was complemented on the south by the Regent's Canal. Behind the streets' fashionable, neo-Regency veneer was a London suburb hammered into shape by the messy, dirty forces

  Marx and Engel's north London milieu, from an A–Z of 1888.

  of industrialization. And the men and women behind those industries wafted, like the filthy smog and steam from the Midlands trains, across the tracks and into the neighbourhood itself. Bordering the railway lines, along the edge of the terraced streets, were vast railway sheds for stoking, refuelling and cleaning the trains. Nearby stood the iconic Round House at Chalk Farm for major engineering works. This was a noisy, stinking, eye-watering environment where ‘flakes of soot often an inch across, like black gossamer lace, constantly floated about, settling everywhere’. With the trains came hundreds of engineers, signalmen, lamp men, porters, shunters and cleaners who provided tenants for the subdivided houses and thirsty custom for the plentiful pubs (which Engels, with his predilection for bottled Pilsener, tended to avoid).5

  Today, Engels's four-storey, terraced home still stands at 122 Regent's Park Road opposite the Queens pub and diagonally across the entrance to Primrose Hill. Thanks to the efforts of local resident Jenny Hutt (daughter of leading Communist Party activist Allen Hutt) a 1971 blue plaque from the Greater London Council marks the spot describing Engels rather anodynely as a ‘political philosopher’. The house itself was converted into flats during the 1960s, but walking around it one can still get a feel of how it worked in the 1870s, with the kitchen and bathroom in the basement, a morning room and dining room on the ground floor separated off by double doors. The first floor – which most Victorians would have used as their drawing room – was converted into Engels's vast study: an airy, well-lit studio with a polished Norwegian pine floor, ceiling-high bookcases, a magisterial fireplace and tall French windows looking out on to the noisy bustle of Regent's Park Road and beyond to Primrose Hill. Engels was characteristically fastidious about his study. ‘The rooms were more like reception rooms than a scholar's study,’ according to one visitor.6 The succeeding two floors were g
iven up to bedrooms for himself, Lizzy, maidservants, Pumps the niece and any passing houseguest. One such guest was the German Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein, who was to become a regular at Regent's Park Road during the 1880s. ‘Upstairs we soon began a political conversation, which often assumed a very lively character,’ he recalled of a rumbustious evening at No. 122. ‘Engels’ stormy temperament, which concealed such a truly noble character, and many good qualities, revealed itself to us as unreservedly as the joyous conception of life peculiar to the Rhineland. “Drink, young man!” And with these words, in the midst of a violent dispute, he kept on refilling my glass with Bordeaux, which he always had in the house.’7

  Despite his bohemian inclinations, Engels could never quite shake off his Calvinist work ethic. Breakfast would be followed by a couple of hours of study and correspondence before the highlight of the day: his visit to Marx in Maitland Villas. ‘Engels came to see my father every day,’ Tussy remembered. ‘They sometimes went for a walk together but just as often they remained in my father's room, walking up and down, each on his side of the room, boring holes with his heel as he turned on it in his corner… Frequently they walked up and down side by side in silence. Or again, each would talk about what was then mainly occupying him until they stood face to face and laughed aloud, admitting that they had been weighing opposite plans for the last half hour.’8 When they did go for a walk, it was a brisk, discursive hike of ‘one and a half German miles’ up and around Hampstead Heath where the Rhinelanders breathed in ‘more ozone than in the whole of Hanover’. Engels would then return to Primrose Hill to send off any remaining letters by the 5.30 p.m. post before having an early evening dinner with Lizzy at 7 p.m., then more reading, drinking and chatting after which a late ‘supper’ and bed around 2 a.m.

  This regimented week-day existence all changed of a Sunday. ‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house. On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London Engels's house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning,’ recalled the communist exile August Bebel. All and sundry – ‘socialists, critics and writers. Anybody who wanted to see Engels could just go’ – were welcome at No. 122 for an afternoon of wine-fuelled discussion, stomach lined by ‘a fairly “liberal” helping of meat and salad’. The house speciality was a springtime bowl of Maitrank – a May wine flavoured with woodruff. There would be German folk songs round the piano or Engels reciting his favourite poem, The Vicar of Bray (which he later translated into German for the Social Democrat songbook Vorwarts), while the cream of European socialism – from Karl Kautsky to William Morris to Wilhelm Liebknecht to Keir Hardie – paid court to the man whom the British Marxist Henry Hyndman called the ‘Grand Lama of the Regent's Park Road’. It was just about as far as you could get from the seedy image of émigré, anarchist nihilism - of dirty pubs, furtive meetings and Soho porn shops - which Joseph Conrad conjured up in The Secret Agent. The lights were on, the shutters open, and the Pilsener flowing. Election nights to the German Reichstag were a particularly riotous affair. ‘Then Engels laid in a huge cask of special German beer, laid on a special supper, invited his very intimates. Then, as the telegrams came pouring in from all parts of Germany far into the night, every telegram was torn open, its contents read aloud by the General, and if it was victory we drank, and if it was defeat we drank.’9 But the social pinnacle of the year was Christmas, which Engels the noted atheist celebrated with Prince Albert-like ardour. ‘Christmas was kept by Engels after the English fashion, as Charles Dickens had so delightfully described it in The Pickwick Papers,’ according to Bernstein's memoirs.

  The room is decorated with green boughs of every kind, between which, in suitable places, the perfidious mistletoe peeps forth, which gives every man the right to kiss any person of the opposite sex who is standing beneath it or whom he can catch in passing. At table the principal dish is a mighty turkey, and if the exchequer will run to it this is supplemented by a great cooked ham. A few additional attractions – one of which, a sweet known as tipsy-cake, is, as the name denotes, prepared with brandy or sherry – make way for the dish of honour, the plum-pudding, which is served up, the room having been darkened, with burning rum. Each guest must receive his helping of pudding, liberally christened with good spirits, before the flame dies out. This lays a foundation which may well prove hazardous to those who do not measure their consumption of the accompanying wines.10

  Given such an extensive roster of communist visitors, it is no surprise Engels was watched by an array of security forces. A January 1874 report to the Préfecture de Police in Paris describes Engels as ‘l'ami et protégé de Karl Marx’ and ‘un homme de lettres’. The police spy, codenamed ‘Blatford’, placed opposite No. 122, was clearly concerned by Engels's activities and reported in August that ‘Engels est très occupé’, spending his days with ‘beaucoup d'étrangers’. Over the coming years, according to the files, Engels flits in and out of the French government's concerns as ‘Jack’ replaces ‘Blatford’ and discovers a copy of the subversive magazine Le Socialiste in Engels's post.11 In the shadows, nudging up alongside the Parisian spooks, the Metropolitan Police also took an interest. For Engels, who otherwise valued the lack of British state harassment, these hapless officers were a source of amusement rather than annoyance. ‘We have every evening a bobby promenading before the house,’ he noted in 1883 as he and Carl Schorlemmer hid giggling behind the shutters. ‘The imbeciles evidently think we are manufacturing dynamite, when in reality we are discussing whisky.’12

  In 1916 it was said you could hear the guns of the Somme from the top of Primrose Hill. In 1871 the low thud of Otto von Bismarck's troops shelling Paris was indiscernible, but the wider reverberations of the Paris Commune were certainly felt along Regent's Park Road. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, Marx and Engels had been surreptitiously inclined to back the Prussians on the grounds that ‘Bismarck is doing a bit of our work, in his own way and without meaning to, but all the same he is doing it.’ Their loathing for Bonaparte was such that any means to dislodge him from power were deemed worthy of support. Then they discovered that your enemy's enemy can turn out to be your enemy as well. ‘Due to the unexpected victories chauvinism has gone horribly to the heads of German philistines,’ Engels noted after Bismarck had decapitated the French army at Sedan in September 1870. As the Bonapartist Empire collapsed and a new, more peaceable French Government of National Defence was sworn in, the Prussian army did not simply amble back to their barracks as the Primrose Hill communists had hoped they would. Instead, Bismarck demanded a massive indemnity, the cession of Alsace-Lorraine, and a march through the Champs-Élysées (pretty much the entire package of pre-World War I resentment). ‘The fact is that you cannot see beyond the end of your noses,’ Engels wrote to his jingoistic brother Rudolf back in Engelskirchen. ‘You have made sure that for many years to come France (which after all lies on your border) will remain your enemy.’13 Bismarck's punitive post-war demands served only to galvanize the French as tens of thousands signed up for a levée en masse to resume the fight against the Prussians. But they were no match for the well-trained, well-armed Prussian troops who steadily ground down the French patriots until the struggle culminated with a battle for the capital, where the Paris National Guard stood fast. But rather than storming the city, the Prussians decided to dig in, hoping to starve the 2.2 million inhabitants into surrender. Under siege for weeks and then months, the stoical Parisians famously held out by expanding their dietary repertoire to include rats, horses, dogs, cats and then the entire contents of the city zoo – kangaroos and all. As the Prussian noose tightened around Paris, a political chasm opened between France's moderate republican politicians and the revolutionaries inside the capital, with the former urging an armistice and the latter a death-or-glory counter-attack. As privations worsened and the Prussians unleashed an indiscriminate bombardment of the city, the moderate Adolphe Thiers moved to negotiate a surrender. On 1 March 1871 the Prussians had t
heir hubristic march-past – preceded two months earlier by the proclamation of a new German Empire in the Versailles Hall of Mirrors – and then left a weakened, hungry, angry Paris to its own bloody devices.

  On 18 March 1871 a contingent of French government troops marched up Montmartre to reclaim a set of cannons from the Paris National Guard. Thiers and his fellow moderates in the National Assembly – now sitting at Versailles – had been increasingly concerned at the radical sentiments infecting the Parisian soldiery and their representative body, the Republican National Guard Federation (‘Fédérés’), and wanted them swiftly disarmed after the Prussian departure. But at Montmartre, when the government troops were confronted by the Fédérés, intermingled with the working-class neighbourhood's women and children, they opted to lay down their guns and join forces with the republican soldiers. This symbolic moment of military obeisance was the single spark Paris needed. Despite all Baron Haussmann's urban improvements of the previous decades – the barrier-proof boulevards, the dispersal of working-class neighbourhoods, the easy transport for the movement of troops – Paris was still the city of revolution: the barricades went up, the remaining government troops scurried back to Versailles, and a new city council was announced with the title of ‘Paris Commune’ consciously evoking the revolutionary Commune of 1792. ‘What resilience, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians,’ gushed Marx. ‘However that may be, the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June [1848] insurrection in Paris.’14 Early events seemed to confirm his optimism. On 19 April the Commune produced its ‘Declaration to the French People’, which established the right of permanent involvement by citizens in communal affairs, open accountability of officers and magistrates (whose salaries were capped), the replacement of army and police by the National Guard, liberty of conscience and the transferral of redundant workshops or factories to ‘the co-operative association of the workers who were employed in them’.15 ‘As almost only workers, or recognized representatives of the workers, sat in the Commune, its decisions bore a decidedly proletarian character,’ according to an admiring Engels.16 Indeed, these brief, glorious weeks represented an exemplary ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ (understood more in the classical Roman rather than the continental twentieth-century sense) and, as such, a model for all aspirant social revolutionaries.