by Tony Benn
My grandfather fought a notable battle against the ‘surface’ or ‘stud’ system for trams, whereby connection was made between the tram and a wire contact in the road. The system was introduced by the Moderates and was supposedly cheaper, but had caused the death of a horse and cars to catch fire, because many of the studs were found to be live. John spoke about ‘the terrible story of the Mile End Road from June 24th to July 12th last. Fifty live studs a day injured people, roasted horses, caused fireworks at night and the danger of a fatal accident to any person who chanced to touch a live stud.’ The tram company sued my grandfather for libel, and in November 1910 the court assessed damages against him at £12,000. The judge directed that ‘£5,000 must be secured within 14 days’. An order was put on his property to guarantee payment and, anticipating the bailiffs, my grandmother marked some of the furniture as hers; but my grandfather won on appeal in March 1911. He was congratulated by, among others, a man called Key who wrote, ‘I felt as if all the bells ought to be ringing and the flags in the City waving.’
John Benn also advocated leasehold franchisement, the taxation of land values, the abolition of all school fees and public ownership of the Port of London. And he was a strong supporter of women’s rights, vigorously defending Lady Sandhurst and two other women who had been chosen by the council as aldermen, but who were disqualified by the courts, because they were women.
John’s greatest passion was to secure for Londoners the right to have their own elected government to replace the hotchpotch of boards and vestries, which were as corrupt as they were inefficient. He believed that London, as the greatest city in the world, should be allowed to take over responsibility for the new and sprawling community growing up outside the old City of London, and the City itself under its Lord Mayor and aldermen and livery companies. These enjoyed immense wealth, but had no interest in the people who poured into the City every day to work in the offices and warehouses from which its wealth was derived – and John always believed that its riches should be shared.
As Chairman of the Housing Committee, he was very proud of what the new LCC was able to achieve, acquiring great tracts of land for building. And he campaigned actively to raise the rates of relief in 1893–4 at a time when distress among the poor was at its worst for twenty years.
In 1892 my grandfather had supported John Burns in his campaign for trade-union rates of pay, hours and conditions for contractors to the council. That same year, when the National Telephone Company asked permission to have the streets of London dug up to accommodate its new cable system, the LCC objected, and John led the delegation to see the Postmaster-General to demand that the new telephone service should be seen as a public utility and brought into public ownership.
Arnold Morley, the Postmaster General, refused, saying that the telephone was a luxury. To this my grandfather, showing great foresight, replied that ‘The day will come when ordinary people will be able to order their groceries through the telephone.’ He lived to see a Liberal government bring the National Telephone Company into the Post Office’s own system.
He was equally radical in his attitude to the police, on one occasion calling for an inquiry into the severe injuries sustained, at the hands of the police, by unemployed demonstrators at Tower Hill. And he moved the motion in the council in April 1889 which declared it to be necessary and expedient that the LCC should, in common with all other municipal bodies, have control of its own police. However, London never succeeded in this because Sir William Harcourt, the Home Secretary, argued that the dangers of ‘Irish terrorism’ necessitated government control.
In 1894 Lord Salisbury denounced the LCC as the place where ‘collectivist and socialistic experiments were tried’; the Daily Mail included John Benn, along with John Burns and Sidney Webb, on its ‘blacklist’ in the LCC elections that year.
In 1892 my grandfather had been elected MP for St George’s-in-the-East, declaring that he aspired ‘to the honour of being a member for the backstreets’. He used this little verse as his slogan:
Friends of Labour, Working Men
Stick to Gladstone, Vote for Benn.
John was a passionate believer in Home Rule for Ireland and defeated C. J. Ritchie, who was then President of the Local Government Board, receiving a message of congratulations from Mr Gladstone himself.
After losing his seat in 1895 by eleven votes, having forgotten to vote for himself, he stood in the Deptford by-election in 1897, calling for a bigger house-building programme and for cheap fares for workmen. A scurrilous campaign was mounted against him in a newspaper called The Sun owned by Harry Marks, which circulated to every elector a special edition attacking John Benn. He was defeated by 324 votes, a result that led John Burns to announce that ‘The election had been won by a newspaper owned by blackguards, edited by scoundrels.’ Later, in the General Election of 1900, my grandfather stood for Bermondsey, where he was again defeated. He was ultimately successful in re-entering Parliament for Devonport.
As Chairman also of the LCC, he set out in 1904 his political philosophy in these words, describing the role of the council as guardian of the plain citizen, and foreshadowing the Beveridge Report forty years later:
The Council now follows and guards him from the cradle to the grave. It looks after his health, personal safety and afflicted relatives; it protects him from all sorts of public nuisances; it endeavours to see that he is decently housed or itself houses him.
It keeps an eye on his coal cellar and his larder; it endeavours to make his city more beautiful or convenient; it looks after his municipal purse and corporate property and treasures his historical memories.
It tends and enriches his broad acres and small open spaces and cheers him with music.
It sees that those it employs directly or indirectly enjoy tolerable wages and fair conditions.
It speaks up for him in Parliament, both as to what he wants and what he does not want; and last and greatest of all, it now looks after his children, good and bad, hoping, if it is possible, to make them better and wiser than their progenitors.
In 1910 he spoke alongside Keir Hardie at a rally in Hyde Park in support of Lloyd George’s Budget.
One of the last decisions taken by the LCC was to acquire the site on the river on which its home, County Hall, was built. It was Mrs Thatcher who abolished its successor, the Greater London Council, because she did not believe in any of the principles that John Benn espoused.
John was very popular with children and once composed a children’s prayer: ‘O God, please make the bad people good and the good people nice.’ He also wrote ‘The Christmas Pudding Song’ which I remember my father singing at Christmas, to the tune of ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’:
Once there was a pudding
At least I fancied so
She had three little children
Whose names I think you know
There was Peter Mincepie first
Michael Orange sitting by
And little Lucy Lemon who
Seemed just about to cry.
Chorus: Sing a song of Pudding full of spice and plums
Crowned with glistening holly, when old Xmas comes
Pass the pudding plates and have another slice
And clap clap clap for Christmas time and everything that’s nice.
Worthy Mistress Pudding who had so wise a head
She always gave a raisin for everything she said
She plummed her neighbours up with spicy compliments
Her words were also eatable and with the currant went.
Chorus
Little Peter Mincepie was so cut up one day
He always was so crusty and had a nasty way
Of making very ill the folks who took him in
They couldn’t sleep a wink at night he kicked up such a din.
Chorus
Little Michael Orange was such a charming boy
To make his playmates happy was ever Michael’s joy
He covered them w
ith juice and though they sucked him dry
This very happy little chap was never known to cry.
Chorus
Little Lucy Lemon whenever she was squeezed
She always pulled a nasty face and said ‘I won’t be teased’
She always was so cross she never got a kiss
Whatever you do, dear boys and girls, don’t get a face like this.
John Benn died in 1922, three years before I was born, and I am very sad never to have met him. As I have got older, I have come to appreciate what a tremendously progressive force local government has been in the history of our democracy. Had the Labour Party existed when he was first elected, he would certainly have been a member of it. He was a passionate advocate of what came to be known as ‘gas-and-water socialism’, which laid the foundations of the welfare state. After his death his son, my Uncle Ernest, opened the John Benn Hostel for homeless boys in the East End in memory of his father.
In 1958, when my dad was just over eighty, he did a broadcast for the BBC and his opening words were, ‘The chief interest of my family for four generations has been Parliament.’ He described how his grandfather, the Revd Julius Benn, had nominated James Bryce as the Liberal candidate for Tower Hamlets; how his father John had been elected for the same constituency in 1892, and he himself for Tower Hamlets in 1906. His broadcast ended by describing how my two eldest sons had sat in the gallery of the House of Lords waving to him, knowing that their father, their grandfather and both their great-grandfathers had been Members of Parliament. And he ended, ‘You will understand then what I mean when I speak of a parliamentary community and why I live so happy in a blaze of autumn sunshine.’
My dad could not know then that one of those little boys (my son Hilary) would himself become an MP for Leeds and is now a Cabinet minister, helping to make a record of five members of the family over four generations in Parliament in three centuries.
MOTHER’S SIDE
On my mother’s side my Scottish ancestors were radical in nature, and it is said that my great-great-grandmother was in Stirling on the day of the execution of two Scots radicals – John Baird and Andrew Hardie – for armed insurrection in 1820.
My great-grandfather on Mother’s side was Peter Eadie, a Scots engineer who was apprenticed on the Clyde. The Eadies were farmers in Perthshire, but Peter travelled widely in Europe, as many Scottish engineers did in the nineteenth century, and was involved in building the railway station at Kilmarnock.
Peter Eadie was a very imaginative man. He invented a device called a Ring Traveller, which was a modest invention that was essential for the textile industry. And in his little house in Galashiels he designed and manufactured these tiny components, set up a small company and then moved to Paisley, a textile centre. There he built up a very successful business with two brothers (the company being called Eadie Bros and Co.) with £120 capital.
Politically he was a radical on Paisley council and disliked the ‘idle rich’ intensely. My mother said that the first time she heard the word ‘socialist’ was after the election of the Liberal government in 1906, when Peter declared that he might go further than them and ‘become a socialist’. In his capacity as a Paisley councillor, he supported votes for women and in 1913 wrote:
I will give my blessing to anyone who will bring in a measure to redress her [woman’s] wrongs. Of course I do not know all the circumlocutions of the House of Commons nor how long it would take them to do it, but if they would hand it over to the Paisley Town Council they would do the job at a sitting.
Peter Eadie’s daughter, my maternal grandmother, Margaret, who worked on the Ring Traveller in Galashiels, met and married Daniel Holmes, who was born in 1863, the son of a steeplejack in Irvine. Daniel was a brilliant student who had become a teacher at Paisley Grammar School, having come first in the external examination for a degree at London University. The Holmes family belonged to the Irvine Brethren, a strict Christian sect.
Daniel also travelled up and down Scotland giving lectures at public libraries that had been funded by James Coats, a wealthy Scots industrialist. He wrote a book about it called Literary Tours in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, which gives a vivid account of his travels and the very intellectual attitude of the Scots, together with their readiness to engage in intense discussions about political and theological questions.
He was very absent-minded. Mother told us that after leaving school he had been unsuccessfully apprenticed to a tailor. He was sent round to take the measurements of the customers, who later refused to accept the finished suits because they were all wrong. When Daniel and my grandmother went cycling on their honeymoon, she had a puncture and he cycled on, waving cheerily and saying, ‘I’ll see you back at the hotel’, leaving his bride to walk back alone.
Although when I knew Daniel, in old age, he seemed very conservative in his outlook and his liberalism appeared to me to be far to the right, he was reported – when adopted as a parliamentary candidate for Govan – as saying, ‘I am a radical by conviction, I shall give my utmost support to any measure which, in my opinion, is for the social wellbeing of the people. One great reason for our social misery is that too much of the land in this country is in the hands of private individuals.’ In these opinions he may well have been influenced by his father-in-law, Peter Eadie, who was a genuine radical.
In 1911 Daniel was duly elected to Parliament for Govan (in a by-election), and Mother told me that his political meetings were very well attended because he would use them to explore and explain his knowledge of ancient history. On one occasion he described to an interested audience that just before Vesuvius erupted, there was an election in Pompeii; he held his audience in rapt attention, although it had little to do with the manifesto on which he was standing.
He made his maiden speech on the Temperance (Scotland) Bill and entranced the House by saying, ‘I do not expect that, in our generation at least, alcohol will ever be out of date and when I look at the history and even the climate of my native country I know quite well that my fellow countrymen will never be sickeningly abstemious or ostentatiously teetotal.’
He was a talented poet and became known as the Poet Laureate of the House of Commons. One poem, which I quoted at my own retirement party in the Speaker’s House in 2001, ran as follows:
Though politicians dream of fame
And hope to win a deathless name
Time strews upon them when they’ve gone
The poppy of oblivion.
But lo the singer and his lays
Grow mightier with the lapse of days
And soar above the wreck of time
On the immortal wings of rhyme.
Daniel Holmes was not really a politician, but a teacher, and in that capacity he represented perfectly the deep commitment of his fellow countrymen and women to education and the importance of learning – describing himself as ‘a worshipper at learning’s shrine’. He was scholarly to the end and always carried around a copy of Dante’s Inferno in his pocket, and suitcases full of books.
I knew both my grandparents on my mother’s side, as they lived into the 1950s. But Mother had a strange childhood, because Daniel, being a very old-fashioned Scottish teacher, took little interest in her education and she spent much time in France and Switzerland as a child, because her parents moved there for a time; she learned French there, and was educated at home, though by the age of seven or eight she had not been taught to read or write properly. She never went to university, but compensated for this by developing her own interest in theology and studied for an STh (Student of Theology) qualification at King’s College London, after she had married my father and while she was having her children.
I had many interesting aunts, uncles and cousins, of whom two stand out in my memory.
MY UNCLE ERNEST
My father and his elder brother were both Liberals, but whereas Ernest was a ‘Manchester School’ Liberal, Father was a radical Liberal, and Ernest was very upset when Father
decided in 1927 to join the Labour Party. But Father had a great deal of respect and affection for Ernest’s kindness towards our family.
We used to spend Christmas at his house in Oxted, Surrey – Blunt House – during my childhood up until 1935. Ernest was married to Gwen, who somewhat disapproved of my father. She was a magistrate and my father who, as a Privy Counsellor, could sit in any magistrate’s court, would tease her, threatening to come and sit in hers.
Ernest was a very good businessman; he took over the struggling trade-publications company Benn Brothers, founded by his father John, and turned it into a thriving business. After the First World War, Ernest had decided to move into book publishing and set up a new company called Ernest Benn, which was a great success, so that by 1918 he was earning £10,000 a year. This is why he was able to buy his grand Surrey mansion. Ernest was also extremely careful with money.
A young man called Victor Gollancz had been working voluntarily in my father’s parliamentary office, but decided that politics was not his interest, so Father suggested that he might go into publishing and recommended him to Ernest. Long before the advent of Penguin Books, Ernest introduced Benn’s Sixpenny Novels and they were a tremendous success, largely due to Victor; but when Victor asked my uncle to make him a partner, on the basis of the contribution he had made, Ernest refused. And so Gollancz left the firm and established his own publishing house.
Gollancz Books became an even greater success, and among the many titles for which Victor became famous were the Left Book Club publications, which had a profound impact on the development of socialist ideas during the 1930s. I once had the pleasure of hearing Gollancz speak during the war in a debate in Oxford about the need to admit Jewish refugees to Britain; it was so powerful that the students voted unanimously in favour of the motion.
Ernest was also a very successful writer and his most famous book, The Confessions of a Capitalist, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was published worldwide. He was an unashamed advocate of market forces, like Margaret Thatcher years later – whose election would have delighted him, although Ernest would have been very doubtful about the idea that a woman should have the responsibility of being Prime Minister. Ernest wrote another book about Russia, which began with the clear and simple statement that he had never been to Russia and had no intention of doing so while the Soviet regime continued to exist.
