MINNIE Lansbury was born in 1889 in Stepney in the East End of London. Her parents, Annie and Isaac Glassman, were Jewish refugees from Poland, who had escaped the pogroms fomented by the Russian Tsarist police. Her tragically short life amongst the slums of the area where she was born was filled with struggle alongside the poor and the oppressed.
In 1911, Minnie became a teacher in a primary school in Whitechapel, where she became active in the National Union of Teachers (NUT). She also became a socialist and suffragette. These were the years of the “Great Unrest”, a huge wave of strikes by dockers, rail and road transport workers and miners. In Ireland it saw the Dublin Lockout struggle led by Jim Larkin and James Connolly.
The East End saw strikes on the London docks in the summer of 1911 and again in 1912. Thanks to their syndicalist and socialist leadership, these strikes helped overcome the racism that had recently divided Irish and Jewish workers from each other. The families of Whitechapel Jewish tailoring workers took in some 300 dockers’ children during the latter three-month dispute. During the docks and transport strikes, schoolchildren marched in support of the strikers.
Only a decade earlier, a virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic organisation called the British Brothers League had been established in the East End. Its poisonous agitation claimed the credit for Britain’s first modern racist controls on immigration, the 1905 Aliens Act. Building bridges of solidarity during strikes was thus a vital weapon against this early precursor of fascism.
Another component of the “Great Unrest” was the campaign of direct action by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the “suffragettes”, led by Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst. Minnie became a militant in Sylvia Pankhurst’s East London Federation of the WSPU, which focused on mass working class women’s action for universal suffrage, adopting militant tactics and welcoming support from men. For these tactics, Sylvia was imprisoned and went on hunger strike several times.
Minnie Glassman married Edgar Lansbury in 1914. Edgar’s father George Lansbury (1859-1940) was already a prominent socialist in the East End. He became Labour MP for Bow and Bromley in December 1910, and started publishing the Daily Herald.
Originally a strike paper, the Daily Herald became the paper of the militant wing of the labour movement in 1912, giving unstinting support to the suffragettes. In the same year, George Lansbury even resigned his seat to stand on a platform of universal suffrage both for men (whose right to vote was still restricted by a property qualification) and women (who did not have the vote at all), but lost the ensuing by-election.
In 1913 Christabel and Emmeline expelled their far more radical sister Sylvia from the WSPU, for sharing a platform at the Albert Hall with George Lansbury and Jim Larkin, in support of locked out Dublin workers. Sylvia’s grouping renamed itself the East London Federation of Suffragettes (ELFS), and began to develop a more broadly socialist politics.
When the First World War started in the summer of 1914, the ELFS threw itself into campaigning and providing for the welfare of women suffering on the “home front”. It organised milk distribution and ran a day nursery, cost-price restaurants and a toy factory to provide employment. It also fought for higher and more regular allowances for soldiers’ wives, price controls and higher wages for women workers.
Minnie gave up her teaching job in 1915 to become Assistant Secretary of ELFS, where she brought suffragette-style direct action to these new causes. Sylvia Pankhurst recounted one example of this as follows:
“Minnie Lansbury burst in, exultantly announcing ‘a riot in the Roman!’ A crowd of women had threatened to storm a fish and chip shop for potatoes. A policeman attempting to stop them had been swept aside and ‘they tore off all his buttons!’, her black eyes twinkled with merriment. To save further disturbance the policeman had compelled the fishmonger to bring out his store of potatoes and sell them at three halfpence a pound from a table outside his door.”
As the war was coming to an end in 1918, another wave of class struggle broke out. Bus, tram and underground workers went on strike against their union officials’ advice, demanding equal pay for women workers.
However, five days after the war ended on 11 November 1918, Prime Minister David Lloyd George called a snap election. This was the first to be held under nearly universal male suffrage, and with women over 30 voting for the first time. Lloyd George went to the country in alliance with the Tories, devastating Herbert Henry Asquith’s wing of Lloyd George’s own Liberal party, which had not endorsed this alliance.
Labour won only a limited number of seats, 57 compared to its 42 seats in 1910. However, it polled 2,385,472 votes, compared to 309,963 in 1910. And only a year later in 1919, Labour swept the board in many borough councils across London, and did well in elections to the London County Council and to the Boards of Guardians, which administered benefits to unemployed workers whose insurance had run out.
In Poplar, Labour had 39 out of 42 of councillors. Amongst them were seven dockers, seven railworkers, four labourers, two postmen, a toolmaker, a boilermaker and a lead worker.
Four of the councillors were women (Jeannie MacKay, Jane March, Nellie Cressall and Julia Scurr), as also were two aldermen (sic), Susan Lawrence and Minnie Lansbury. George and Edgar Lansbury were also elected. Minnie opened her house to constituents every morning, and delivered significant improvements in maternity and child welfare provision. Poplar’s Labour Council radically improved services for the working class residents who had elected it.
In the meantime, the Russian revolution in November 1917 had aroused considerable enthusiasm in the British labour movement. The ELFS, which had renamed itself the Workers’ Socialist Federation (WSF) in May 2018, took part in the unity discussions with Russia’s Bolsheviks and other British revolutionary socialists that eventually led to the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920.
Minnie and Edgar remained in the WSF during these discussions, while also remaining members of the Labour Party. A key sticking point in these discussions, however, was the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin’s advice that communists should stand for elections and seek affiliation to the Labour Party, remaining inside it where they were already members.
This was something to which Sylvia Pankhurst was completely opposed, and which left her and her supporters outside of the CPGB’s ranks after the conclusion of all the various “unity congresses” in 1921. Here Sylvia and Minnie parted ways. Minnie agreed that socialism would come through a revolution, but understood that working class representation in parliament and councils could provide a tribune for those waging the class struggle outside of it. Minnie was soon proved right.
In January 1920 a major depression broke out in the USA, hitting Britain in April. Unemployment soared to 17 per cent by 1921. And unemployment insurance only lasted a short time, following which the jobless were forced to undergo a savage “means test” under the 1834 Poor Law, to verify that claimants had practically no other resources.
Moreover, each borough (however rich or poor) had to provide for its own “paupers”. Thus Poplar council faced a choice: to cut services, to raise rates or to defy an unjust funding system. It chose the third, and refused to collect the precepts for cross-London bodies (like London County Council, the Water Board and the Metropolitan Police), until measures were taken so that richer boroughs in the West End paid a bigger share.
The law was soon invoked against the Poplar councillors. Thousands demonstrated in their support when the councillors marched to court, with Minnie in the front ranks. After a High Court ruling, Minnie was imprisoned at the start of September 1921, along with 30 of her fellow councillors. The six women went to Holloway prison, and the men to Brixton.
Minnie waged a ceaseless struggle inside demanding better conditions, especially for Nellie Cressall who was heavily pregnant. They both also exposed the terrible conditions suffered by “ordinary” prisoners.
On 21 September, Nellie was forcibly released, having previously refused release unless all her fellow councillors were released with her. Demonstrations outside the prisons kept up the pressure on the government. The remaining councillors were released on 12 October, six weeks after their arrest, without having yet “purged their contempt” of court.
The government backed down and rushed through the Local Authorities (Financial Provisions) Act 1921, which provided for pooling of local government funding. This benefitted Poplar council by £250,000 per year, as well as other poor London boroughs. It was a magnificent victory for both militant defiance and mass mobilisation.
But over Christmas 1921, Minnie developed influenza, which rapidly turned into pneumonia. Under normal circumstances, a healthy 32-year-old woman’s body would have fought this off. Minnie’s body was weakened by her six-week spell in prison. She died on 2 January 1922.
Thousands of East End workers – men as well as women – turned out for her funeral, many wearing red flowers. The Red Flag was sung, appropriately enough since, metaphorically speaking, she was one of those whose “hearts’ blood dyed its every fold”.
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Minnie, in her 32 years, crammed double that number of years’ work compared with what many of us are able to accomplish. Her glory lies in the fact that with all her gifts and talents one thought dominated her whole being night and day: How shall we help the poor, the weak, the fallen, weary and heavy-laden, to help themselves? When a soldier like Minnie passes on, it only means their presence is withdrawn, their life and work remaining an inspiration and a call to us each to close the ranks and continue our march breast forward.”
– George Lansbury’s tribute to Minnie
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