John Cleese’s claim that London is not an ‘English City’ shows his ignorance of London’s history
John Cleese who was funny once is at it again, doing what Rupa Huq MP on Twitter called his best Morrissey impression. According to Cleese London is not really an English City anymore.
Quite aside from exhibiting an unacceptable racist attitude, Cleese is also showing his ignorance of history.
The late socialist historian Raphael Samuel wrote a long essay, Comers and Goers (in The Victorian City, 1973), about London in the later Victorian period. It begins thus:
‘The migrating classes’ as they were called by the promoters of the Leicester Square soup kitchen in the 1850s have left remarkably few traces of their existence, even in the places which once served them as town lairs. No railway hotels mark the terminal point of their journeyings. No imposing clubs stand as memorials to the seasons they spent in town’.
Samuel had partly in mind what Mayhew called the ‘wandering tribes’ seasonal workers who came to London in the winter for warmth and shelter and travelled to the countryside for work in the spring, summer and autumn.
But within that there were large numbers of gypsies, Irish workers, who were driven to London for work, given the poor state of their own labour market, and of course sailors as London was an important port.
Samuel writes of numbers of Americans, Chinamen, Lascars, Greeks and Italians, while numbers of stonemasons also migrated from London to America in search of seasonal work.
London has remained a place of comers and goers, a world city. Cleese’s ‘ English City’ is an unpleasant piece of historical fiction.
Dr Keith Flett is the Convenor of the London Socialist Historians Group
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