SDF Meeting Hasting Beach July 1908 (Hastings Museum)
Socialists, meeting places & free speech
The current political climate, perhaps enhanced a little by social media is raising some issues about where the left is able to meet and put across points that may be controversial to some.
The situation is not new, although the present conjuncture provides a particular focus. Anyone who has organised events for the left or the labour movement will know that there are some venues that are relaxed about allowing meetings and some that just wont entertain the idea.
What is less usual are venues that will accept bookings from the left and labour movement cancelling because of threats from individuals hostile to the left. Traditionally, though I think it must be accepted that this is not a better alternative, they would have tried to break the meeting up, often violently.
However there is a long history of the authorities trying to frustrate the left’s right to meet and speak out.
Perhaps one of the best known examples is in pre=1914 Hastings when the Social Democratic Federation (formed 1881) was banned from holding meetings in the town and had to resort to holding them on the beach. On occasion speakers had to use a boat just offshore to address crowds on the beach to avoid arrest.
One of the SDF’s activists in Hastings at the time was Robert Tressell (Noonan) who was working as a painter while writing the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.
The SDF had been part of the 1900 meeting which set up the Labour Representation Committee, which led to the formation of the Labour Party but continued to operate independently. It split over the issue of support or otherwise for the First World War and some anti-war members joined the Communist Party from 1920. It had a specific focus on free speech for the left which reflected its own approach to politics. That is for another post though.
Below is a report from the Hastings Observer about a modern recreation of one of the beach meetings
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Celebrating 100 years since Tressell began writing his hugely influential novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, speakers in authentic outfits mounted a makeshift ‘soapbox’ and argued the case for many of the democratic rights we now take for granted.
Cllr Jeremy Birch held court with an impassioned plea to give women the vote and begin a redistribution of wealth in Britain.
Ion Castro, a committee member of the Robert Tressell Festival committee, said: “A hundred years ago, the Socialist Democratic Federation – one of the forerunners of the Labour Party – used to meet on the beach at Hastings to make their views known.
“If they had spoken in public in the town they would have been arrested by the police, but they couldn’t touch them on the beach.
“Every year we do an re-enactment of these speakers who helped shape the democratic society we now live in.”
https://www.hastingsobserver.co.uk/news/socialists-re-enactment-at-tressell-festival-1-1440774
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