Kmflett's Blog

The former Oakdale Pub, Hermitage Rd, South Tottenham

Sue Gray the former senior civil servant now at the centre of Keir Starmer’s Downing St operation was born and brought up in Tottenham.

This of course has nothing to do with her job  and neither does the history of her family.

However it is not without some interest. She lived initially in West Green Rd N15 and then in Philip Lane N15, quite close to where Foreign Secretary David Lammy was brought up. Subsequently it seems the family moved to Hermitage Rd N4 (a long road that runs between St Ann’s Hospital and Green Lanes in South Tottenham) and her mother worked at the Oakdale Arms pub.

The Oakdale I’m afraid is no more though I (as the then Secretary of Haringey TUC) and many others were involved in a long running campaign to save it. Of course Ms Gray’s mother was no longer working there- this was in the years before 2010,she died in 2003. In fact the pub had passed into the hands of Milton a Cambridge micro-brewery and was known for good cask beer and food. It was run by Tom Behan- who went on to run the Bumble Inn in central Peterborough-the 2020 Beard Friendly Pub of the Year. The Oakdale was overseen by Steve Early who also ran the Pembury Tavern in Hackney-now Five Points brewery tap.

The pub was owned by North London property developers C and S Shah whose aim was to build flats on it. The pub was a profitable going concern but flats were more profitable. They got planning permission after an appeal to a planning inspector claimed that there was an alternative pub nearby, the Woodberry on Seven Sisters Rd. It has not been a pub for a good while and last time I checked flats had not been built on the Oakdale site. An all too familiar story of C21st Britain.

All that being said Ms Gray due to family circumstances did not do a degree but entered the civil service direct from school and based on her ability rose to a senior level. I’m not sufficiently familiar with the 2024 Civil Service to know if it’s still possible to do that-but in the private sector where I work, there are management apprentice schemes designed to facilitate that. It’s world of which old Etonians like Boris Johnson have no conception.

Thanks to @Mattyblag on Twitter

Keir Starmer clearly has a penchant both for sharp haircuts (for which he pays himself) and sharp suits which have been donated by a well wisher (aka a wealthy Labour peer).

Since the media remains notoriously bad at history a reminder that in the 1960s Labour PM Harold Wilson was well known for wearing Gannex Macintoshs. These were produced by a company owned by Wilson’s friend Joseph Kagan. Kagan donated (for the time) a substantial sum to the running of Wilson’s political office.

Kagan was later jailed for tax evasion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kagan,_Baron_Kagan

There is no evidence that anyone but Wilson paid for his trademark pipes however

Today marks my first anniversary on Blue Sky. I’m not quite in the first 10% of users but I joined (via a guest code) clearly with an influx of others. No doubt that was due to an earlier burst of Musk idiocy.

For quite a while Blue Sky (certainly UK wise) was very quiet. More recently as Musk lurches further to the right and lots of blue tick racists and fascists pop up on Twitter, its much better.

As a socialist historian I find it a decent space now. Beards remain a work in progress and sport is more or less non-existent. Politically its certainly not right-wing but the left presence is not huge either. There is quite a bit on Ukraine (I think both Russia and the US should clear off and a peace should be sorted before yet more of the bloody infantry die thanks to others imperial ambitions) but Gaza hardly features.

That reflects, the welcome Brazilian levy notwithstanding, a lack as yet of global reach.

Above all that though Blue Sky unlike Twitter (where I remain active for now) is a nice and mostly friendly place to be. Let’s hope it thrives.

Below is a slightly edited version of a post from September 2014

Keir Hardie’s original base, from the late 1870s, was amongst first the Lanarkshire and then the Ayrshire miners in Scotland. He was a trade unionist, a full time organiser, with a Lib-Lab perspective on the world that focused strongly on issues of respectability such as temperance and religious observance. He also had a beard.

Hardie stood as an independent labour candidate election in Lanark in April 1888 and in August of the same year he became the first Secretary of the new Scottish Labour Party.

A career in Scottish politics surely beckoned. Except that it didn’t because that wasn’t quite how Hardie saw the world.

In 1892 he travelled to the East End of London, another centre of a newly organising working class, to stand, without Liberal opposition, as a labour candidate for Westminster. Hardie won and in August 1892 took his seat as an MP.

Questions were asked about where Hardie’s campaign funds came from. While Hardie presented himself as moving beyond his trade union background, as Caroline Benn’s definitive biography underlines, unemployment was even more of an issue in West Ham than it was in Ayrshire. The Scottish miners understood the link well enough and certainly gave some of the money for Hardie’s election.

The following year he was one of those who formed the Independent Labour Party.

When it came to the 1900 General Election Hardie in era when it was possible to stand in more than one seat was nominated in Preston and Merthyr in South Wales.

 Preston was never likely at this point, on a still restricted franchise, to return a labour MP.

Hardie’s chances in Merthyr weren’t thought to be too good either. After all he was a Scot who had held a seat in London’s East End and was largely unknown in the area.

Hardie however had two things going for him. Firstly he had been a miner and a miner’s union official. Merthyr was a mining seat, but one which remained firmly Lib-Lab. This however was the period when the new Trades Councils were being formed in the area, and they were often a bedrock of support for independent labour politics

In a two member seat Hardie was elected MP and in the 1906 General Election was re-elected with an increased majority.

During his period as MP for West Ham and Merthyr when not representing his constituents in London, Hardie continued to live in Cumnock in Scotland where he had been based as a union official.

The historical point that Hardie’s trajectory as a union and labour activist demonstrates is that while issues of national independence are important ones, class politics transcends boundaries.

I am Scottish- my father a Communist- was born on Clydebank. However I live in London and Cardiff so I didn’t have a vote on 18th September 2014. If I had one it would be hard to envisage why one would have voted to keep the imperial structure of the United Kingdom as it currently is. At the same time the thought of a smiling Alex Salmond on 19th September 2014 was just as upsetting as that of a smiling David Cameron in May 2015. Neither man of course has ever had a beard, unlike Keir Hardie.

Whichever way you look at it, perhaps the debates and the energy of the campaign will provoke an upsurge not in the Establishment politics of Salmond and Cameron, but movement at the grassroots, from below. That is what all those in authority in London and Edinburgh really fear.

The spectre of united working class internationalism that Hardie, and his beard, in a way personified.

Hendrix, Dylan and music politics

Jimi Hendrix died in London 54 years ago on 18^th September 1970. His last performance was at the Isle of Wight festival on 30^th August 1970.

Hendrix died well before the age of the internet, mobiles and social media and, as importantly, before the ‘serious’ media- broadsheet papers and the BBC- took music culture seriously. Hendrix’s death did not pass unremarked but the impact was much less than it would be now.

Amongst a significant musical output Hendrix also produced what was one of the best known cover versions of the 1960s and probably one of the finest ever.

That was his take on Bob Dylan’s All  Along the Watchtower, which he played at the Isle of Wight on that late August day in 1970.

Dylan was not drafted to fight in Vietnam and said little directly about the war, or the opposition in the US to it which grew in the late 1960s. Hendrix by contrast had been a GI briefly in 1961/2 before being discharged. He too didn’t go to Vietnam.

Yet Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower was certainly about the US society that had given rise to the Vietnam War and Hendrix’s treatment of it provided an appropriate musical context.

The late Mike Marqusee writing on Dylan, notes that the Hendrix version of Watchtower was picked up on by both black and white US soldiers serving in Vietnam in the late 1960s. For black soldiers Hendrix was a symbol of a possibly changing situation. For white soldiers the radicalism of his music and of the lyrical content of songs like Watchtower fitted their disillusion with the US military.

As Dylan noted in the song ‘there are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke’ before adding ‘that is not our scene’ underlining the seriousness of the times.

They were too serious sadly for Hendrix who died after choking on his own vomit in circumstances never quite fully explained just a few weeks after playing the Isle of Wight festival.

Marqusee suggests that Hendrix’s playing of the Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock was the coda to his version of All Along the Watchtower.

Hendrix’s tortured guitar playing turned the US national anthem, like God Save the Queen essentially a patriotic war song, into an attack on US imperialism.

54 years on I’ll certainly be remembering Hendrix as a great musician and someone who stood against the political stream too

Larry the seventeen year old veteran Downing St mouser has recently seen two new feline arrivals in the street. The Starmer’s moved there existing cat JoJo in recently and have now also acquired a Siberian kitten, Prince.

It has also been reported that Rachel Reeves family have persuaded her that a cat is needed. So far details are sparse but if Reeves applies the same Treasury rules to the cat as she plans for the economy there will be a need for a Downing St cat Food Bank.

Keir Starmer has something of a history of accepting hospitality as leader of the Opposition and now as PM and in fact when he was a lawyer according to some reports.

Freebies have included several Coldplay tickets and Arsenal away games. Starmer is an Arsenal Season Ticket holder (for which he paid himself) and would often get preference for away game tickets, but not the cost of them.

Angela Eagle told Kay Burley on Sky News (17th Sept) that Starmer’s love of freebies is because ‘he’s an Arsenal fan’.

Some might regard Starmer’s choice in music and football as very centrist dad. Arsenal are traditionally known as boring (as a Spurs fan I know there are worse things) but that really relates (if at all) to the Wenger era not the current manager Arteta.

One Summer 2024 Project I pursued (and Summer doesnt end until 22nd September) is to look at what might be termed the Making of the Making of the English Working Class.

E P Thompson signed a contract for the book in August 1959 but he had clearly done research and formed ideas on the subject well before that.

We know that some of these ideas came from adult education classes he gave in North Yorkshire. Some came from his activism in CND, the Communist Party and from 1956 the New Left.

His writings in the New Reasoner, Universities and Left Review and from 1960 New Left Review provide interesting insights into the approaches that Thompson took in the Making.

The brief extract below comes from an article Thompson wrote on Commitment in ULR. He was pursuing a friendly argument with the largely student focused ULR on what the nature of serious political activism meant and in particular had historically meant.

The flavour of interaction, debate, dispute and struggle can be found in many sections of the Making

The  great pioneers   never   built   on   flattery:   they   denounced,   they challenged,   they   offered   the   hardships   of   organisation, self-education,  the  difficult  mastery  of  political  understanding,   the  painful   awakening   of  richer   social  aspirations:

Universities & Left Review 6, 1959

Kennington Common, April 10th 1848

The Guardian which has owned The Observer since 1993 has reported that it is in talks to sell the paper to a relatively new start up Company. What this means for the future of the Guardian and in particular its UK print edition it will be interesting to see

When the Observer became a tabloid on 21st January 2018 the Editor reviewed the history of the paper (14th January 2018) and made the point that the paper supported Chartism:

And what a history. The Observer supported the Chartist movements for political and social reform in the 19th century. It backed the rise of early trade unionism. It sided with the North against the Confederate slave states in the American civil war. It played a vital role in helping to establish Amnesty International and Index on Censorship and became the principal supporter in the British press of Nelson Mandela.

A similar point was made in 2010 in a previous redesign. However is it true?

This is how The Observer reported the Chartist demonstration on 10th April 1848 at Kennington Common:

The metropolis presented on Monday a scene of unusual excitement and alarm. The determination announced by the members of the Chartist National Convention to hold their meeting and procession in defiance of the law and the constituted authorities – the military preparations, almost unparalleled for extent and completeness to put down any insurrectionary attempts.

The weather was exceedingly favourable for the demonstration; no obstruction was offered by the police to the processions which left the Middlesex side of London for Kennington Common; a free thoroughfare was permitted to all who wished to take part in the public meeting; and yet, instead of the 300,000 persons who, we were told would assemble on Kennington Common does not reach 50,000

Observer 16th April 1848.

The report does not read as particularly supportive. However I’ve no doubt the Editor wrote in good faith. The Observer certainly did support the extension of the suffrage (vote) and that was the key Chartist demand. Support for the Chartist movement was perhaps another matter.

Tom Baldwin’s biography* of Keir Starmer reminds that when he was elected as Labour Leader in 2020 he was seen by some on the moderate left as ‘Corbyn in a suit’. That is he had similar policies to Jeremy Corbyn but did not have a beard and had the appearance, with dark suits, of ‘centrist dad’ (Times 16th September 2024).

Of course image matters in politics and there hasnt been a PM with a beard since 1902 (and he was a Tory).

Of course the Corbyn part of the equation was soon ditched and now just the suit remains. It is an expensive decent quality suit though and Starmer is one of those people who looks like he was born wearing a suit as it were..