London: Truth and Reconciliation

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PART TWELVE: WAR AND PEACE

Eltham: Posh Dagenham

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Brent: Adventures in Metroland

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XLIII – Overton and Lilburne

"We the free People of England.... Agree... to abolish all arbitrary Power, and to set bounds and limits both to our Supreme, and all Subordinate Authority..."

Brave words from people who were imprisoned in the Tower of London at the time, and who had seen others executed for saying the same thing.

But John Lilburne and Richard Overton, two of the authors of this declaration, were no strangers to incarceration. Throughout the English Civil War they and their fellow levellers were a constant thorn in the side of both Royalists and Parliamentarians who became too comfortable with power and privilege.

In 1637, Lilburne was flogged and thrown into the Fleet Prison for denouncing the Church of England. In 1645 he was imprisoned again for denouncing Members of Parliament for leading comfortable lives while soldiers fought and died for the Parliamentary cause.

In 1646, Overton was thrown into Newgate Prison for a pamphlet he wrote condemning the House of Lords. Undeterred, he wrote another pamphlet from prison called 'An Arrow shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords'.

The Levellers' radical demands included annual elections for Parliament, religious tolerance and near-universal male suffrage. They were able to demand these changes and stay alive thanks to the rank and file of Parliament's supporters, who regularly signed petitions in their thousands supporting them.

Lilburne and Overton were eventually released. Overton went into exile and later joined the Royalists under Charles II, Lilburne went in and out of prison before becoming a Quaker in his final years. He died before Charles II was restored to the throne.

The Levellers have never been commemorated with the kinds of statues that were erected in Westminster for Cromwell and the Stuart kings. It was only in the twentieth century that newly-elected socialist Councillors used the memory of these early radicals to name streets filled with cheap social housing, including Lilburne Road in Eltham and Overton Close in Brent.

Thanks to LSyd for drawing my attention to the John Lilburne and the Levellers – it would have been a real travesty to have left them off the list.

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XLIV Cats and Dogs

During the Great Plague of 1665, Londoners suspected cats and dogs of carrying the disease that killed a sixth of the city's human population. The Mayor of London ordered that:

'...no hogs, dogs, or cats, or tame pigeons, or conies be suffered to be kept in any part of the city... and that the dogs be killed by the dog killers appointed for that purpose.'

An estimated 40,000 dogs 200,000 cats were killed. The animals were largely innocent, given that most experts agree that the disease was spread by rat fleas.

It didn't take long, though, for London's furry friends to regain their place in the affections of the capital, and by the 20th century, people were putting up statues in their honour.

In the aftermath of World War I, when millions of animals died, The RSPCA a commissioned this dramatic frieze to the animals that had died in the Great War.

An inscription accompanying the artwork ended with the words:

'May we all remember them with gratitude and in the future commemorate their suffering and death by showing kindness and consideration to living animals.'

The RSPCA was as good as its word, because the monument is not only made of brass and stone but of bricks and mortar. It is mounted on the front of a 'dispensary for sick and injured animals' that treated tens of thousands of animals for free in the 1930s, more than a decade before the NHS was set up to do the same thing for human beings. The building still operates as an RSPCA clinic.

The RSPCA had originally intended to establish a grander monument at Hyde Park Corner, but this plan was shelved in the 1920s. However it did finally get built further up Park Lane, and was unveiled in 2004. Cats and dogs, who died in their thousands during the Plague, both feature in this exhaustive tribute to animals.

There are, of course, a huge number of graves dedicated to individual pets in London. Perhaps the most curious is this unassuming stone in Carlton Terrace in Westminster, which dates from 1934. It sits next to the former German Embassy, and commemorates Giro, the beloved pet dog of German Ambassador Dr Leopold von Hoesch. The ambassador gave Giro a full state funeral, which makes this little stone the only official Nazi monument in London.

Thanks again to LSyd for turning up what has to be the most curious monument so far.

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XLV – Fenner Brockway and the Conscientious Objectors

Plenty of the people featured in this thread have spent some time in the Tower of London. The pacifist, Fenner Brockway, is the most recent by some way.

In return for speaking out against conscription, he was tried and, in his words, was:

"...taken to the Tower of London and locked in a large dungeon where there were twenty or so prisoners. Six were objectors. I was to be taken to Chester Castle and my wife travelled with me. The Cheshire Regiment did not have a good reputation for its treatment of objectors. The previous week the newspaper had carried reports of how [two objectors] had been forcibly taken to the drilling ground and kicked, punched, knocked down and thrown over railings until they lay exhausted, bruised and bleeding. I was a little apprehensive."

It's to Brockway's credit that these experiences and four years of imprisonment that followed did not embitter him. During his long life this generous-hearted champion of democratic socialism and humanism was close friends with some of the most famous figures of the 20th century, including George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi, de Valera and Bertram Russell.

As he grew older, a space in Red Lion Square in Holborn was reserved for a statue of him. But, as he lived longer still, the planning permission that had been given for the statue started to reach its expiry date. As a result, at the age of 96, Brockway was given the privilege of witnessing the unveiling of his own statue. So the man that London once treated as a traitor ended up being given an honour that was usually reserved for prime ministers and heads of state.

In 1994, a monument to all conscientious objectors was established in Tavestock square, a few minutes walk from the Fenner Brockway statue, for all the men who were imprisoned, sentenced to hard labour, humiliated and denied employment for many years because of their beliefs.

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Paddington and Beyond: Boats, Trains and Automobiles

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XLVI Alan Turing

Alan Turing was the man who learnt to think like a computer before computers existed; he gave the Allies a crucial advantage in World War II with his work on code breaking; he defined the concept of artificial intelligence; and in 1952 he was chemically castrated by the British authorities for being a homosexual.

In 1936, he developed an approach to logic that used an imaginary calculating machine directed by algorithmns. In doing this, he laid out the theoretical basis for computer science.

Historical accounts differ about the extent to which Turing's ideas gave rise to modern computers, but in a sense, whether he invented computers or not, Turing himself was the first computer, in the way he disciplined his mind to operate in a way that machines could imitate.

For example, in 1952 he wrote a chess program that required more processing power than any of the prototype machines of the time could generate. Undeterred, he played a game where he operated as the computer, taking half an hour to perform the calculations needed for each move.

During the war, he played a leading role in cracking German codes. According to one colleague:

'In 1940/41 the German U-boats were sinking our food ships... left right and centre, and there was nothing to stop this until Turing managed to break naval Enigma, as used by the U-boats....

'If that hadn’t happened, it is entirely possible, even probable, that Britain would have been starved and would have lost the war.'

But in 1952 the police discovered that Turing had been involved in a homosexual relationship. To avoid imprisonment, he agreed to be chemically castrated. By 1954, this 'treatment' was over, but Turing was found dead in his home, poisoned by cyanide. It is unclear whether or not he committed suicide.

As the story of Turing's work during the war has gradually come to light, his reputation has grown.

In 1998 a Blue Plaque was unveiled at his birthplace in the sleepy neighbourhood of Maida Vale.

In 2009 Turing received an apology from the Prime Minister. It ran:

'Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of the Second World War could have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely.

'In 1952, he was convicted of "gross indecency" – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

'...his treatment was of course utterly unfair, and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was convicted, under homophobic laws, were treated terribly.'

Four years later Turing was given a Royal Pardon, but this was not extended to the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted.

Could there be an algorithm for reconciliation?

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XLVII – The Victims of Yalta

In March 2014 Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird compared Russia's annexation of Crimea to Hitler's annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938.

Ukrainians, however, can draw on a precedent from World War II that is closer to home.

At the Yalta Conference in 1945, the Allies agreed to send around two million Russian prisoners of war back to Stalin. Some had fought for the Nazis, some were simply refugees that had left the Soviet Union during the savage Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution. Some had been captured and forced to work as slaves by the Nazis.

All were regarded by Stalin as traitors and were executed, imprisoned or sent to labour camps when they returned. Some were shot as they disembarked from the ships that had brought them back to the Soviet Union, within sight of the British sailors who had delivered them.

When confronted with protests against the repatriations, the British foreign minister, Anthony Eden, insisted on pressing ahead saying, 'we cannot afford to be sentimental'. Many were tricked into going back, being told that they were being transported to the safety of places like Canada.

In the words of one Cossack soldier: 'The NKVD or the Gestapo would have slain us with truncheons, the British did it with their word of honour.'

In 1982, a memorial garden was dedicated to the victims of the repatriation. Its centrepiece was a fountain by the sculptor Angela Connor.

A newspaper report of the time said the memorial, 'was denounced in advance by Soviet authorities and erected over the opposition of the Foreign Office, known to be embarrassed over its role in ordering the repatriation...'

Shortly afterwards the monument was comprehensively demolished by vandals using stonecutters. Angela Connor worked tirelessly to raise funds for a new monument, dedicating most of her own services for free, and in 1986 a new monument, as hard and dense and unvanadisable as a cannon ball, was put in place.

The new sculpture consists of twelve images of victims of the repatriation, whose faces merge into each other. There is nothing cathartic or pleasing about this small, jagged piece of bronze. Like a heckler being dragged out of a meeting, it is a reminder of an uncomfortable truth, that history is written by the winners, that many bitter subplots run beneath it, that we aren't always the good guys.

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XLVIII Harry Farr

‘You are a fucking coward and you will go to the trenches. I give fuck all for my life and I give fuck all for yours and I'll get you fucking well shot’.

This was the warning Private Harry Farr's Sergeant Major gave him with when Farr refused to go to the front line in preparation for a huge assault at the Somme in 1916.

The Sergeant Major’s promise came true. Farr was sentenced to death for cowardice and shot on the 16th October.

Harry Farr suffered from uncontrollable panic attacks whenever he heard the sound of heavy artillery - he had been treated for shell shock three times before. This time, it was the sound of British guns, not enemy fire, that had set him off.

However, his psychological condition was not recognised in Edwardian England. Unless someone was in a state of permanent mental breakdown they were likely to be considered a shirker. Farr only broke down when confronted by the sound of artillery - as his commander put it: 'Apart from his behaviour under fire, his conduct and character are very good', and as Farr himself acknowledged, 'being away from the shell fire I felt better'.

When he was executed, Harry Farr refused a blindfold. The army chaplain told Farr's widow, "A finer soldier never lived".

Farr's daughter was only three years old when her father was shot, but she fought her whole life to get his name cleared. In 2006, supported by expert medical evidence, she succeeded; Harry Farr was officially pardoned along with over 300 soldiers executed for cowardice.

The war memorial in Wealdstone, North London, now includes the name of Harry Farr in the list of local men who died in action during World War I. There wasn't space to put Farr's name in strict alphabetical order, so it lives in the space originally left between 'F' and 'G' - this slight anomaly being the only clue to the 90-year wait for his name to be cleared.

[Sketching]

A remarkable thread I have enjoyed catching up on. Excellent work and I appreciate all the effort and time you've obviously put into it.

[LSyd]

great tour and coverage, thanks. especially for getting in the levelers, turing, yalta...eh, the list is too long to go on. how about the Bermondsey T-34?

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I've put it on the list!

Thanks for the kind commemts

[Chef]

Thanks for the updates. This is one of my favorite threads on the forum.

[Greavsie]

This thread is absolutely Epic BEDHEAD!Thank you for all the effort you put in to it! Any chance of a trip to Blackheath? You may already have done it of course.Thanks once again.

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Chef - thanks!

Greavsie - thanks - I did do a short trip to Blackheath (here), but didn't really do it justice. Maybe I'll go back sometime and add a few more to round it out!

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At long last... an update - as usual, some filler to get to the next page...

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