Speaking Out (2023)

Book Review from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speakers’ Corner Anthology. Edited by Jim Huggon. Union of Egoists. 2022.

This is a republication (with a new, additional Foreword) of an anthology first published in 1977. It is a collection of excerpts and other written material connected to Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner and there are several references to the SPGB scattered throughout. Jim Huggon is an anarchist who spoke regularly there from 1965 to 1983. He refers to a review by the Socialist Standard of the original version which has slightly puzzled us as it appears that no such review was ever published.

The collection also includes a knockabout piece by Harry Young (Horatio) called ‘On the Platform’ and originally published in the Seventieth Anniversary edition of the Standard in June 1974. There are excerpts too from famous Speakers’ Corner regular Bonar Thompson’s book, Hyde Park Orator, which has also recently been republished with added illustrations.

In addition, there is an interesting if rather pious excerpt from a piece by Lord Donald Soper about his time as an outdoor orator (more focused on Tower Hill than Hyde Park). This is interesting as he tells of encounters with a variety of other regular speakers and his relationship with them, without actually naming them. In particular, he writes of his conversations with a well-known Tower Hill personality and that this man was a scientific socialist, ‘breathing fire and slaughter against all religion, sneering at morality [and] despising the consolations of faith’ who turned out to be much warmer privately than his public persona had initially indicated. Given Soper’s detailed description of him it is highly likely that this was Harry Martin, a regular speaker at Tower Hill and who had left the SPGB in 1911 to found the Socialist Propaganda League (see ‘Getting Splinters’, in the June 2004 Centenary Edition of the Socialist Standard).

Tower Hill no longer exists as a speaking station and Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park is a shadow of its former self, these days a veritable bear garden aimed at tourists with very few serious speakers. This anthology helps capture the spirit of an earlier age.

DAP.

Blogger's Note:

There's a wee mistake in the review. The original edition of this book was reviewed by Robert Barltrop in the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard.

An I.L.P. Evangelist (1926)

Book Review from the December 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Evangel of Unrest: The Life Story of Bonar Thompson. 1/-. From the author. (Marble Arch, W.l.)

Bonar Thompson tells his life story in his usual style, from the days of unemployment processions in Manchester to his C.O. days during the so-called Great War. He pays tribute to our Party’s unswerving attitude during the war, but makes the curious statement that the I.L.P. was as firm as a rock against the war. He avoids the gymnastics of Ramsay MacDonald on the question and the association of the I.L.P. as an integral part of the Labour Party which joined the War Government.

Bonar Thompson does not tell us of his joining and leaving the Communist Party, and his reasons for that. He simply says he belongs to the I.L.P. now. What connection the I.L.P. has with Socialism he does not say. The prominent "pacifist” users of force in the Labour Government belonging to his I.L.P. he avoids to mention.

He denounces those who harp on “the position” and “economics," to the exclusion of the more emotional life, but he does not argue his case. He leaves it to denunciation. He is very bitter about those who object to paid speakers and paid literature sellers, etc. Here again he does not argue, but becomes vitriolic in denouncing his critics. So there is nothing to answer.

In a letter accompanying the book Bonar Thompson tells us that he has been a consistent reader of the Socialist Standard since 1907, but he accounts for his “political ignorance” by his “temperament and intellectual constitution.” Parties, however, are the expression of economic interests, not temperaments, and Thompson’s excuse for his outlook simply avoids the question of the soundness of the Party’s position.

For those who are interested in Bonar Thompson’s life the book will be of interest for what it contains, as well as its omissions.

C. R. B.

“Hyde Park Orator” (1934)

Book Review from the April 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his “Hyde Park Orator" (Jarrolds, 287 pages, 10s. 6d.), Mr. Bonar Thompson has written a somewhat irritating but entertaining book. He tells us about his early life in Northern Ireland, his introduction to working-class life in English industrial areas, his contacts with trade unions and labour organisations, and his strenuous and not always very successful efforts to earn his living as cheap-jack in the market-place, and as platform speaker and entertainer.

He has done and seen many things, and has learned how to describe them vividly enough—this, in spite of Sean O'Casey's criticism in the Preface —and many of the things he says are worth saying. He cuts through a great deal of humbug and pretentiousness, and shows up many of the weaknesses of working-class organisations. While his criticisms of men and movements are often one-sided and malicious (he has a savage paragraph on the S.P.G.B.), it does no organisation any harm to hear what it looks like to a keen, even if prejudiced, onlooker.

Nevertheless, the whole book is made needlessly irritating by Mr. Thompson's efforts to pose as the hard-bitten, work-shy cynic, who was never himself a believer in the principles to which he professed adherence. In adopting this pose he has been preceded by Mr. Walton Newbold, and in neither case is the claim true. Mr. Thompson’s pose ought to deceive nobody. He himself remarks on a sensitiveness to ridicule which he says he finds highly developed in the working-class movement. It is no doubt partly this sensitiveness in him which makes him so anxious to disclaim ever having shared the illusions of those around him. At an early age he acquired a dislike for the kind of work and working conditions which alone were open to him. This was only natural, but his pretence that he has spent a lifetime dodging work is ludicrous. In spite of his claim he has had to work very hard indeed to maintain a precarious existence. Workers cannot escape the evils of working-class life by adopting poses or practising self-deception.

Needless to say, Mr. Thompson often forgets his pose. He boasts of having lived by deception of the workers, but gets very indignant regarding Labour Leaders who, according to his account, are working a “racket" no worse than his. He sneers at the workers for being so credulous and sheep-like, but turns and calls them ungrateful when they do not give him generous collections. After all, according to Mr. Thompson’s philosophy, why should the workers pay him for his strenuous orations if they can hear them for nothing? If for reasons of inexperience, necessity, or sentiment, Mr. Thompson offers the wrong wares for sale, or offers them in the wrong place, he should be the last to complain. And although he chides the workers for their credulousness, he is furiously angry with the S.P.G.B., which at least never shared his and the Labour Party's illusions about leadership, the value of emotional appeals, the impending collapse of capitalism, etc.

It is a pity that a man with Mr. Thompson’s experience, who has unlearned many false lessons, should have allowed bitterness to stand in the way of recognising that the failure of so many reformist activities does not in the least touch the solid basis on which the case for Socialism really rests.

Edgar Hardcastle

Holding Forth (1977)

Book Review from the June 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speakers' Corner: An Anthology. Kropotkin's Lighthouse Publications, £1.75. Illus.

The most remarkable thing about Hyde Park is that meetings and speakers still proliferate there. Up to the traffic and television explosions of the early nineteen-fifties, crowds went to parks and listened every Sunday. Finsbury Park, Victoria Park, Clapham Common, Platt Fields in Manchester and numerous others where audiences can no longer be found; but Hyde Park, despite surgery fifteen years ago, carries on. Tourists flock there, Londoners go - largely because, as is not the case with most of the so-called "means of communication", communication actually takes place.

The speakers today are alleged to be not so good as in the past, and it is probably true. Proficiency at outdoor speaking requires much practice, and that is harder to get than it was twenty-five years ago and more. Yet opportunities are arising afresh now, with the creation of shopping precincts and traffic-free areas in cities. The next decade may see a new generation of speakers to rival some of those mentioned in this book.

It is a collection of pieces about Hyde Park. Items from the history of assemblies there; the park regulations; extracts from writings by Bonar Thompson, a professional speaker who entertained audiences for many years; piousness by Lord Soper; and an article from the 70th anniversary of the SOCIALIST STANDARD. The compiler, Jim Huggon, is an anarchist speaker in Hyde Park and the foreword is by one of his predecessors, Philip Sansom. It is not the former's fault that the latter is an essay in dreadful self-esteem.

For habitués of the park this is an interesting wide-ranging book which does not attempt to analyze but communicates the feeling of the place.

Robert Barltrop