The City of London Chartist meeting rooms: from 55 Old Bailey to Turnagain Lane
While many localities made do with meeting rooms in dissenting chapels or beer-houses, the City of London Chartists were able to rent premises in which they could also hold tea parties and lectures, and even find space for a library, and coffee shop, as the account here explains.
Chartists met anywhere they were welcome, from beer-houses to dissenting chapels. But often they and other working class radical groups were excluded from existing venues and had to create their own spaces. In Protest and the Politics of Space and Place (Manchester University Press, 2017), Dr Katrina Navickas recounts how not just Chartists but Owenite socialists, trade unionists and other social movements of the 1830s and 1840s were able to take meeting rooms and other buildings for their own use on a long-term basis. As she puts it: ‘With greater longevity and funding than their predecessors, radicals were able to move beyond “spaces of making do”.’
Outside London this often meant Chartists and others were able to build their meeting place from scratch. In the square mile of the City of London, its streets already crowded, this was not an option – and may have proved beyond Chartism’s resources. But the approach was the same.
55 Old Bailey before the Chartists
In the spring of 1841, the City of London Chartists took out a lease on rooms at 55 Old Bailey. At the time, preparations were under way to organise the presentation of a great petition to Parliament calling for a pardon for imprisoned Chartists, and the movement needed a venue for a Victim Restoration and Charter Convention which would oversee the arrangements.
But the building would go on to become a hub of Chartist activity, hosting regular meetings, lectures, and delegate conferences for the whole of London and Middlesex. It served as an office and correspondence address for the National Charter Association – and as a venue for social events. It would also host meetings of other radical and working-class organisations. The ‘Scientific and Political Institute’ which ran the venue was managed by a committee which stood at least to some extent apart from the Chartist body.
Today the name Old Bailey is synonymous with the central criminal court, although it is in fact the name of the street on which it stands. A smaller but equally well known courthouse was there in the 1840s, next door to Newgate Gaol and the venue for public hangings.
Number 55, it seems from a number of reports, was immediately opposite the courthouse, where a glass office block stands today. It was also reportedly the former home of the notorious 18th century underworld figure Jonathan Wild. If this is true, then the picture here may show the building. In 1810, a Mr Lydiard, giving evidence in a court case said he kept a public house ‘at the Sign of the Rose’ at 55 Old Bailey, and that the building was within the Rules of the Fleet (Northern Star, 11 December 1810). The property went through a number of changes before it fell to the Chartists. For the most part it had been a salesroom, with one advert from George IV’s time proclaiming: ‘Coronation!!! 20 to 30,000 ILLUMINATION LAMPS’ for sale (Public Ledger 16 July 1821). But the final tenant before the Chartists moved in was a Mr Pett, who wrote letters (‘secrecy strictly observed’), petitions, wills and legal documents ‘on moderate terms’. ‘Mrs P attends to Females’ letters of correspondence, &c. Advice to tenants gratis’ (Morning Advertiser, 6 August 1839).
The advertisement that caught the eye of someone in the City of London Charter Association must, however, have been that which ran in the Morning Advertiser a couple of years later, on 6 March 1841. It read: ‘CITY – No. 55, OLD BAILEY. To be LET, a spacious FIRST-FLOOR, good light and wide staircace (sic), with every convenience, suitable for offices, ware-rooms, or manufactories – front room, thirty-five by nineteen; back, nineteen by sixteen. May be had together or separate. Unfurnished.’
For comparison, a doubles tennis court is 36 feet wide – so the main room would have been big enough for a public meeting, but hardly capable of hosting a great rally.
55 Old Bailey and the petition for the prisoners
The City of London Chartists had previously met at the Dispatch Coffee Rooms in Bride Lane just off Fleet Street. But now they had rooms of their own, next door to the British Coffee House (NS, 1 May 1841). Early that month the Chartists moved in, with Morgan Williams, secretary pro tem to the Victim Restoration and Charter Convention urging the working men of England, Scotland Wales to forward their petitions to the meeting at 55 Old Bailey (NS, 8 May 1841).
The ‘place of meeting’ procured by the City of London Chartists was ‘well furnished, with a platform, seats, &c &c’ (NS, 15 May 1841), and was being put to good use, with lectures delivered ‘twice on Sunday, besides other evenings’ (NS, 5 June 1841).
The national convention proved to be a great success. Peter Murray McDouall reported how on the morning of 25 May 1841, when the number of signatures was counted and proclaimed to be 1,300,000, ‘the cheers resounded through the Old Bailey, and rolled away in its granite recesses’. A team of stonemasons ‘attired in clean white fustian jackets’ was brought in to load the giant petition rolls onto a wooden hurdle and carry it off to Parliament. ‘Our little room, 55 Old Bailey, was crowded to suffocation, and the street blocked up,’ declared McDouall.
That summer, the Scientific and Political Institute which managed the hall held a special general meeting of its shareholders, ‘when rules for their future guidance was agreed upon, and a managing committee for the succeeding quarter was elected’ (NS, 24 July 1841). Out of 50 shareholders, it was announced, 24 regularly took the Northern Star every week, while Henry Vincent’s National Vindicator ‘and other invaluable vehicles of sound political principles”, also enjoyed good sales, with the profits going towards the expenses of the institute.
Giving an indication of the range of activities taking place, the report also said that members of the public could call in to buy radical newspapers on a Sunday morning, that Chartist sermons were being preached there of a Sunday evening, and that a social concert was planned for the Monday to defray the cost of the London general election committee.
The following week, the Northern Star was able to report the setting up of a City of London Female Chartist Association, with the promise that it would meet at 55 Old Bailey every Thursday evening (NS, 31 July 1841). Events were also held to try to launch a youth section (NS, 25 September 1841).
55 Old Bailey: sermons and celebrations
The rooms were not solely for the use of the City of London Chartists, however, and both the Middlesex County Delegate Meetings and London Delegate Meetings were held there. And there is evidence that the Scientific and Political Institute was not synonymous with the City of London Charter Association. In September 1841, the Chartists were soundly ticked off by their landlords for allowing a sermon to be preached attacking those associated with the New Move.
Other bodies used the hall. Mr L. T. Clancy, late secretary of the Dublin Repeal Association, lectured there (NS, 2 October 1841) and the council of the tailors’ union agreed to take the hall every Thursday evening at a cost of 1s 6d (NS, 9 October 1841). Even a Young Men’s Anti-Monopoly Association held its first meeting there to protest at prime minister Sir Robert Peel’s plans to introduce an income tax to make up his budget deficit (Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 2 April 1842).
But the rooms were not solely for Sunday sermons, earnest political discussions and the passing of resolutions. A report from the London Evening Standard (28 December 1842), though hostile in tone, gives a flavour of the social activities in the hall – on this occasion a Boxing Day celebration:
‘CHARTIST RECREATIONS: On Monday night the Chartists assembled in their Hall, No. 55 Old Bailey, not for the purpose of listening to the ‘sweet voice’ of Miss Mary Ann Walker, not to ‘further the Charter to the utmost of their power,’ but to take part in a concert and ball. The females on this occasion greatly predominated. The concert commenced and consisted of Chartist songs by male and female artistes of the Chartist school; among them was the favourite song (among the Chartists) of ‘O’Connor’s the man of our choice.’ A child about 10 years of age very appropriately sang a song, the burden of which was ‘Oh mother dear, my gentle mother dear!’ Now came the ball. After dancing for some time, a subscription was raised among the gentlemen (?), the ladies strongly protesting at being excluded, and three pennyworth of mistletoe was bought. A Mr Hogg proposed to have the ‘cushion dance,’ upon which a general cry was set up by the females of ‘by all means,’ many of them not knowing what it meant. No cushion being found, a ‘bolster’ was introduced, with which the ‘proposer’ danced until nearly out of breath. The ‘bolster’ was then presented to Miss Susannah Cleopatra Inge, who at the same time received a kiss from Mr Hogg. Miss Inge then danced with the ‘bolster,’ and, having received several Chartist kisses, sat down with the air of an eastern monarch, she being the Queen of the Night, ‘Our Mary Ann’ being left in the shade. The ‘bolster,’ having danced for upwards of an hour, was allowed to retire, as did the other dancers a the peep of dawn, many of them thinking it was better to spend the time in the manner they had done on that occasion than in agitating for the Charter.’
Despite all this, the hall was clearly not much of a money spinner for its landlord. A report of proceedings at the insolvent debtors’ court found John Costello applying to be discharged on sureties (London Evening Standard, 10 October 1842): ‘The insolvent was a plumber and glazier, at No. 55, Old Bailey, the first floor of which house he let to a trades union society (the National Charter Hall). He said the furniture belonged to the society, which met two or three times a-week.’
Turnagain Lane: bigger, better, busier
By the autumn of 1842, the City Chartists were looking to move on (NS, 5 November 1842, p1). Delegates from the Political and Scientific Institute visited Chartist localities in Somers Town and elsewhere to drum up support for their plan to ‘procure a large central hall for the use of the National Chartist Association’ (NS, 12 November 1842, p1), and within a matter of weeks the Institute was able to report that it had found ‘extensive premises’ just a short walk away (Evening Star, 10 December 1842).
Formerly occupied by Mr Du Croix, who used it as a chandelier warehouse, the new building at 1 Turn-again-lane was said to be 76 ft long by 24 ft wide and 20 ft high – more than twice the size of the rooms at the Old Bailey, and able to accommodate public meetings of anything from 1,000 to 2,000 people. But this would be more than a lecture theatre: the Institute had plans for library, coffee, reading and committee rooms, and longer-term ambitions to open a school.
On Monday 12 December, members of the City locality, among them George Duck Wyatt, Mary Ann Walker, and Theophilus Salmon, who was secretary to both the City Chartists and the Institute, suspended their normal business to go and view their new hall (Evening Star, 15 December 1842, p1). That same week they renewed their appeal in the Northern Star for new shareholders to come forward: the cost of renting and fitting out the new building would not be cheap, and they had already committed themselves to laying out between £200 and £300 that had yet to be found (NS, 17 December 1842, p6).
They swiftly reached agreement with Mr Roberts, who owned the building, and by Christmas it was theirs. The lease was set at four years and nine months, at a yearly rent of thirty guineas, and with options to extend the agreement. There were to be 5,000 shares of five shillings each (of which 340 had been sold so far).
Helping to defray the costs, Feargus O’Connor agreed to give three lectures which could be expected to draw large audiences, John Cleave donated 500 Chartist Circulars to be sold for the benefit of the hall, and Thomas Slingsby Duncombe promised £25. Deputations to Parliament extracted £15 from the Earl of Radnor, £5 5 shillings from the civil engineer Thomas Penn, and £2 from the clergyman philanthropist Dr Fellows. The radical MP and editor of the Westminster Review John Bowring gave £1, and the Quaker veterinary surgeon Bracy Clark, 5 shillings with the promise of £5 worth of books once the library was formed.
Turnagain Lane: a standard of political freedom
Work on the hall obviously progressed at speed. On Monday 19 February, the institute was able to host ‘a grand festival, tea party and ball’. John Cleave took the chair, introducing as guest of honour the radical MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe who gave a rousing speech in which he declared it an honour to be able ‘to assist in planting the standard of political freedom’ in the hall. Upwards of 350 people sat down to tea, and others joined them as speeches continued into the evening. A poem ‘On the opening of the large hall of the City of London Scientific and Political Institute’ was read with ‘great effect’. The hall by this period was crowded to excess. Dancing was kept up with great spirit until and early hour, the only drawback being a want of sufficient space, but this was scarcely felt, as it augured so well for the future prosperity of the institution’ (NS, 25 February 1843, p1).
The new hall served its purpose. The pages of the Northern Star are filled for the next few years with reports of meetings. Susanna Inge sought to revitalise the flagging City of London Female Chartist Association with a meeting there (1 April 1843, p5). William Cuffay was elected president of the institute’s board of directors (NS, 1 April 1843, p2). Thomas Martin Wheeler, Robert Gammage and other well-known figures lectured there – as did Feargus O’Connor, who spoke on the repeal of the union with Ireland (NS, 3 June 1843, p7). Admission tickets cost 2d. It also attracted other bodies: the Metropolitan Tailors Trade Protection Society met there to elect a general secretary (NS, 20 May 1843, p5). And when Chartism’s focus switched to the land company, James Wyatt (younger brother of George Duck Wyatt) could be found at the hall every Sunday evening, ready to enrol new members and collect subscriptions (NS, 18 October 1845, p1).
It seems likely that the City Chartists’ tenure of Turnagain Lane lasted only until 1846, when they were reported once again to be looking for a suitable venue for locality meetings. Certainly, by the end of the decade, the hall had changed hands, and the Chartists were long gone: Mary Ann Walker and Susanna Inge had long since cut ties with Chartism; William Cuffay had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land in the wake of the Orange Tree Conspiracy of 1848; George Duck Wyatt and his younger brothers were preparing for a new life in South Australia; and Feargus O’Connor was now MP for Nottingham but no longer the head of a great political and social movement, the Charter having been soundly rejected by Parliament for the third time in 1848.
After Chartism: 55 Old Bailey
After the City Chartists left 55 Old Bailey, an advert appeared in the Morning Advertiser offering the rooms on the first and second floors to let, ‘the whole newly painted and papered – rent low’. Two years later, however, the Chartist meeting rooms finally met their end, when notice appeared that Messrs Farebrother, Clark and Lye would be selling by auction the building materials and fixtures, ‘consisting of flooring-boards, joists, girders, rafters, doors, panelling, glazed sashes and lead lights, brickwork, paving, tiles, fixtures, &c’ (Morning Advertiser, 14 November 1846).
A new building rose on the site (although not for nearly a decade), and it could not have been more different. Built by the Sunday School Union, the corner-stone was laid by alderman Thomas Challis MP ‘in the presence of a very respectable audience’ (Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 17 December 1855).
After Chartism: Turnagain Lane
Renamed Druids Hall, in the early 1850s, 1 Turnagain Lane became a regular venue for trade unionists. In the summer of 1853, London’s bricklayers met there throughout a series of strikes aimed at winning an extra 6d a day (The Sun, 9 September 1853, p3). London’s letter-carriers met there in support of their own pay claim (Reynolds’s Newspaper, 9 October 1853). And the London Boot and Shoemakers met to fight employer proposals to cut the wages of journeymen (Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 30 October 1853).
The following summer, however, the building hit the headlines for one last time, when a police raid found more than a hundred men dancing together, several of whom were wearing women’s clothes (Weekly Dispatch, 6 August 1854). In somewhat muddled evidence before the magistrates, Inspector Teague claimed that the building was used regularly for unlicensed dances and ‘immoral purposes’, but said he had been unable to detain more than two of the men there, one ‘dressed in the garb of a shepherdess of the golden age’ and the other ‘completely equipped in female attire of the present day’. After initially refusing both men bail, and questioning Inspector Teague about what he had seen, the magistrate accepted the payment of recognizances by the first prisoner. The second man then admitted that he was in fact not who he had said he was, but a Scottish Baptist minister whose object in visiting Druids Hall had been ‘to see vice in all its enormity’ so that he might be better able ‘to correct it from the pulpit’. Accepting that the man’s behaviour was less criminal than ‘imprudent’, the court discharged him.
In the 1860s, Turnagain Lane largely disappeared as a huge public works scheme known as the Holborn Valley Improvements demolished much of the area’s buildings and drove through new roads providing better traffic links between the West End and the City. Just a few yards of the old Turnagain Lane now survives, serving as an access road to the rear of newer commercial properties, the remainder having long since vanished under the monumental Holborn Viaduct.
Notes and sources
All newspapers referenced in the text above are taken from the British Newspaper Archive. After the first mention, the Northern Star is given as NS.
Precise measurements for the Turnagain Lane hall vary in different reports, but all agree it was somewhere between 76 and 79 feet in length by 22 to 26 feet in width; with a capacity of 1,000 to 2,000 people. In metric measures, this is some 24 by 8 metres, or 192 square metres. Recent work on crowd safety and crowd dynamics by Professor G. Keith Still of the University of Suffolk, however, gives an upper limit for standing and viewing spaces of five people per square metre – which would mean that no more than 960 people would have made Turnagain Lane feel very full. That sort of crowd density would have left no room for dancing, and coupled with the heat generated by oil or gas lamps and so many bodies would have been uncomfortably hot and oppressively claustrophobic. Professor Still’s crowd density images suggest to me that there were probably no more than 500 people in the room for its grand opening. See Crowd Safety and Crowd Risk Analysis.