George Lansbury
George Lansbury (22 February 1859 – 7 May 1940) was a British politician and social reformer who led the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. Apart from a brief period of ministerial office during the Labour government of 1929–31, he spent his political life campaigning against established authority and vested interests, his main causes being the promotion of social justice, women's rights, and world disarmament.
George Lansbury
Clement Attlee
Ramsay MacDonald
Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart
Ramsay MacDonald
22 February 1859
Halesworth, Suffolk, England
7 May 1940 (aged 81)
North London, England
- Angela Lansbury (granddaughter)
- Bruce Lansbury (grandson)
- Edgar Lansbury (grandson)
- John Postgate (grandson)
- Oliver Postgate (grandson)
Originally a radical Liberal, Lansbury became a socialist in the early 1890s, and thereafter served his local community in the East End of London in numerous elective offices. His activities were underpinned by his Christian beliefs which, except for a short period of doubt, sustained him through his life. Elected to the UK Parliament in 1910, he resigned his seat in 1912 to campaign for women's suffrage, and was briefly imprisoned after publicly supporting militant action.
In 1912, Lansbury helped to establish the Daily Herald newspaper, and became its editor. Throughout the First World War, the paper maintained a strongly pacifist stance, and supported the October 1917 Russian Revolution. These positions contributed to Lansbury's failure to be elected to Parliament in 1918. He devoted himself to local politics in his home borough of Poplar, and went to prison with 30 fellow-councillors for his part in the Poplar Rates Rebellion of 1921.
After his return to Parliament in 1922, Lansbury was denied office in the brief Labour government of 1924, although he served as First Commissioner of Works in the Labour government of 1929–31. After the political and economic crisis of August 1931, Lansbury did not follow his leader, Ramsay MacDonald, into the National Government, but remained with the Labour Party. As the most senior of the small contingent of Labour MPs that survived the 1931 UK general election, Lansbury became the Leader of the Labour Party. His pacifism and his opposition to rearmament in the face of rising European fascism put him at odds with his party, and when his position was rejected at the 1935 Labour Party conference, he resigned the leadership. He spent his final years travelling through the United States and Europe in the cause of peace and disarmament.
Radical Liberal[edit]
First campaigns[edit]
On his return to London, Lansbury took a job in Brine's timber business. In his spare time he campaigned against the false prospectuses offered by colonial emigration agents. His speech at an emigration conference at King's College in London in April 1886 impressed delegates; shortly afterwards, the government established an Emigration Information Bureau under the Colonial Office. This body was required to provide accurate information on the state of labour markets in all the government's overseas possessions.[17]
Having joined the Liberal Party shortly after his return from Australia, Lansbury became first a ward secretary and then general secretary for the Bow and Bromley Liberal and Radical Association.[18] His effective campaigning skills had been noted by leading Liberals, including Samuel Montagu, the Liberal MP for Whitechapel, who persuaded the young activist to be his agent in the 1885 general election.[19] Lansbury's handling of this election campaign prompted Montagu to urge him to stand for parliament himself.[20] Lansbury declined this, partly on practical grounds (MPs were then unpaid and he had to provide for his family), and partly on principle; he was becoming increasingly convinced that his future lay not as a radical Liberal but as a socialist.[19] He continued to serve the Liberals, as an agent and local secretary, while expressing his socialism in a short-lived monthly radical journal, Coming Times, which he founded and co-edited with a fellow-dissident, William Hoffman.[21]
Personal and family life[edit]
George Lansbury married Elizabeth Jane (Bessie) Brine on 22 May 1880 in Whitechapel, London. Four years later, in May 1884, he took his wife and their three young children to Australia as emigrants with high hopes based on British government propaganda, which suggested plentiful work and a rosy life there. The truth was otherwise, with paid work very hard to find, and terrible living conditions for many. By May 1885 they had had enough of Australia, and returned to London. Lansbury took up work in his father-in-law's Whitechapel sawmill and began his political career speaking about the harsh conditions in Australia.[168]
For most of their married life, George and Bessie Lansbury lived in Bow, originally in St Stephen's Road and from 1916 at 39 Bow Road, a house which, Shepherd records, became "a political haven" for those requiring assistance of any kind.[169] Bessie died in 1933, after 53 years of a marriage that had produced 12 children between 1881 and 1905.[170]
Of the 10 children who survived to adulthood, Edgar followed his father into local political activism as a Poplar councillor in 1912, serving as the borough's mayor in 1924–25. He was for a time a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). After the death of his first wife Minnie in 1922, Edgar married Moyna Macgill, an actress from Belfast;[171] their daughter Dame Angela Lansbury (1925-2022), became a stage and screen actress.[170] George Lansbury's youngest daughter, Violet (1900–72), was an active CPGB member in the 1920s, who lived and worked as a translator in Moscow for many years. She married Clemens Palme Dutt, the brother of the Marxist intellectual Rajani Palme Dutt.[172]
Another daughter, Dorothy (1890–1973), was a women's rights activist and later a campaigner for contraceptive and abortion rights. She married Ernest Thurtle, the Labour MP for Shoreditch, and was herself a member of Shoreditch council, serving as mayor in 1936. She and her husband founded the Workers' Birth Control Group in 1924.[173] Dorothy's younger sister Daisy (1892–1971) served as Lansbury's secretary for over 20 years. During the suffragette protests in 1913 Daisy Lansbury helped Sylvia Pankhurst to evade police capture by disguising herself as Pankhurst.[174] In 1918 she married the left-wing writer and historian Raymond Postgate, who was George Lansbury's first biographer, and founder of The Good Food Guide.[175] Their son Oliver Postgate was a successful writer, animator and producer for children's television.[176] The Conservative MP Penny Mordaunt is a distant relative of Lansbury.[177]
The Lansbury home at 39 Bow Road was destroyed by bombing during the London Blitz of 1940–41.[178] There is a small memorial stone dedicated to Lansbury in front of the current building, named George Lansbury House, which itself carries a memorial plaque. There is also a memorial to Lansbury in the nearby Bow Church, where Lansbury was a long-term member of the congregation and churchwarden.