In the Nest of Extreme Radicalism: Radical Networks and the Bolshevization of Claude McKay in London

ABSTRACT

Between 1919 and 1921, Claude McKay (1889–1948), best known as a distinguished black poet and novelist, spent 14 months in London, a crucial and transformative moment in his life and work. Yet this is the least studied and understood period of McKay’s life and oeuvre. Drawing upon newly discovered archival sources, the essay documents and analyses the extraordinary impact McKay’s British sojourn had on his radicalisation. He met and befriended disgruntled black and colonial veterans of the Great War, spent most of his spare time at the International Socialist Club in the East End of London, a key venue for radicals of various stripes and nationalities. He became an important member of Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, the first British group to embrace and join the Communist International (Comintern). He was at times the de facto editor of its newspaper, the Workers’ Dreadnought, for which he penned some of his most remarkable articles (including his very first) and radical poems. The moment that McKay arrived in Britain and the radical milieu in which he lived and worked turned out to be profoundly influential in the decolonisation of his mind and his full embrace of revolutionary socialism in general and Bolshevism in particular.

KEYWORDS:

• McKay
• Sylvia Pankhurst
• C. K. Ogden
• London
• Britain
• Workers’ Socialist Federation
• black radicalism
• Russian Revolution
• imperialism
• Bolshevism
• Great War
• International Socialist Club
• Workers’ Dreadnought
• racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. W. A. Domingo, and the editors of the Messenger magazine, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, were early and vocal supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution, but none joined the Workers’ Party or the later Communist Party. They chose to remain members of the Socialist Party. Cyril Briggs and much of the leadership of the African Blood Brotherhood (including Grace Campbell, Harry Haywood, Richard B. Moore and Lovett Fort-Whiteman), after initial hesitation, also became forthright supporters of the Bolshevik Revolution and later joined the Workers’ Party. In France, the young Guadeloupean lawyer, Joseph Gothon-Lunion, was one of the first black adherents of Bolshevism, attending the Fifth Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) as a delegate in 1924. The early black responses to the Bolshevik Revolution are analysed in James (2017).

2. The few notable exceptions are: Trinidadian radical George Padmore who left the US in the late 1920s for Moscow, moved to Berlin and Paris before settling in London in the 1930s. Guyanese Ras Makonnen migrated from the US to Britain in the 1930s, and before him, Henry Sylvester Williams moved from Canada to London in the 1890s.

3. These facts escape Wayne Cooper and Robert Reinders, who in their article on McKay’s visit to England, frame their argument around the notion of a black Briton coming home only to be disillusioned. It is as if McKay remained unchanged between 1911, when he wrote the poem ‘Old England’, and December 1919, when he arrived in London. Cooper and Reinders (1967).

4. In 1909 a Sierra Leonean, A. B. C. Merriman-Labor (n. d.), published Britons Through Negro Spectacles or A Negro on Britons. Though it carries interesting anecdotes it lacks analysis.

5. The original of this issue (Negro World, 20 September 1919) has not been located and likely not survived.

6. McKay also visited the ‘1917 Club’, a redoubt of the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ in Soho, but primarily as a rendezvous spot for meeting with C. K. Ogden (about whom more below). He never liked it and felt uncomfortable there. In any case, the 1917 Club was artistic and Fabian, not radical, in politics. See James (2003b, 77–79).

7. McKay and Ogden (1889–1957) became close friends and probably even lovers. Ogden effectively acted as McKay’s literary agent, promoter and editor of Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920), McKay’s first anthology since leaving Jamaica. For more on the relationship see James (2003b, 77–79).

8. Pankhurst had known both Crystal Eastman, a socialist and ardent feminist, and her younger brother Max who, at the time of Pankhurst’s 1911 US tour, was secretary and treasurer of New York State’s Men’s League for Woman Suffrage: Sylvia Pankhurst (1977, 349); Eastman to Pankhurst, 11 May (Eastman 1911?).

9. On 23 October 1920, for instance, the Dreadnought reported on a ‘very lively meeting’, which finished at 11pm at the WSF’s Soho branch, and explicitly mentioned ‘Comrades McKay, Bishop, and others from the Central branch’ as visitors.

10. E. Edwards, Hugh Hope, C. E. E., C. E., C. E. Edwards, C. M. and Leon Lopez were among the pseudonyms used. Contrary to Wayne Cooper’s assertion, Ness Edwards was not one of McKay’s pen-names. Ness Edwards (born Onesimus Edwards [1897–1968]) was at the time a Welsh revolutionary miner, a leading member of both the South Wales Miners’ Federation, and the South Wales Socialist Society, and close associate of Pankhurst and the Dreadnought group. See Cooper (1987, 117, 394–395n) and The Labour Who’s Who, 1927 (1927, 62).

11. Pankhurst herself tells of the break in Pankhurst (1977), esp. book ix, chap. iv.

12. Lenin’s pamphlet was first published in June 1920 in time for the Second Congress of the Comintern. For the most detailed discussion of Pankhurst’s and other anti-parliamentary communists’ disagreement with Lenin, see Shipway (1988), chaps. 1–4; also see Bullock (1992).

13. See Workers’ Dreadnought (1918a). Significantly, her position on the struggle in Ireland was one of the issues that contributed to Pankhurst’s split with her mother Emmeline and sister Christabel, leaders of the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1913. Pankhurst had earned the opprobrium of her mother and sister for appearing on a platform supporting Irish workers fighting for unionisation during the Dublin Lock-Out that year (Bell 2016, 6).

14. For a rare, if not unique, account of the riots from a black eye-witness and victim, see Ernest Marke (1975, 25–32).

15. In A Long Way From Home McKay reported that during a strike at a sawmill owned by George Lansbury ‘scabs’ (strike-breakers) were used. He wrote an article for the Dreadnought exposing the situation and Lansbury’s hypocrisy. But Pankhurst, he claimed, objected to its publication and killed the article because, she said, the Dreadnought owed Lansbury 20 pounds. In a letter to Lee Furman, McKay’s publishers, Pankhurst said that she took ‘strong exception’ to many statements in the book and in particular the sawmill story, which she claimed is ‘absolutely untrue’ and that McKay had libelled her. She requested that Furman ‘immediately withdraw the book from circulation and delete those passages’. She concluded: ‘It is a pity that Claude McKay should have chosen to libel one who has treated him with consideration and kindness’ (Pankhurst 1937).

16. Speaking of Smyth, Pankhurst’s former secretary testified that ‘people didn’t care for her’. She was arrogant and the fact that her family had an estate in Ireland with ‘30 servants’ did not endear her to many East Enders (Jones 1972b).

17. British intelligence were fully aware of Pankhurst’s strengths as well as her weaknesses. One of their agents, reporting on the secret Communist conference in Manchester in September 1920 aimed at unifying the far left forces, wrote: ‘This need not disturb us over much for no one has yet succeeded in working amicably with Sylvia Pankhurst’ (CAB 24/112).

18. There is also an article published in the anarchist journal, The Spur, on Limehouse that was almost certainly written by McKay, though the authors name is given as ‘W. Winter’ (1920,105).

19. See item, ‘D. F. Springhull [sic]’.

20. Unsigned intelligence report, 25 November 1920; intercepted and transcribed letter from McKay to Springhall (n. d.), [but envelope stamped in Bow, ‘4-pm 25 November 1920’].

21. Springhall rose up the ranks to become the National Organiser of the CPGB by 1940; he was sentenced to seven years in prison for spying for the Russians in 1943. He died in Moscow in 1953 and is buried in China (See the Douglas Springhall files, KV 2/1594).

22. See Cook (1978) for a good sample of Eastman’s writings, including some excellent analyses of the British political scene.

23. During McKay’s time in London the British cabinet received via the Directorate of Intelligence at the Home Office a detailed document, at least once a month, entitled ‘Report on Revolutionary Organisations in the United Kingdom’. Hundreds, pertaining to the revolutionary ferment during and after the First World War, have been preserved. See NAUK series CAB 24. Many of these relate the goings on at the ISC, which was regarded by the government as the headquarters of the Communist Party in the early 1920s. One report in September 1921 claimed that the ISC was ‘entirely controlled by the Communist Party, which has paid 1,000 [pounds] towards its up-keep’. (CAB 24/128).

24. Professor David Killingray, who is writing a biography of Dr. Harold Moody, informs me that the medical student in question was probably a Jamaican named I. O. B. Shirley. As Dr. Shirley he entered into partnership with Moody in 1929 but it was dissolved in 1933 (Killingray to James 2002).

25. Barbara Winslow gets Gilmore’s name wrong (she calls him Reuben Samuels) and incorrectly states that he was a correspondent for the Dreadnought (1996, 128 and 211n). Patricia Romero (1990), Mary Davis. (1999) and Katherine Connelly (2013) failed to mention him.

26. It should be noted that McKay’s biographical profile of a ‘Comrade Gilmore’, ‘The Leader of the Bristol Revolutionaries’ (Hope [McKay] 1920) is of a different man. See also Workers’ Dreadnought (1920a) for a report on the march from Bristol and rally in Trafalgar Square. The Gilmore who led a tramcar strike and led the ex-servicemen’s march to London is cited variously in the Bristol Observer and Bristol Evening Post as ‘G. Gilmore’ or ‘J. Gilmore’ and never referred to as ‘coloured’, indicating he was black, as was the custom at the time for non-whites. The McKay profile made no reference this ‘Comrade’ Gilmore’s colour.

27. Three letters from Gilmore to McKay have survived but none from McKay to Gilmore. See Reuben Gilmore (1934 [quoted], 1936a, 1936b).

28. McKay met J. L. J. F. Ezerman (1869–1949), a radical and maverick Orientalist, in New York in August 1919. He employed McKay to do research for him at the New York Public Library. Ezerman was called to Holland on family business and invited McKay to accompany him, paying his passage. From Holland they went to London in December 1919, where the relationship broke down. Ezerman, however, gave McKay his return passage and £50 towards the publication of his book of poems. The wages from the Dreadnought only covered McKay’s board in London (McKay 1920d, 1920l, 1920m; Ezerman to McKay, 1920; McKay, 1937, 87). McKay’s recounting of a mysterious couple, ‘the Grays’, providing him with the passage to Europe (1937, 38–44), should not be taken literally. He probably used the device to hide Ezerman’s involvement.

29. The Dreadnought over the years carried many adverts for social events at the ISC.

30. Opened on 21 October, the exhibition was advertised in the Dreadnought (1920b).

31. See also McKay to Francine Budgen [August? 1920], quoted in Cooper 1987, 130–31.

32. Budgen tells his own remarkable story in an engaging autobiography (1970).

33. Writing in January 1920, McKay claimed the club was ‘about three months old’, but the 14 June 1919 issue of the magazine West Africa carried a report on the operations of the club (p. 444). See McKay (1920g). Although McKay’s ‘letter’—in fact a long article on the club—was published in the Negro World of 13 March 1920 it is datelined, ‘London, 14 January 1920’. For an analysis of the context and the reprinted document itself, see James. (2018).

34. He appended the Rev. Matthias’s words to his Negro World article (1920g) sent to the freethinking Hubert Harrison who was then an editor at the Negro World. The report in West Africa (1919) corroborated McKay’s description of the place as ‘overwhelmingly churchy’. The magazine reported that the club has a reputation as a ‘no drinking club’. And one of its officials advised the men to ‘keep smiling’, telling them: ‘The average Englishman does not understand coloured men, never having seen crowds of them, so is apt to stare and perhaps pass remarks. Don’t let it get your goat’ (West Africa 1919, 444).

35. Though Pravda carried it in April, McKay’s letter was dated 20 February 1923.

36. ‘Africa Enslaved’, is the title of one of the poems McKay sent to Ogden (1920o). The enclosure was not retained. It is almost certainly the one later published as ‘Enslaved’.

37. McKay saw the SSO in December 1919 at the Coliseum. He was not as taken with Buddy Gilmore as most of the critics were. ‘[H]is drum was more than noisy & practically drowned the whole band. There was no balance’. See McKay to Ogden (n. d.) but marked ‘Saturday’ [June/July, 1920 (between June 23 and 7 July 1920)]; see also Green (1982, 72); Rye (Rye 1986).

38. See McKay’s insightful and moving discussion of African art in his correspondence with Ogden, and in McKay (1979, 56–59).

39. McKay’s profound sympathy with the Irish comes through powerfully in the article; see also C. E. E. [McKay] (1920), and McKay (1920r). Bell (2016, 125–126), noted how exceptionally radical the Workers’ Dreadnought was on the Irish question, and applauded and quoted at the length the latter article without knowing and therefore acknowledging that it was by McKay.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Winston James

Winston James is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. His publications include Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain  (1993), edited with Clive Harris, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (1998), which won the Gordon K. Lewis Memorial Award for Caribbean Scholarship of the Caribbean Studies Association, A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay's Jamaica and his Poetry of Rebellion (2000), and The Struggles of John Brown Russwurm: The Life and Writings of a Pan-Africanist Pioneer, 1799-1851 (2010). His current projects include a two-volume study of Claude McKay.