Leaders: George Lansbury 1932-35

George Lansbury (1859 - 1940)

George Lansbury was a Labour pioneer, leading pacifist, Christian Socialist, tireless campaigner against poverty, and Leader of the Labour Party between 1932 and 1935. The historian AJP Taylor called him, 'the most loveable figure in modern politics'. When Harold Wilson claimed Labour was a 'moral crusade' it was surely men like Lansbury that he had in mind. Lansbury's biographer said, 'his anger and pain at injustice or cruelty could affect him so violently as to make him momentarily ill.' He personified the socialist dilemma between principles and power, between ideals and practical politics, and in the end his principles meant he must relinquish the party leadership.

Lansbury, the son of George Lansbury senior and Anne Ferris , was born in a tollhouse between Haleworth and Lowestoft, Suffolk, in 1859. He was one of nine children. When Lansbury was nine years old the family moved to East London. George started work in an office at the age of eleven but after a year he returned to school where he stayed until he was fourteen. This was followed by a succession of jobs as a clerk, a wholesale grocer and working in a coffee bar. Both his parents were alcoholics, and Lansbury became a life-long teetotaller.

Lansbury then started up his own business working as a contractor for the Great Eastern Railway. In 1880 he married Elizabeth Brine at Whitechapel church. In 1884, now with three children, the Lansburys decided to emigrate to Australia. After one year, he returned to England, embittered by the conditions suffered by émigrés, and founded the Emigration Information Department to reveal the truth behind the propaganda about emigration.

In the 1886 General Election Lansbury joined the local Liberal Party. Later that year he was elected General Secretary of the Bow and Bromley Liberal Association. He broke with the Liberals in 1892 over their unwillingness to support legislation for a shorter working week. Lansbury joined the Gasworkerss and General Labourers Union and in 1889 joined a local strike committee during the London docker's strike.

Here he met HM Hyndman, the leader of the Marxist SDF. Lansbury joined the SDF and in 1892 established a branch of the SDF in Bow.

In the 1890s he was influenced by the Christian Socialism of Philip Snowden. Lansbury became a Christian Socialist and helped convert Keir Hardie to Christian Socialism in 1897.

In 1892 Lansbury was elected to the Poplar Board of Guardians, which ran the Poplar Workhouse. The Guardians worked to improve conditions in their workhouse. They also established, with funding from an American businessman, a Farm Colony in Lainden, Essex, where they provided work for the unemployed. In the 1895 General Election Lansbury fought the Walworth seat as the SDF candidate. He only obtained 204 votes in that election but in 1900 he fought the seat again and won 2,558 against the Conservative Party candidate who won with 4,403 votes. In 1903 Lansbury left the SDF and joined the ILP. He was elected as Poplar borough councillor in 1903. He unsuccessfully fought the 1906 General Election in Middlesborough. He served on the London County Council between 1909 and 1912.

Between 1905 and 1909 Lansbury was a member of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, and along with Beatrice Webb and other members, signed the Minority Report. In 1906 the government ordered an inquiry into the running of the Poplar Workhouse. The Board of Guardians was accused of wasting the ratepayers' money by their generous treatment of paupers and the funding of the Laindon Farm Colony. Lansbury, who had been joined as a Guardian by John Burns, another leading Christian Socialist argued the case for treating people in workhouses with dignity.

In the 1910 General Election Lansbury was elected as Labour MP for Bow and Bromley with a majority of 863, and he and Hardie launched headlong into the campaign in Parliament for votes for women. In October 1912, Lansbury in a typical act of principle over practicalities, resigned his seat in the House of Commons in order to fight a by-election on a platform of votes for women. He was defeated by 731 votes. The following year he was imprisoned for making speeches in favour of suffragettes who were involved in illegal activities. While in Pentonville prison he went on hunger strike and was eventually released under the 'Cat and Mouse Act'.

For the next ten years Lansbury was out of the House of Commons and concentrated on journalism. In 1911 he helped start the Daily Herald and two years later became the editor. Lansbury and his newspaper, the Daily Herald, was opposed to the First World War. In the 1918 General Election, Lansbury, like other anti-war Labour Party candidates was defeated. In 1920 he visited Russia, and met with Lenin 'the best loved and best hated man in the world.'

In 1921, Lansbury became Mayor of Poplar. The council took the decision to increase the amount of money spent on poor relief, in defiance of the LCC precept. This brought the council in conflict with the Liberal Government and in 1921 Lansbury and the majority of the local council were imprisoned for over four months. Their experiences were recounted in a pamphlet Guilty and Proud of It. 'Poplar-ism' provided the precedent for future refusals by Labour local government to set rates prescribed by central Government, notably Liverpool and Lambeth councils in the 1980s.

In the 1922 General Election Lansbury was elected as the Labour MP for Bow and Bromley with a majority of 7,000, a sat he retained until his death. Elected to the Parliamentary Labour Party Executive in 1923, (Shadow Cabinet) and in every subsequent Opposition year until he became Labour leader, he was given to expect Cabinet office on the formation of Labour's first government in 1924. Instead he was offered the post of Transport Minister outside Cabinet, which he declined. In 1925 he started the Lansbury's Labour Weekly. The newspaper rapidly reached a circulation of 172,000 and provided an important source of news during the 1926 General Strike.

Lansbury was elected Chairman party in 1928, and published his autobiography My Life. In 1929 he joined Ramsay MacDonald's Cabinet as First Commissioner of Works, combining responsibility for the royal parks and ancient monuments with public works projects for the relief of unemployment. It was Lansbury who created the mixed bathing Serpentine Lido. Less successfully he advocated retirement pensions at 60. With Oswald Mosley and Tom Johnston he served on J H Thomas's Cabinet Committee on unemployment and became increasingly frustrated with its failure to agree a programme for the relief of unemployment through public works. Unlike Mosley, he did not let his frustration on this issue push him to resignation, but he shared many of Mosley's views on the issue. In February 1931 he wrote to Lloyd George urging him to join the Labour Party and help conquer unemployment: 'Your help would be invaluable, as one of us.' It was to no avail. It was in Lansbury's Ministerial office that the cabal of Ministers opposing proposals to cut unemployment benefit gathered in the summer of 1931. In the 1931 election following the formation of MacDonald's National Government, Lansbury was the only former Labour Cabinet Minister to retain his seat. In 1932 he therefore succeeded Arthur Henderson, who had lost his, as Labour leader and the Leader of the Opposition.

When Italy invaded Abyssinia he refused to support the view that the League of Nations should use military force against Mussolini's army. After being criticised by several leading members of the Labour Party, Lansbury was effectively deposed as leader of the party in October 1935 and was replaced by his deputy, Clement Attlee, though he remained an MP. Ernest Bevin accused Lansbury of hawking 'your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it.' After his Lansbury's resignation Bevin remarked, 'Lansbury has been going about dressed in saint's clothes for years waiting for martyrdom. I set fire to the faggots'.

Lansbury published a variety of books and pamphlets including Unemployment: The Next Step (1909), Your Part in Poverty (1918), These Things Shall Be (1919), What I Saw In Russia (1920), Jesus and Labour (1924), The Miracle of Fleet Street (1925) (the story of the Daily Herald), My England (1934), Looking Backwards and Forwards (1935), Why Pacifists Should be Socialists (1937) and My Quest for Peace (1938). Lansbury spent the last few years of his life trying to prevent another world war. After having talks with Hitler he believed it was possible to reach agreement with the Nazis and prevent war. He died of cancer at his home, 39 Bow Road, London on 7th May, 1940. Biographies include the Life of George Lansbury (1951) by his son-in-law Raymond Postgate and George Lansbury (1990) by Jonathan Schneer.