Socialist History Society meeting

Horatio Bottomley grew up in a prominent secularist family, knew Bradlaugh and Holyoake from a young age, before making his own career as a newspaper proprietor. He became an anti-socialist Liberal, a war-time champion of anti-German riots, and finally a leading figure in the post-1918 far right. Read on ...

Speaker – Constance Bantman

Five hundred or so French anarchists were exiled in London between 1880 and 1914. As the anarchist movement went through a terrorist phase which was especially bloody in France, the drastic repression that followed forced hundreds of ‘companions’ (the nickname of anarchists) out of the country. As most European countries closed their borders to political refugees – and above all the highly-stigmatised anarchists – at the end of the nineteenth century, Britain remained the one country offering shelter to such dissident and potentially dangerous groups, and therefore became the rallying point for international radical exiles, an unrivalled militant hub. Read on ...

A Transgressive Life
Speaker: Frances Bingham

Valentine Ackland was a poet, gender-rebel, and lover of the writer Sylvia Townsend Warner. For much of her life she was under MI5 surveillance for ‘abnormality’ as well as Communism. This talk about Ackland’s transgressive life, by her biographer Frances Bingham, considers her lifelong political activism – which included volunteering for the Spanish Civil War – and the personal politics of her gender deviance. Read on ...