The Chopwell pit in Tyne & Wear closed on this date, and with it England’s most famous “Little Moscow” began fading into history. Lenin Terrace is still there, though, as is Marx Terrace. You can find them on Zoopla and Rightmove.
In Britain and elsewhere, Little Moscows - so named by a nervous capitalist press – were 20th century villages or districts in which sympathy for the Russian revolution was widespread and overt, and where the symbols of communism and socialism were widely displayed.
The phrase implies strong support for the Communist Party of Great Britain, though an academic study of the subject unearthed a CP report on Chopwell from 1931 which revealed that there were just five party members in the whole village, and that they were “very sincere but politically very backward.” Other sources suggest that there was an active communist-with-a-small-c scene in Chopwell in the 1910s and 20s, so perhaps the picture is slightly more complex than it’s usually painted.
We do know that the Union Flag was taken down from the local town hall during the 1926 general strike, and replaced with the hammer and sickle. Chopwell was certainly one of the English pit villages which most worried the government during the ‘26 strike, as it was seen as ferociously militant. It is claimed that the (rather successful) local football team was prevented by the Football Association from changing its name to Chopwell Soviets. The local miners’ union banner featured portraits of Marx, Lenin, and Keir Hardie. Chopwell was described by the press as “England’s reddest village.”
Chopwell miner Wilf Jobling (1909-37), after training at the Lenin School in Moscow, ran economics classes on his return and became an important figure in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, consequently serving time as a political prisoner. He died fighting the fascists in Spain.
The Vale of Leven District Council, in Dunbartonshire, which had a plurality of CP members through the 1930s, was Scotland’s best-known Little Moscow – an unusual example of the genus, since it wasn’t a coal mining area. Maerdy certainly was, being situated in the Rhondda in Wales. It produced several labour movement celebrities; leading British Communist, and national miners’ leader, Arthur Horner worked there after World War One. Nelson, in Lancashire, was also called Little Moscow by newspapers; but another nickname, Red Nelson, was more accurate, according to the current town council’s website, as its local activists were associated with the left of the Labour Party, rather than the Communist Party.
Although CP councillors continued to be elected in various parts of Britain for most of the 20th century, Little Moscowism was primarily a phenomenon of the interwar years. The cold war which followed WW2 probably finished it off. Memories of it remain in a few street signs: there's another Lenin Terrace in Stanley, County Durham, a William Morris Avenue in Rowlands Gill, Gateshead, and a Keir Hardie Crescent in Middlesborough.
As late as 1954, there was very nearly a Lenin Court: a council housing project in Finsbury, London. But cold war politics intervened, and its name was changed at the last minute to Bevin Court – in honour of Labour’s post-war foreign secretary, the fiercely anti-Red Ernest Bevin.
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Sources:
www.chopwell.org/history/
www.landofoakandironlocalhistoryportal.org.uk/index.asp?pageid=719930
Red lives (Manifesto Press, 2020)
https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/a2e02045-d42f-3c2d-9be7-2e3dfd7cb2fc
www.nelsontowncouncil.gov.uk/About_Nelson_22060.aspx
www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/north-east-streets-named-after-14092094
https://programme.openhouse.org.uk/listings/2214