Rebel Britannia

8th December 1920:

What would you do if a mysterious woman with hypnotic eyes told you to occupy a piano factory, a swimming baths or a public library? Well, what could you possibly do, other than obey?

Lillian Harris, born in London in 1887, was a shop assistant and suffragist who moved to Australia in her mid-twenties and there became involved with various revolutionary movements, notably the Industrial Workers of the World (the "Wobblies"), earning a reputation as a fine public speaker. She married a man named Thring, and the couple relocated first to Khartoum and then, with their young son, back to London, where Lillian joined Sylvia Pankhurst's campaign for peace and universal suffrage.

She was variously a member of the Communist Party, the Independent Labour Party, and the Labour Party, but her political focus was mostly on direct action. There was plenty of that around during the recession of 1920-21. In particular, large numbers of ex-soldiers who'd served in the great war were now jobless, and many of them used the discipline they'd learned in the forces to do something about it. Unemployed workers were becoming increasingly organised, and Lillian Thring was in the thick of it on behalf of the London District Council of the Unemployed.

One of the movement's tactics was to seize control of public buildings both as political stunts and to use them as relief centres for the unemployed. Thring seems to have been a prime mover in the two-month occupation of Essex Road library, Islington, for instance, and in a speech she gave at Acton on December 8 1920 she described how occupations all over London were forcing the authorities into action.

(One local paper reporting the meeting referred to her as "Madam Thring," presumably to make her sound sinister and foreign. As her fame grew the press more often called her Red Rosa, and there was mention of her "hypnotic eyes." Obviously, unemployed people couldn't be agitating because they were unemployed, but only because a woman with hypnotic eyes had tricked them into it.)

Madam Thring's oratory must have been inspirational that day, because several hundred unemployed men headed off to Acton swimming baths. The pool was boarded over for the winter, to be used for dances and other functions. The rebels announced that all such bookings were cancelled and put up a sign declaring the baths to be their General Headquarters. A committee was elected, talks and meetings arranged, barricades erected and rotas drawn up to ensure that the place was guarded by sentries through the nights.

Some local small businesses were sympathetic and made donations of food and other necessities, allowing the occupiers to put up another sign at the entrance to the building: "Liberty Hall. If you are hungry there is bread and margarine inside." But it was cold in there at night, especially when the council turned off the lights and heating.

Not all councillors were hostile to the men's cause - though one Labour councillor told the press that the occupation was part of a plot to form a soviet government, and that the left-wing extremists behind it were "mainly young Jews." Negotiations took place between the borough and the occupation committee, and after a familiar saga of splits, grandstanding, walkouts, ultimatums and police raids, the men left the baths having won the permanent use of two nearby army huts as an unemployed centre.

It was also in 1920 or 21 that Madam Thring led the occupation of a piano factory in St Pancras. This employer was notorious for demanding many hours of overtime from his staff; the occupiers persuaded the piano workers to strike for higher pay and to impose an overtime ban, thus creating more jobs. As you'd expect, she was arrested many times in her life, often on blatantly political grounds such as editing a journal in which appeared an article urging the police not to act against striking workers. Then there was the occasion on which she was imprisoned for possession of German machine gun parts. I'd love to learn the full story of that case, but all I know is that she was eventually acquitted in the high court. While she was on remand one London unemployed centre changed its name to Thring Hall.

During the 1926 general strike Lillian was a member of a local Council of Action (a kind of workers' soviet), and in the early thirties she began campaigning against fascism. She was involved in supporting the hunger marches, in unionising workers in retail and later agriculture, and was, until her last days, especially active in the cooperative movement. As a political pacifist, she spent world war two helping conscientious objectors and afterwards worked with homeless squatters.

She died in 1964, her activism only curtailed towards the end by illness. Many times over the years political parties had, unsurprisingly, asked this brilliant campaigner to stand for parliament. Unsurprisingly, she always refused; Madam Thring had more important things to do.

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Sources:

Labour Heritage Bulletin Spring 2020

https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2012/09/15/thring-lillian-harris/

Pall Mall Gazette 9 December 1920

Westminster Gazette 9 December 1920

Nottingham Evening Post 9 December 1920

Acton Gazette 17 December 1920

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/forward-unemployed