By Christopher Brunel

“A House on Clerkenwell Green” by Andrew Rothstein. 80pp. Lawrence & Wishart, London. 7/6. 103.

AND.

“History of a House” by Elizabeth Collins. 8pp. National Secular Society, London. 1/-. 

Two booklets, both published in early August, tell the respective histories behind two London buildings, at present occupied by natiobal. organisations. A House on Clerkenwell Green is now threatened with destruction, unless its present owners, the Marx Memorial Library, succeed in getting the plans of the local authorities amended. The story of this house, built in 1738 as a Welsh Charity School by a distinguished architect, and the Green on which it stands together form a most remarkable slice of history of the democratic struggle in Britain. The Charity Schools used religion to keep the poor submissive in a manner that Thomas Paine understood well, and Andrew Rothstein gives a most interesting survey of this phase of the house’s existence. Later, he notes that in 1792 Clerkenwell had a branch of the London Corresponding Society the body that used Rights of Man as its textbook and from this period on it is interesting to see the number of times that Paine’s ideas recur in the story of Clerkenwell, which by the early nineteenth century had become the recognised sounding board for popular causes. 

Part of the building became a coffee-room and part the “Northumberland Arms” both taking the place of workingmen’s clubs in those days and Mr.Rothstein records that at Lunt’s coffee-rooms, a few doors along, Richard Carlile and other reformers used to speak. Further research may show whether Carlile, that fearless publisher of Paine’s works, also lectured at what is now Marx House. 

When in later years pressure was brought to bear on tavern-keepers to stop politics being discussed at their premises, the London Patriotic Society, (Later, the London Patriotic Club) bought the premises, help coming amongst others from Moncure Conway (identified, I am glad to see, by Mr.Rothstein as “biographer of Thomas Paine”). Charles Bradlaugh certainly knew the place, as he was a speaker on the Green in 1885 at a meeting convened by the London Patriotic Club. 

And so the story of this house continues through its tenancy by the famous Twentieth-Century Press and through the time of Hitler’s notorious book-burning, when the Marx Memorial Library was founded, to the present, and one notes that recent events there, in tune with its unique past have included the 1959 Thomas Paine Exhibition, held to commemorate the 150th. anniversary of Paine’s death. 

An anniversary is the occasion got the publication of 103: History of a House, which also tells a story of noble traditions; in this case it is a more personalised story, as it was from the Queen’s Head Inn, on the site of which now stands the Georgian building at 103, Borough High Street, London, owned by the National Secular Society, this year celebrating its first 100 years of work, that John Harvard left England in 1637 with his newly-married bride and his precious books for Massachusetts. In the previous year the American colony had voted £400 towards the building of a college at Newtown, and when in 1638 John Harvard died, leaving some £750 and his entire library to the college, it was agreed to name the new seat of learning Harvard College. In her booklet Mrs. Elizabeth Collins sketches in the savage persecutions and censorship on the printing trade in England and the high prices of books printed here factors that decided John Harvard in setting out for America, the land of the free, as Paine did some 140 years later for reasons not so dissimilar. 

I happen to know the authors of both these booklets, and I also know the tremendous amount of research that each put into the preparation of their works; I trust that I shall be forgiven, when I say that, as after a healthy meal, I wanted more, after I had finished reading them. Neither sets out to be exhaustive studies but my appetite is certainly whetted for just that in each case.