Ella Donovan was a prominent figure and a full time organiser in the Stepney Tenants Defence League, a communist led grassroots organisation that organised Rent Strikes in the 1930s. She taught tenants how to organise, determine their legal rights and collectively fight landlords.
A rent strike is a method of protest commonly employed against large landlords. In a rent strike, a group of tenants come together and agree to refuse to pay their rent en masse until a specific list of demands is met by the landlord. This can be a useful tactic of final resort for use against intransigent landlords, but carries the obvious risk of eviction and bad credit history in some cases.
The Stepney Tenants’ Defence League was organised by the Communist Front and women chaired most of the tenants’ committees formed in tenement blocks, organised opposition to attempted evictions attempts, and even demonstrated in the West End of London to highlight the plight of east London slum-dwellers. [1] In 1938 the decontrol of much housing in the area and proposed rent increases of up to 40% led to STDL becoming even more active, and Ella Donovan, the wife of an unemployed hall porter, became a full-time organizer. This was a time when women who previously had not been engaged in activism, ‘lost their fear of the landlord and learnt their own organized power’ in Ella’s own words. [2]
A Communist front organization is an organization identified as a front organization under the effective control of a Communist party, the Communist International or other Communist organizations. They attracted politicized individuals who were not party members but who often followed the party line and were called fellow travellers.
By the end of January 1939, the STDL had four central officers and 10 local committees, and could count on nearly 5000 affiliated members. [3] By the end of February, the STDL had recovered £10,000 in overcharged rents and had won rent reductions totalling £18,000. It had also forced landlords to carry out numerous repairs.
The historian Sarah Glynn highlights the importance of these strikes which: “proved the determination of the women, who bore the brunt of these struggles and sometimes found themselves picketing through weeks of winter cold.” [4]
Noreen Branson notes "It was the women who did the picketing, women who often dominated the committees making up the Stepney Tenants’ Defence League, women who came out on demonstrations. It was, of course, partly because the men were at work, and the women were at home where the action was taking place." Despite their impressive political credentials as activists, the women prominent in the Stepney rent strikes did not reach the same heights of political office as the men. [5]
Red Clydeside was the era of political radicalism in Glasgow, Scotland, and areas around the city, on the banks of the River Clyde, such as Clydebank, Greenock, Dumbarton and Paisley, from the 1910s until the early 1930s. Red Clydeside is a significant part of the history of the labour movement in Britain as a whole, and Scotland in particular.
The Solidarity Federation, also known by the abbreviation SolFed, is a federation of class struggle anarchists active in Britain. The organisation advocates a strategy of anarcho-syndicalism as a method of abolishing capitalism and the state, and describes itself as a "revolutionary union". In 1994 it adopted its current name, having previously been the Direct Action Movement since 1979, and before that the Syndicalist Workers' Federation since 1950.
The New Communist Party of Britain is a communist political party in Britain. The origins of the NCP lie in the Communist Party of Great Britain from which it split in 1977. The organisation takes an anti-revisionist stance on Marxist-Leninism and is opposed to Eurocommunism. Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the party signed up to the Pyongyang Declaration in 1992. It publishes a newspaper named The New Worker.
The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism." Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
The Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG) is a communist, Marxist–Leninist political organisation in the United Kingdom.
A leasehold estate is an ownership of a temporary right to hold land or property in which a lessee or a tenant holds rights of real property by some form of title from a lessor or landlord. Although a tenant does hold rights to real property, a leasehold estate is typically considered personal property.
The Land War in Irish history was a period of agrarian agitation in rural Ireland in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. The agitation was led by the Irish National Land League and was dedicated to bettering the position of tenant farmers and ultimately to a redistribution of land to tenants from landlords, especially absentee landlords. While there were many violent incidents and some deaths in this campaign, it was not actually a "war", but rather a prolonged period of civil unrest.
The United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) was a labor union formed in 1937 and incorporated large numbers of Mexican, black, Asian, and Anglo food processing workers under its banner. The founders envisioned a national decentralized labor organization with power flowing from the bottom up. Although it was short-lived, the UCAPAWA influenced the lives of many workers and had a major impact for both women and minority workers in the union.
The Burston Strike School was founded as a consequence of a school strike and became the centre of the longest running strike in British history, that lasted from 1914 to 1939 in the village of Burston in Norfolk, England. Today, the building stands as a museum to the strike. Every year hundreds of people turn up for a rally to commemorate the 25-year strike over the jobs of Annie Higdon and her husband.
The Clyde Workers Committee was formed to campaign against the Munitions Act. It was originally called the Labour Withholding Committee. The leader of the CWC was Willie Gallacher, who was jailed under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 together with John Muir for an article in the CWC journal The Worker criticising the First World War.
The Hukbalahap Rebellion was a rebellion staged by former Hukbalahap or Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon soldiers against the Philippine government. It started during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1942 and continued during the presidency of Manuel Roxas and ended in 1954 under the presidency of Ramon Magsaysay.
Abraham "Abe" Lazarus (1911–1967) was a British Communist activist. Lazarus contracted rheumatic fever during his childhood and this affected his education, because of his condition he was taught at home by his mother. His health recovered in 1928 so he got a job working as a professional driver and a mechanic, later on in 1930 he joined the Hammersmith branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain and became involved in the National Unemployed Workers' Movement. While in London he was often seen selling the Daily Worker outside Belsize Park tube station. In 1933 he led a strike at the Firestone tyre factory and this earned him the nickname 'Bill Firestone'. After the strike he became the South Midlands organiser for the Communist Party.
Helen Crawfurd Anderson was a Scottish suffragette, Rent Strike organiser, Communist activist, and politician. She was born in Glasgow and brought up there and in the London area.
Isabel Brown was a British communist activist.
Sarah Wesker was a trade unionist active in the garment industry in the East End of London in the 1920s and 1930s.
The women of Quinn Square were a group of mostly working class women living in Quinn Square, Bethnal Green, London who, in August 1938, organised a rent strike in reaction to the attempted eviction of a female tenant with “the landlord alleging that she owed arrears”. After an investigation it became clear that not only was she being overcharged, but that this overcharging was the case for 70 of the 90 controlled rents.
Max Samuel Levitas was an Irish communist activist and antifascist fighter, prominent in the East End of London for many years.
Leeds Trades Council is an organisation bringing together trade unionists in Leeds, in northern England.
Bertha Sokoloff was a prominent figure within the Stepney Communist Party, and was its General Secretary in 1940 and 1941 during the Second World War.