In an alley between 82 and 84 High Street is a doorway leading to a site of dereliction. This is the sad site of the Walthamstow Working Men's Club and Institute.
Originally called St. James's club, this club was founded in 1862 in Marsh Street, moving in 1872 to nos. 82 and 84 High Street, where a hall was built and in 1890 additional club premises with two shops for letting in front.
In a political landscape at once strange and familiar in these days of New Labour's abandonment of its history, the politics of fear and the war on terror, from shortly after the great Walthamstow Tram Outrage in 1909, Walthamstow Syndicalists are recorded as meeting in the Walthamstow Workingmen's Club until 1914. Many of the Walthamstow Syndicalists were in the Horse Transport Union, an anarcho-syndicalist union (the forerunner of the Transport and General Worker's Union). No bombs were thrown.
Ambrose Barker, son of a Chartist from Northamptonshire, was involved in the club from 1892 and the Club Secretary until 1950. He was an Anarchist with a Capital A. He is famous in anarchist circles, for having helped John Turner and George Cores form the London Freedom Group, and in Socialist circles for being in at the inception in 1880 of the Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club, a splinter group from the National Secular Society. This, Ambrose Barker wrote, as he became secretary of yet another club, "marks the inception of the Socialist movement in East London". The Dialectical Club begat the Labour Emancipation League, which begat the Social Democratic Federation, the first socialist party.
On February 27, 1900, the SDF met with the ILP ( a grouping with many ex-SDF members), the Fabian Society and trade union leaders at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London. After a debate the 129 delegates decided to pass Hardie's motion to establish "a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour." To make this possible the Conference established a Labour Representation Committee (LRC). This committee included two members from the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party, one member of the Fabian Society, and seven trade unionists.
The Labour Representation Commmittee eventually evolved into the Labour Party.
At present, these premises look derelict. I would be very interested to know what has become of the club.
I have spoken to someone in one of the businesses in front of the club, who says that work does sometimes go on there. There is scaffolding on the roof which suggests that repairs are planned.
[Updated 2 September 2008]