John and Julia Scurr
Husband and wife teams in politics aren’t so uncommon. There are Bill and Hillary Clinton of course, Juan and Eva Peron and, rather more prosaically, Virginia and Peter Bottomley. But there can’t be many so dedicated to their cause as to go to prison for their pains. But John and Julia Scurr were a remarkable couple, submitting to jail rather than give up on the Poplar Rates Strike of 1921.
John was born in Poplar in 1876, Julia in Limehouse five years earlier. Both were East Enders from start to finish, and both were key figures during the momentous years of the East End Labour movement during the early 20th century. It was a time when organised labour was breaking a political party system that had persisted for centuries. These were years when working men were to get the vote at last (1918) with women having to wait until 1928. Meanwhile, a wave of strikes immobilised Britain in the years running up to World War I, as dockers, transport workers, miners and many others pressed for higher wages and better conditions: the London Dock Strikes between 1910 and 1912 were among the bloodiest and most financially destructive for dock workers. It was a time when political action could mean imprisonment and beatings, and the Scurrs were at the heart of it all.
John Scurr went to George Green’s School then King’s College School. He made it his life’s work to improve the situations of working people, and found himself in good company in the East End political scene at the turn of the 1900s. Fellow activists included Will Crooks, George Lansbury and Julia O’Sullivan. She was a committed Suffragette and a constant thorn in the side of Government. A child of immigrants from Cork, she had first got into politics to improve the lot of Irish East Enders, but her interests had quickly blossomed. John and Julia were married in 1900 and swiftly became a formidable team.
Women’s rights and the damaging effects of unemployment and casual employment were at the centre of the politics of the time. In 1905, Julia led a deputation of 1000 women from Poplar to meet prime minister Arthur Balfour to protest about the disastrous effect unemployment was having on their community. A prodigious organiser, she would later fined famed for masterminding the feeding of 7000 children of dockers during the gruelling dock strike of 1912. When people did fall through the cracks, there was only the workhouse of course, no welfare state or income support.
Julia joined the Poplar Board of Guardians (the body administering the local workhouse) alongside George Lansbury. Rather than toeing the accepted line of making life in the workhouse as miserable as possible (the idea being that people would think hard before opting for poor relief and would get back to work as quickly as possible), the Poplar Board was adopting a creative approach that infuriated the authorities, spending a little more on the residents and even setting up a farm colony in Laindon, Essex, to teach the claimants new skills. A government enquiry in 1906 accused the Board of wasting the ratepayers’ money, but eventually backed down. And while Julia was pushing the case for relaxing funds, John was publishing his pamphlet “The reform of the Poor Law”.
Looking from a century on, the lines between social welfare, hospital and prison seem oddly blurred. If people were punished for being poor, they also got it for being sick. In June 1912, Julia wrote a report on the dreadful conditions at Bow Infirmary, where “residents stood around in unheated corridors and appeared depressed and unhappy” and “one man was refused discharge because he had no clothes.” Julia reminded the governors this was a hospital not a prison. Her male colleagues scoffed that she was exaggerating, but the image persists that local people were being denied well-paid employment on one hand - and being punished for being poor and unemployed on the other.
World War I mostly saw an end to the strikes that had been rocking Britain: during the war years and afterwards there was a shortage of workers of course. Men returned from the trenches to, if not a country fit for heroes, at least one where the returning heroes could vote. The 1918 Representation of the People Act removed the qualification whereby only property owners could vote, thus extending the franchise to all men over 21. Still though, a woman had to be over 30 and a property owner to vote.
And as the war ended and Britain emerged as a country in serious economic straits, John and Julia Scurr faced their most gruelling fight yet.
Prison and Parliament
By the close of World War I, John and Julia Scurr had been politically active for decades. And as a husband and wife team they had seen the most tumultuous years in British Labour history, with the East End dock strikes, the fight for universal suffrage and the battles over local poor relief. But the hardest battle was about to come for the pair.
In 1919, both John and Julia were elected as Councillors in Poplar - it was a period when the euphoria of the Armistice was fast receding. Workers may have got a hard time in the run up to the First World War, but it was at least a time of economic growth, as the country rapidly industrialised. Motor transport, radio telegraphy, a growth of consumer goods and (not least) the massive investment in the War itself, had seen the factories, mines and docks busy. Now came the downturn, with returning soldiers finding few jobs to occupy them.
Local Councillors in Poplar were furious at the iniquity of a rates system that saw all boroughs of London making an equal contribution to the pot for the whole of London. This ‘precept’ saw a chunk of the local rates going to pay for the London County Council, the Metropolitan Police, Metropolitan Asylums Board and the Metropolitan Water Board. Fair enough perhaps, but there was no central support for Poplar to relieve unemployment, hunger, and poverty in the borough - that had to be paid for by the borough itself under the Poor Law. Effectively, the poorest boroughs were paying more than the richer ones. The Councillors took matters into their own hands and ’struck’. They witheld the precept charge and instead directed the money into local poor relief and social reform, funding equal pay for women and a minimum wage for Council employees.
This was anarchy as the Government saw it, and they were determined to stamp down hard. 30 councillors, six of them women, one of them pregnant, were sent to prison for six weeks for refusing to return the cash. Among them were John Scurr (sent to Brixton) and wife Julia (to Holloway). It was a disastrous decision for the Government, who succeeded in whipping up popular support for the rebels. Council meetings had to be held in Brixton prison (the women being ferried there by taxi), and George Lansbury gave speeches through the bars to crowds gathered outside.
The rebels were released to much celebration back in the borough, and their sacrifice brought almost immediate change. The London Authorities (Financial Provision) Act 1921, was quickly pushed through Parliament, and pretty much equalised the tax burden across rich and poor boroughs. But John and Julia Scurr had been physically weakened by their time in jail. Pictures of the time show a man in his forties but who looks much older, gaunt and hollow-cheeked, and with his suit hanging from a thin frame. Julia cuts a more robust figure but she would die six years later, at the age of just 57. George Lansbury wrote that he had no doubt that her time in Holloway, and the treatment she received there, contributed directly to her early death. Her old friend Sylvia Pankhurst was also to mention Julia at this time, writing that she was admitted to Bromley Infirmary in the last years as she was ‘deteriorating mentally’.
But if damaged, the pair returned to the fight. John was elected MP for Mile End in 1923, retaining his seat in the 1924 election, which elected Britain’s first Labour Government, led by Ramsay Macdonald. Meanwhile, Julia continued her work as a Poplar Guardian, and in 1925 she was elected to the London County Council (LCC) as a member for Mile End. She died in 1927, with universal suffrage still a year away. John would live just another five years, with failing health and increasing financial worries. Towards the end, Father Bernard Whelan of Westminster Cathedral launched an appeal in The Times for help towards his medical costs.
Today, John Scurr is remembered in John Scurr House in Branch Road and John Scurr School in Cephas Street. Julia, curiously, has no memorials.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
John Scurr, MP 1876-1932 was NOT born in Poplar. he was born in Brisbane Australia to Louis James Renney & Mary Connor. He was adopted by his aunt Caroline Renney & her husband Capt. John Scurr after the death of his mother and brought back to England where he was brought up as thei son and his name changed to John SCURR.
From Who was Who:
SCURR John, MP (lab) Stepney (Mile End) 1923-1931
Alderman London County Council 1925-1929
Chairman Stepney Board of Guardians: Alderman Poplar Borough Council from1919
Born Brisbane, Queensland 6 Apr 1876 son of Louis James Rennie of Poplar, he was adopted by his Uncle Capt. John Scurr. He married in 1900 Julia (d. 1927) daughter of John O’Sullivan, County Cork.
He died Jul 10 1932